Learn how you can begin starting a weblog in less than an hour. Follow the step-by-step guidelines that we used to begin our successful blog, which now has already reached a lot more than 20 million people and has been presented in the brand new York Times, TIME magazine, and on the TODAY present.
How to begin a Blog page in Five Steps:
1.Choose your running a blog domain and platform.
2.Design your blog utilizing a simple theme.
3.Modify your weblog to define your look.
4.Select the best plugins for your blog.
5.Write compelling content material, start blogging.
Starting a Blog: Step-by-Step Instructions
So you’re thinking about starting a blog, but you don’t have any basic idea where to start, right? Guess what-neither did we. We had been clueless. When this blog was created by us a few years ago, we had no idea how to start a weblog or how to be a blogger. Heck, we could hardly spell HTML, let alone create a blog.
But very good news: it’s easier than you think. We’ve learned a huge amount of lessons during our ascent to reaching over 20 million people. And today you can study from our discomfort and struggling to circumvent much of the tedium involved with establishing a blog.
Here’s how we started our blog, step by step, accompanied by an instructional video, and also extra rationale and insights:
1.Choose your blogging system and domain. The first thing we did when starting our weblog was go to Bluehost and register our domain. We didn’t even need to create WordPress, which is the platform we use, since Bluehost will all that for you personally. Bluehost’s basic price can be $2.75 a month, which works for 99% of people (go to this link to receive a 50% lower price off the monthly price and a free of charge domain). Then, a simple was performed by us, free, “one-click” install of WordPress through Bluehost. When we had questions we were able to chat with the “live chat” folks at Bluehost for free. They pointed us in the proper direction and made beginning our very own blog super easy.
2.Design your blog utilizing a simple theme. A good theme provides you the look and feel you wish for your blog, allowing you to make a blog that looks exactly how you want it to look. If you’re not really a coder (we certainly weren’t), a theme makes the look work a million times easier then. Plus, once you purchase a theme, which are inexpensive for the time they save you, it is owned by you forever. The Minimalists uses the beautiful “tru” theme by SPYR, which is available at BYLT. Head on over to BYLT, browse their collection of themes, and find the look that’s correct for you.
3.Modify your weblog to define your look. Once we acquired our domain, blog hosting, WordPress, and theme, we spent lots of time tweaking the theme to get the look and feel we wished (i.e., making our vision a reality). Then we spent even more time trying out the theme and arguing about it and tweaking it some more. Once we had developed our blog, we set up a free of charge Feedburner account so people could sign up to our site via email and RSS subscriptions. And then we established a free of charge Google Analytics account to track our stats. Feedburner and Google Analytics were both easy to sign up for, both today and we still use.
4.Select the best plugins for your blog. We only use a few plugins on our site, including “Google Analytics for WordPress” and “Yoast SEO”. They consider simply a few seconds (literally a couple of seconds, it’s simply a click of a button) to install once you’ve started your blog. And if you want to play around with some cool plugins really, check out WPBeginner’s Best WordPress Plugins.
5.Write compelling content material. Last, via WordPress, we started composing and uploading this content for our webpages: About Page, Contact Page, Start Here Page, Books Page, Tour Page, Archives Page, etc. Next, we designed our logo using free images we found online and text message from a normal word-processing program. Then we put an image of ourselves in the header (this is essential because people recognize with people, not logos). Finally we began writing new blog articles and publishing them frequently (at least once weekly), accompanied by free photos from Unsplash, Pexels, and the Library of Congress. And the rest is history.
How exactly to Create a Blog: Video
Watch our step-by-stage instructional video, which includes screenshots of the entire starting-a-blog process:
But very good news: it’s easier than you think. We’ve learned a huge amount of lessons during our ascent to reaching over 20 million people. And today you can study from our discomfort and struggling to circumvent much of the tedium involved with establishing a blog.
Here’s how we started our blog, step by step, accompanied by an instructional video, and also extra rationale and insights:
1.Choose your blogging system and domain. The first thing we did when starting our weblog was go to Bluehost and register our domain. We didn’t even need to create WordPress, which is the platform we use, since Bluehost will all that for you personally. Bluehost’s basic price can be $2.75 a month, which works for 99% of people (go to this link to receive a 50% lower price off the monthly price and a free of charge domain). Then, a simple was performed by us, free, “one-click” install of WordPress through Bluehost. When we had questions we were able to chat with the “live chat” folks at Bluehost for free. They pointed us in the proper direction and made beginning our very own blog super easy.
2.Design your blog utilizing a simple theme. A good theme provides you the look and feel you wish for your blog, allowing you to make a blog that looks exactly how you want it to look. If you’re not really a coder (we certainly weren’t), a theme makes the look work a million times easier then. Plus, once you purchase a theme, which are inexpensive for the time they save you, it is owned by you forever. The Minimalists uses the beautiful “tru” theme by SPYR, which is available at BYLT. Head on over to BYLT, browse their collection of themes, and find the look that’s correct for you.
3.Modify your weblog to define your look. Once we acquired our domain, blog hosting, WordPress, and theme, we spent lots of time tweaking the theme to get the look and feel we wished (i.e., making our vision a reality). Then we spent even more time trying out the theme and arguing about it and tweaking it some more. Once we had developed our blog, we set up a free of charge Feedburner account so people could sign up to our site via email and RSS subscriptions. And then we established a free of charge Google Analytics account to track our stats. Feedburner and Google Analytics were both easy to sign up for, both today and we still use.
4.Select the best plugins for your blog. We only use a few plugins on our site, including “Google Analytics for WordPress” and “Yoast SEO”. They consider simply a few seconds (literally a couple of seconds, it’s simply a click of a button) to install once you’ve started your blog. And if you want to play around with some cool plugins really, check out WPBeginner’s Best WordPress Plugins.
5.Write compelling content material. Last, via WordPress, we started composing and uploading this content for our webpages: About Page, Contact Page, Start Here Page, Books Page, Tour Page, Archives Page, etc. Next, we designed our logo using free images we found online and text message from a normal word-processing program. Then we put an image of ourselves in the header (this is essential because people recognize with people, not logos). Finally we began writing new blog articles and publishing them frequently (at least once weekly), accompanied by free photos from Unsplash, Pexels, and the Library of Congress. And the rest is history.
How exactly to Create a Blog: Video
Watch our step-by-stage instructional video, which includes screenshots of the entire starting-a-blog process:
15 Factors You Should Start a Blog
We were inspired to research and write this essay after reading Joshua Becker’s 15 Factors I BELIEVE You Should Blog page, in which he discusses 15 great reasons why you should start a blog. Why being the main element word here. In other words, he talks about the objective of blogging, not just how to start a blog. That’s what each one of these other weblogs about blogging appear to miss; they miss the purpose-the why behind starting a blog.
3 Reasons You ought not to Start a Blog
So now you have 15 reasons why you should start a blog, and we’ve shown you how to start a blog, step-by-step, based on our personal knowledge. But after giving you those detailed instructions, that could save you the thousands of hours of wasted period, we also want to give you some good reasons why you should not start a blog. (Remember that these reasons are just our opinions, and we do not pretend to provide them up as some sort of collection of empirical blogging maxims.)
1.Money. You ought not to begin a weblog to make money. We have to get that taken care of first. If most of your objective is to displace your full-time income from blogging, just forget about it. It doesn’t work that way. Do this Jimi is thought by you Hendrix picked up his first guitar thus he could “product his income”? No, he didn’t. Rather, he achieved it for the love of it, for the pleasure and fulfillment he received, and the income came thereafter, much later actually.
2.Notoriety. Don’t anticipate getting “Internet famous” immediately. Don't assume all site grows as fast as ours do, but that’s totally Okay. The truth is that we sort of got lucky. We got an excellent domain name, we cobbled together a logo and site design that individuals really liked, we write fairly well, and our articles connects with people in a distinctive way. We didn’t begin this site to be “popular” though. That’d end up being ridiculous. Our notoriety and quick rise to “fame” came as a surprise to us, and was a result of a little luck and a lot of hard, passionate work.
3.Traffic. Not absolutely all traffic is good traffic, therefore don’t worry about obtaining a large number of readers right away.
The funny thing is that all these plain things can happen. You will make a full-time income from building a blog. It is performed by us, Corbett Barr will it, and so do many others. And you could become Internet famous want Leo Chris or Babauta Brogan. But if they are the sole explanations why you start blogging, you’ll be miserable, because it will seem like a working job, and if it feels like employment you won’t end up being passionate about it, and so you’ll either (a) hate it, (b) fall toned on your encounter, or (c) hate it and fall toned on your face.
Instead, write because you’re passionate about it…
20 Recommendations for Your Blog
We receive plenty of emails requesting advice about starting a blog, about how exactly to blog, about blog topics, and about creating meaningful content-even a few questions about whether we wear briefs or boxers. These are the recommendations and answers we tend to give.
1.Find Your Niche. You needn’t possess a niche, but it helps. When learning how exactly to be a blogger, it’s important to consider what you’re passionate about. Running? Cooking? Being truly a parent? Perhaps you have found your interest? If therefore, whatever it is, reveal that. If not, then you must find your passion first. (Note: We generally recommend that people don’t start a weblog about minimalism or the paleo diet or any various other heavily saturated subject. But what we actually mean when we say this is: don’t produce a weblog about something unless you have a unique perspective. If you’ve embraced simple living and have a unique perspective, you should have at after that it. Enjoy yourself.)
2.Determine Your Ideal Readers. Once you’ve found your niche, you need to know who will be reading your site. For example, we blog about intentionally living. Thus, our ideal visitors are people who are interested in exploring minimalism to allow them to clear the road toward even more meaningful lives. If you want to create about your newborn growing up, that’s fantastic: your ideal readers are probably your friends and family. If you want to write about restoring classic vehicles, that’s cool, as well. Tailor your composing to your visitors (whether it’s your family or local community or whoever else will go through your blog).
3.Add Value. Your weblog must add value to its visitors’ lives. This is the only way you'll get Great Quality Visitors to your website (and keep them coming back). Adding value is the only way to get someone’s long-term buy-in. Both of us learned this after a decade of leading and controlling people in the organization world.
4.Be Original. Yes, there are various other blogs out there about the same thing you want to write about. Question: Why is your blog different? Answer: Due to you. You are what makes your weblog different. It’s about your perspective, your creativity, the worthiness that you add.
5.End up being Interesting. Write epic, awesome content. If you want people to share it with others especially.
6.Be Yourself. Part of being interesting is informing your story. Everyone is unique, as well as your story is a significant one. The important component of storytelling, however, is certainly removing the superfluous information that make the story uninteresting. A great storyteller gets rid of 99% of what really happens-the absorptive details-and leaves the interesting 1% for the reader.
7.Be Honest. Your blog needs to be authentic-it needs to feel real-if you wish visitors to read it. You can be your site, or your blog can be you. That's, perform you embody the stuff you reveal really? If not, people will dsicover through you. “Be the noticeable transformation you want to find in the world,” may be the famous Gandhi quote. Perhaps bloggers should build the weblog they want to write for the global world.
8.Transparency. Being transparent differs from becoming honest. You needn’t share every details about your life simply for the sake of being honest. Be honest always, and be transparent when it adds value from what you’re composing. (You won’t ever observe pictures of us using the restroom on our site, because that’s just not relevant.)
9.Time. Once you’ve discovered how to begin a blog, you’ll learn that blogging requires a lot of time, particularly if you’re as neurotic as we are (we spent over 10 hours testing the fonts on this website). And find those Twitter and Facebook icons in the header? We spent hours on those, deciding what was right for all of us). That said, when you have your design setup, don’t tweak it too much. Instead, spend the right time on your own writing.
10.Vision. The reason our site style looks good is because we have an excellent host, we have an excellent theme, & most important, a vision was had by us of how we wanted our weblog to look. Once the vision was got by us, we worked hard to create that vision a reality. (Note: neither of us had any design knowledge prior to starting a blog.) It’s hard to create a beautiful weblog if you don’t know what it is wanted by you to look like.
11.Find Your Voice. Over time, good authors discover their voice and their writing tends to develop a specific aesthetic, one that is appealing to their visitors. Finding your tone of voice makes your writing feel more alive, more real, more urgent. For extra reading, check out our essay about Finding Your Voice.
12.We Instead of You. Utilize the first-person plural when feasible. Statements of we and our are stronger than you and your, especially when talking about harmful behaviors or tendencies. The initial person comes off as far less accusatory. Think of it in this manner: we’re writing peer-to-peer-we aren't gods.
13.When to Post. Question: When may be the best day time and time to create a blog post? Reply: It doesn’t really matter. We don’t stick to a particular schedule. Some weeks we post one essay; sometimes we post three. Yes, it is important to write consistently, nevertheless, you needn’t get too bogged down in the facts.
14.Social Media. Yes, we recommend using Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to greatly help connect with your audience and other bloggers, but don’t get too swept up in it. Focus on the writing first, interpersonal media thereafter.
15.Disregard Bad Stupidity and Criticism. Sure, we get yourself a lot of harmful comments and stupid questions from ignorant individuals who aren’t actually our readers (e.g., harmful comments like “You’re not genuine minimalists” and stupid queries like “Are you guys gay?”). We contact these people seagulls: they fly in, crap on your site, and fly away. But we spend them no mind, because we didn’t begin our weblog for them. Delete their comment and move on.
16.Research. Spend period researching what you’re authoring. The reason why we are able to use so many helpful, relevant links inside our essays is because we put in the right time to research our topics.
17.Keep It Basic. That's where minimalism can be applied to starting any blog, regardless of its genre. No need to place superfluous advertisements or widgets around your site. Stick to the fundamentals and remove whatever you don’t need. Remove whatever doesn’t add value.
18.Picture. Put a picture of yourself on your own blog. People recognize with other people. If two goofy men from Ohio too afraid to put their pictures on the site aren’t, then you have nothing to worry about.
19.Comments. If you’re going to possess comments on your own site, then browse the Five Words That Kill Your Blog by Scott Stratten.
20.LIVE LIFE. You’re blogging about your daily life (or around certain elements of your life, at least), and that means you still need to live life. There are stuff that we generally put before writing: exercise, health, relationships, encounters, personal growth, contribution.
We were inspired to research and write this essay after reading Joshua Becker’s 15 Factors I BELIEVE You Should Blog page, in which he discusses 15 great reasons why you should start a blog. Why being the main element word here. In other words, he talks about the objective of blogging, not just how to start a blog. That’s what each one of these other weblogs about blogging appear to miss; they miss the purpose-the why behind starting a blog.
3 Reasons You ought not to Start a Blog
So now you have 15 reasons why you should start a blog, and we’ve shown you how to start a blog, step-by-step, based on our personal knowledge. But after giving you those detailed instructions, that could save you the thousands of hours of wasted period, we also want to give you some good reasons why you should not start a blog. (Remember that these reasons are just our opinions, and we do not pretend to provide them up as some sort of collection of empirical blogging maxims.)
1.Money. You ought not to begin a weblog to make money. We have to get that taken care of first. If most of your objective is to displace your full-time income from blogging, just forget about it. It doesn’t work that way. Do this Jimi is thought by you Hendrix picked up his first guitar thus he could “product his income”? No, he didn’t. Rather, he achieved it for the love of it, for the pleasure and fulfillment he received, and the income came thereafter, much later actually.
2.Notoriety. Don’t anticipate getting “Internet famous” immediately. Don't assume all site grows as fast as ours do, but that’s totally Okay. The truth is that we sort of got lucky. We got an excellent domain name, we cobbled together a logo and site design that individuals really liked, we write fairly well, and our articles connects with people in a distinctive way. We didn’t begin this site to be “popular” though. That’d end up being ridiculous. Our notoriety and quick rise to “fame” came as a surprise to us, and was a result of a little luck and a lot of hard, passionate work.
3.Traffic. Not absolutely all traffic is good traffic, therefore don’t worry about obtaining a large number of readers right away.
The funny thing is that all these plain things can happen. You will make a full-time income from building a blog. It is performed by us, Corbett Barr will it, and so do many others. And you could become Internet famous want Leo Chris or Babauta Brogan. But if they are the sole explanations why you start blogging, you’ll be miserable, because it will seem like a working job, and if it feels like employment you won’t end up being passionate about it, and so you’ll either (a) hate it, (b) fall toned on your encounter, or (c) hate it and fall toned on your face.
Instead, write because you’re passionate about it…
20 Recommendations for Your Blog
We receive plenty of emails requesting advice about starting a blog, about how exactly to blog, about blog topics, and about creating meaningful content-even a few questions about whether we wear briefs or boxers. These are the recommendations and answers we tend to give.
1.Find Your Niche. You needn’t possess a niche, but it helps. When learning how exactly to be a blogger, it’s important to consider what you’re passionate about. Running? Cooking? Being truly a parent? Perhaps you have found your interest? If therefore, whatever it is, reveal that. If not, then you must find your passion first. (Note: We generally recommend that people don’t start a weblog about minimalism or the paleo diet or any various other heavily saturated subject. But what we actually mean when we say this is: don’t produce a weblog about something unless you have a unique perspective. If you’ve embraced simple living and have a unique perspective, you should have at after that it. Enjoy yourself.)
2.Determine Your Ideal Readers. Once you’ve found your niche, you need to know who will be reading your site. For example, we blog about intentionally living. Thus, our ideal visitors are people who are interested in exploring minimalism to allow them to clear the road toward even more meaningful lives. If you want to create about your newborn growing up, that’s fantastic: your ideal readers are probably your friends and family. If you want to write about restoring classic vehicles, that’s cool, as well. Tailor your composing to your visitors (whether it’s your family or local community or whoever else will go through your blog).
3.Add Value. Your weblog must add value to its visitors’ lives. This is the only way you'll get Great Quality Visitors to your website (and keep them coming back). Adding value is the only way to get someone’s long-term buy-in. Both of us learned this after a decade of leading and controlling people in the organization world.
4.Be Original. Yes, there are various other blogs out there about the same thing you want to write about. Question: Why is your blog different? Answer: Due to you. You are what makes your weblog different. It’s about your perspective, your creativity, the worthiness that you add.
5.End up being Interesting. Write epic, awesome content. If you want people to share it with others especially.
6.Be Yourself. Part of being interesting is informing your story. Everyone is unique, as well as your story is a significant one. The important component of storytelling, however, is certainly removing the superfluous information that make the story uninteresting. A great storyteller gets rid of 99% of what really happens-the absorptive details-and leaves the interesting 1% for the reader.
7.Be Honest. Your blog needs to be authentic-it needs to feel real-if you wish visitors to read it. You can be your site, or your blog can be you. That's, perform you embody the stuff you reveal really? If not, people will dsicover through you. “Be the noticeable transformation you want to find in the world,” may be the famous Gandhi quote. Perhaps bloggers should build the weblog they want to write for the global world.
8.Transparency. Being transparent differs from becoming honest. You needn’t share every details about your life simply for the sake of being honest. Be honest always, and be transparent when it adds value from what you’re composing. (You won’t ever observe pictures of us using the restroom on our site, because that’s just not relevant.)
9.Time. Once you’ve discovered how to begin a blog, you’ll learn that blogging requires a lot of time, particularly if you’re as neurotic as we are (we spent over 10 hours testing the fonts on this website). And find those Twitter and Facebook icons in the header? We spent hours on those, deciding what was right for all of us). That said, when you have your design setup, don’t tweak it too much. Instead, spend the right time on your own writing.
10.Vision. The reason our site style looks good is because we have an excellent host, we have an excellent theme, & most important, a vision was had by us of how we wanted our weblog to look. Once the vision was got by us, we worked hard to create that vision a reality. (Note: neither of us had any design knowledge prior to starting a blog.) It’s hard to create a beautiful weblog if you don’t know what it is wanted by you to look like.
11.Find Your Voice. Over time, good authors discover their voice and their writing tends to develop a specific aesthetic, one that is appealing to their visitors. Finding your tone of voice makes your writing feel more alive, more real, more urgent. For extra reading, check out our essay about Finding Your Voice.
12.We Instead of You. Utilize the first-person plural when feasible. Statements of we and our are stronger than you and your, especially when talking about harmful behaviors or tendencies. The initial person comes off as far less accusatory. Think of it in this manner: we’re writing peer-to-peer-we aren't gods.
13.When to Post. Question: When may be the best day time and time to create a blog post? Reply: It doesn’t really matter. We don’t stick to a particular schedule. Some weeks we post one essay; sometimes we post three. Yes, it is important to write consistently, nevertheless, you needn’t get too bogged down in the facts.
14.Social Media. Yes, we recommend using Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to greatly help connect with your audience and other bloggers, but don’t get too swept up in it. Focus on the writing first, interpersonal media thereafter.
15.Disregard Bad Stupidity and Criticism. Sure, we get yourself a lot of harmful comments and stupid questions from ignorant individuals who aren’t actually our readers (e.g., harmful comments like “You’re not genuine minimalists” and stupid queries like “Are you guys gay?”). We contact these people seagulls: they fly in, crap on your site, and fly away. But we spend them no mind, because we didn’t begin our weblog for them. Delete their comment and move on.
16.Research. Spend period researching what you’re authoring. The reason why we are able to use so many helpful, relevant links inside our essays is because we put in the right time to research our topics.
17.Keep It Basic. That's where minimalism can be applied to starting any blog, regardless of its genre. No need to place superfluous advertisements or widgets around your site. Stick to the fundamentals and remove whatever you don’t need. Remove whatever doesn’t add value.
18.Picture. Put a picture of yourself on your own blog. People recognize with other people. If two goofy men from Ohio too afraid to put their pictures on the site aren’t, then you have nothing to worry about.
19.Comments. If you’re going to possess comments on your own site, then browse the Five Words That Kill Your Blog by Scott Stratten.
20.LIVE LIFE. You’re blogging about your daily life (or around certain elements of your life, at least), and that means you still need to live life. There are stuff that we generally put before writing: exercise, health, relationships, encounters, personal growth, contribution.
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