If you want to learn how to start a blog the right way, then you need to pay attention. I have made over a million dollars and won 8 prestigious blogging awards in the past few years and not only that but I have helped thousands of people just like you achieve their blogging dreams.
So today I am going to show you how to avoid all of the common mistakes so you can start a blog THE RIGHT WAY in just 5 simple steps. Now if you don’t know what to blog about yet don’t worry because I am going to be sharing an awesome 5 minute exercise to help you choose a topic and name for your blog in a moment but first lets jump straight into step 1 which is choosing your blogging platform.
To make a long story short, you should be using WordPress. Why? Because it’s super easy to use and there’s thousands of free themes and plugins available to make your blog look how you want and do what you want. All you need is a domain name, hosting and your good to go.
Now one of the biggest mistakes I see new bloggers make, is when they are “just getting started” they choose to use a free blogging platform like blogspot. But if you do this, you will seriously limit your potential success as a blogger because all of the major free blogging platforms like Blogspot, Medium or Tumblr suffer from the same serious flaws
First you have zero control over your blog and Tumblr, BlogSpot or whoever can choose to shutdown your blog and delete it at any time. There are tons of horror stories about this if you search around google and not only that but they are very limited when it comes to customization where as WordPress has thousands of free themes and plugins to choose from with no limits on how many images and videos you can upload or how many people visit your blog.
Plus who wants an ugly domain name like http://yourblog.blogspot.com rather than a cool domain like just myawesomeblog.com.
And last but not least, no one will take your seriously because if you use a free platform it makes you look like an inexperienced beginner and I didn’t make a million dollars with my blog by looking like an inexperienced beginner, even though I was.
So if you are serious about starting a blog then do things the right way the first time. Plus it only costs a handful of dollars to do it the right way – so why take shortcuts?
So that’s brings us onto the most important part of the entire process and that is choosing a topic and domain name for your blog.
If you don’t know what a domain name is, well it is the address of your blog – for example the domain name of this blog is just my name – MatthewWoodward.co.uk.
But before you choose a domain name you need to choose a topic for your blog and if you are not sure what to blog about is a quick exercise that you can do to help you out.
All your need to do is write a list of 3 things you are good at, write a list of 3 things you are interested in or enjoy and a list of 3 things you want to learn about.
In my case I am good at cooking, nutrition, managing money and findings deals but I really enjoy languages, free diving and traveling but wish I had more time to learn about mediation, 3D printers and fitness trackers.
That quick 5 minute exercise will give you more than enough ideas for topics for your blog and once you have a topic for your blog you need to choose a good domain name.
If you are going to blog about a specific topic which I recommend you do then you should try and incorporate that into the domain name or you could just use your name like I did with my blog that focuses on blogging and digital marketing.
Don’t worry about how you’re going to set it all up yet, I am going to show you how to register the domain and setup WordPress in a moment. For now just pick a topic and then brainstorms domains ideas that are easy to remember, easy to say and spell, don’t include any spaces, hyphens, number or special characters. But if you are really stuck for an idea then just use your name as the domain name like I did because it really makes people take your seriously!
Once you have some domain name ideas you’ll be glad to know the hardest part of setting your blog up is over, now we just need to get it online, make it look awesome and write your first post and I am going to show you how to do all of that with just a few clicks of the mouse next.
To do that we are going to use iPage. The reason why I love iPage it’s super cheap it’s $2 a month. It includes a free domain name so people will take you seriously as well as $100 Google Adwords credit, $100 in Bing Ads credit and that will really help you when you’re launching your blog. You will also get free email addresses, unlimited domains but most importantly 24 hours a day, 7 days a week support, if you have any problems or any questions you can reach and you know that somebody’s got your back and you’ve got all of that with just $2 a month.
Starting your blog with iPage is easy, just click on “Get Started NOW” and it’s going to ask you to register a new domain. I’m going to register www.iamwoodward.com. Click on “Check Availability” and it’s going to make sure that domain is available for us to register. Remember, if you get stuck, you can call their phone number here and they have a full 30-day money-back guarantee.
As you can see the domain was available for me. Now I just need to enter my payment details into here, which I’ll do quickly. Once you have done that. You want to scroll down and review the purchase information. Now there are some things here that are enabled that you don’t need. For example, Domain Privacy, you can choose to have or not. You can untick that to save $10 a year just like this. Then you can also get rid of the website security and you don’t need that and this site back-up. I’m going to show you these things for free.
Now it is worth noting if you disable Domain Privacy, people will be able to see your name and address if they look up on the information on the domain. If you want that to be public record, if you want it to be private, you need to tick this box here. Otherwise, once you are ready to go and I’ll just tick this for demonstration purposes, you can click on “Check Out.”
Once you have gone through the payment information, you will see this “Thank You” Screen and then you need to check your email. Once the email comes for you like this, you just need to click on this link and go ahead and set a password and some security information, which I’m going to do quickly right now. Once that’s done you can click “Save & Continue.” That will bring you into the control panel. All you need to do is click on the WordPress Logo and then here you can choose your domain installation, you can have it with the “www.” or not. It really doesn’t matter you can take your pic. I’m going to go with the “www.” and click next. That’s then going to copy some files over and in the moment it’s going to ask us to provide some additional details so will just wait for that.
Next, we need to add a site name or title so I am just going to put, “I Am Matthew Woodward” as a quick title there. You can see it’s already created the e-mail there and the admin password automatically and then you just need to click on next.
As you can see WordPress is installing right now. it’s going to let us know it’s ready. Down here, they are going to upsell us some themes but don’t worry we don’t need to buy any of these. I’m going to show you how to customize your blog with that premium theme, without having to spend a penny in just a moment.
Now the installation is complete, you want to click this link up here and at this point, it’s going to show us all of our log.in credentials. It’s a good idea for you to take note and copy these into a notepad file or somewhere safe because you’re going to need them shortly. I’m going to do that. Now you can log-in to your new blog. Just click on your domain here and it’s going to take you to a log-in page and once we logged-in, this is going to take you to the admin area of your blog.
iPage comes with a little site builder here, that helps you out if you need help. You can click “I don’t need help” or you can click through and go through their suggestions. We’re actually going to go with we don’t need any help and I’m going to go straight here and go to “Appearance” and then “Themes.” You can see here, there are lots of themes already pre-installed here but if you want to add more themes. It’s easy to do. You just need to click up here “WordPress.org Themes” that will allow you to browse a huge, there’s literally thousands of themes for you to choose from here, and here are just examples of them that you can see.
I’ve got some general rules that you should apply when choosing a WordPress Theme, you want something simple and clutter free. The simpler it is to navigate your site, the better. Your site should be mobile responsive, you need to check that it looks great on a mobile phone or tablet as well. It should load quickly and be optimized for speed. You will quickly know that when you change a theme if it’s load slowly or not. It should be SEO ready but if not we can actually take care of that with a plug-in. Ideally, we want it to be easy to customize, change the colors and logos and you usually find that tucked away in the theme options.
Last but not the least, you want to have some kind of built-in short codes. What this mean, you can style your blog post a little bit and give them a little bit of pop. Now if you’ve got a little bit of money to spend, you can actually use it the exact theme that I use on my blog. Actually this theme was built for me by the MyThemeShop Team because I needed a blog theme that did all of those things that I’ve just said and I wanted it—this was designed based on my years of experience as a blogger and what’s worked for me. If you want a short-cut to professional theme, you can buy this, there will be a link for it underneath the video.
I also want to stress you don’t need to buy a theme, you can just do as well with one of the free premium themes here. Just scroll through and find something that you like. Just to give you an idea this is what the default theme look like. Then I just changed it quickly for demonstration purposes to make this into a much simpler, cleaner theme.
You just browse through here. You can preview themes as you want just to get an idea of how they are going to look without actually having to install them. You can see how this theme looks here. It’s very easy to edit. You’ll see this looks completely different again. Here you can click to edit anywhere we want and there are lots of other options here. You can see that it’s quite cool for a free theme.
I want you to just go through. Find a free theme and then customize it, if you come to “Appearance,” and “Customize” it you can go through those options and really make it your own.
Now comes the fun fart. Writing and publishing your first blog post. It might seem scary but I’m going to guide through the process. All you need to do is click on “Posts,” then “Add New” and you’re going to see a screen like this. I’m going to explain what exactly you’ve seen here.
First is the title area, this I where they write the title of your blog post. “Add Media” is where you upload photos, gifs and videos that kind of thing. Content area this is where you write your blog post content. Here are your publishing controls, it’s either a draft where only you can see it or you can publish so the whole world can see it. Then down here, you have different categories, and tags and areas where you can set your featured image. Most people can just use categories. I don’t really use tags too much.
I’m just going to fill this out quickly to give you an example of what your first blog post could look like. Here you can see my first post. We have the post title set here, post body and I went and set a category of personal down here. Now you can choose to “Preview” to get a look at how it will look without publishing it. You can see right here, this is my post. You can just click “Publish” to put that post live.
Viola! You’ve just set up your WordPress Blog, selected a topic, set-up a domain and published your very first blog post.
So now you know how to start a blog the right way I am sure you have a bunch of questions but before I answer them I want to sign up to my 100% free email course that will teach you how to build a successful blog in 7 days.
You’ll learn how the 8 types of blog posts that always drive traffic, 3 simple strategies to get your first 1,000 visitors, the best way to monetize your new blog and much more. All you have to do is open the email each day and complete the 15-30 minute task I assign you step by step.
You can find the link to sign up for the free course underneath the video and if you have any questions please feel free to ask in the comments or headover to my dedicated blogging FAQ section which covers all of the most common questions new bloggers have, this thing is super detailed and you’ll find that underneath this video as well.
I have helped thousands of people just like you build successful blogs and I would love for you to become my next success story so start your blog today.