Learn how you can start starting a blog in less than an full hour. Follow the step-by-step instructions that we used to begin our successful blog page, which now has already reached more than 20 million people and provides been highlighted in the brand new York Times, TIME magazine, and on the TODAY display.
How to begin a Blog in Five Steps:
1.Choose your blogging domain and platform.
2.Design your blog using a simple theme.
3.Modify your blog to define your look.
4.Select the best plugins for your blog.
5.Write compelling content, 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 do we. We were clueless. When this blog was created by us a few years ago, we had no idea how to begin a blog or how to be a blogger. Heck, we're able to spell HTML hardly, let alone build a blog.
But good news: it’s easier than you think. We’ve learned a ton of lessons during our ascent to reaching over 20 million people. And today you can learn from our discomfort and suffering to circumvent a lot of the tedium involved with establishing a blog.
How we started our weblog here’s, step by step, followed by an instructional video, in addition to additional rationale and insights:
1.Choose your blogging platform and domain. The first thing we did when starting our blog was go to Bluehost and register our domain. We didn’t actually need to create WordPress, which is the platform we make use of, since Bluehost does all that for you personally. Bluehost’s basic price is $2.75 a full month, which works for 99% of individuals (go to this link to receive a 50% discounted off the monthly cost and a free domain). Then, we did a simple, free, “one-click” install of WordPress through Bluehost. When we had questions we could actually chat with the “live chat” people 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. An excellent theme gives you the appearance and feel you desire for your blog, allowing you to make a blog that looks specifically how it is wanted by you to look. If you’re not 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 enough time they save you, you own it for life. The Minimalists uses the beautiful “tru” theme by SPYR, which is offered by BYLT. Head on to BYLT, browse their collection of themes, and find the design that’s right for you.
3.Modify your blog to define your style. Once we had our domain, weblog hosting, WordPress, and theme, we spent a lot of time tweaking the theme to get the look and feel we wished (i.e., producing our vision a reality). Then we spent a lot more time trying out the theme and arguing about it and tweaking it even more. Once we had developed our blog, we create a free Feedburner account so people could subscribe to our site via email and RSS subscriptions. And we established a free of charge Google Analytics accounts to track our stats. Google and feedburner Analytics were both simple to sign up for, both today and we still use.
4.Select the best plugins for your site. We use only a few plugins on our site, including “Google Analytics for WordPress” and “Yoast SEO”. They take simply a few seconds (literally a few seconds, it’s simply a click of a key) to set up once you’ve started your blog. And if you would like to play around with some cool plugins really, check out WPBeginner’s Best WordPress Plugins.
5.Write compelling content. Last, via WordPress, we started writing and uploading this content for our pages: About Page, Contact Web page, Start Here Web page, Books Page, Tour Web page, Archives Web page, etc. Next, we designed our logo using free of charge images we found online and text from a regular word-processing program. After that we put an image of ourselves in the header (this is important because people identify with people, not logos). Finally we started writing new blog posts and publishing them regularly (at least once a week), 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 include screenshots of the entire starting-a-blog process:
But good news: it’s easier than you think. We’ve learned a ton of lessons during our ascent to reaching over 20 million people. And today you can learn from our discomfort and suffering to circumvent a lot of the tedium involved with establishing a blog.
How we started our weblog here’s, step by step, followed by an instructional video, in addition to additional rationale and insights:
1.Choose your blogging platform and domain. The first thing we did when starting our blog was go to Bluehost and register our domain. We didn’t actually need to create WordPress, which is the platform we make use of, since Bluehost does all that for you personally. Bluehost’s basic price is $2.75 a full month, which works for 99% of individuals (go to this link to receive a 50% discounted off the monthly cost and a free domain). Then, we did a simple, free, “one-click” install of WordPress through Bluehost. When we had questions we could actually chat with the “live chat” people 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. An excellent theme gives you the appearance and feel you desire for your blog, allowing you to make a blog that looks specifically how it is wanted by you to look. If you’re not 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 enough time they save you, you own it for life. The Minimalists uses the beautiful “tru” theme by SPYR, which is offered by BYLT. Head on to BYLT, browse their collection of themes, and find the design that’s right for you.
3.Modify your blog to define your style. Once we had our domain, weblog hosting, WordPress, and theme, we spent a lot of time tweaking the theme to get the look and feel we wished (i.e., producing our vision a reality). Then we spent a lot more time trying out the theme and arguing about it and tweaking it even more. Once we had developed our blog, we create a free Feedburner account so people could subscribe to our site via email and RSS subscriptions. And we established a free of charge Google Analytics accounts to track our stats. Google and feedburner Analytics were both simple to sign up for, both today and we still use.
4.Select the best plugins for your site. We use only a few plugins on our site, including “Google Analytics for WordPress” and “Yoast SEO”. They take simply a few seconds (literally a few seconds, it’s simply a click of a key) to set up once you’ve started your blog. And if you would like to play around with some cool plugins really, check out WPBeginner’s Best WordPress Plugins.
5.Write compelling content. Last, via WordPress, we started writing and uploading this content for our pages: About Page, Contact Web page, Start Here Web page, Books Page, Tour Web page, Archives Web page, etc. Next, we designed our logo using free of charge images we found online and text from a regular word-processing program. After that we put an image of ourselves in the header (this is important because people identify with people, not logos). Finally we started writing new blog posts and publishing them regularly (at least once a week), 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 include screenshots of the entire starting-a-blog process:
15 Reasons You Should Start a Blog
We were inspired to analyze and write this essay after reading Joshua Becker’s 15 Reasons I BELIEVE You Should Blog, in which he discusses 15 great reasons why a weblog should be started by you. Why being the key word here. Basically, he talks about the objective of blogging, not how to start a blog just. That’s what all these other blogs about blogging seem to miss; they miss the purpose-the why behind starting a blog.
3 Factors You ought not to Start a Blog
So you have 15 reasons why you should start a weblog now, and we’ve proven you how to begin a blog, step-by-step, predicated on our personal experience. But after giving you those detailed guidelines, which could save you the thousands of hours of wasted time, we also want to give you some good reasons why you should not start a blog. (Remember that these reasons are simply our opinions, and we do not pretend to provide them up as some sort of collection of empirical blogging maxims.)
1.Money. You should not start a blog to make money. We need to get that out of the way first. If most of your objective is to replace your full-time income from blogging, forget about it. It doesn’t work that way. Do this Jimi is thought by you Hendrix picked up his first guitar so he could “health supplement his income”? No, he didn’t. Rather, it was performed by him for the like of it, for the pleasure and fulfillment he received, and the income arrived thereafter, much later actually.
2.Notoriety. Don’t anticipate getting “Internet famous” immediately. Not every site grows as fast as ours do, but that’s totally OK. The simple truth is that we sort of got lucky. We got a great domain name, we cobbled a logo and site design that people really liked together, we write well fairly, and our articles connects with people in a distinctive way. We didn’t start this site to become “famous” though. That’d end up being ridiculous. Our notoriety and quick rise to “fame” came as a shock to us, and was a complete result of just 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 thousands of readers right away.
The funny thing is that these plain things can happen. You could make a full-time income from building a blog. We do it, Corbett Barr does it, and so do many others. And you could become Internet popular like Leo Babauta or Chris Brogan. But if these are the sole explanations why you start blogging, you’ll be miserable, because it will appear like a job, and if it feels as though a working job you won’t be passionate about it, and so you’ll either (a) hate it, (b) fall smooth on your encounter, or (c) hate it and fall toned on your face.
Instead, write because you’re passionate about it…
20 Tips for Your Blog
We receive lots of emails asking for advice about starting a blog, about how exactly to blog, about weblog topics, and about creating meaningful content-even a few pre-determined questions about whether we use briefs or boxers. These are the suggestions and answers we tend to give.
1.Find Your Market. You needn’t have a niche, nonetheless it assists. When learning how exactly to be a blogger, it’s important to consider what you’re passionate about. Running? Cooking? Being a parent? Have you found your enthusiasm? If therefore, whatever it is, write about that. If not, you then must initial find your passion. (Note: We generally recommend that people don’t start a blog about minimalism or the paleo diet plan or any additional heavily saturated topic. But what we really mean whenever we say that is: don’t create a weblog about something if you don't have a unique perspective. If you’ve embraced simple living and also have a unique perspective, then you should have at it. Enjoy yourself.)
2.Establish Your Ideal Readers. Once you’ve discovered your niche, you should know who will be reading your blog. For example, we blog about intentionally living. Thus, our ideal visitors are those who are thinking about exploring minimalism so they can clear the road toward more meaningful lives. If you would like to create about your newborn baby growing up, that’s great: your ideal visitors are probably your friends and family. If you want to write about restoring classic cars, that’s cool, too. Tailor your writing to your readers (whether it’s your loved ones or local community or whoever else will examine your blog).
3.Add Value. Your blog must add worth to its readers’ lives. This is actually the only way you will get Great Quality Readers to your internet site (and keep them coming back). Adding value is the only way to get somebody’s long-term buy-in. Both of us learned this after ten years of managing and leading people in the corporate world.
4.Be Primary. Yes, there are other blogs out there a comparable thing you need to write about. Query: So why is your blog different? Answer: Due to you. You are why is your weblog different. It’s about your perspective, your imagination, the worthiness that you add.
5.End up being Interesting. Write epic, amazing content. If you want people to share it with others especially.
6.Be Yourself. Part to be interesting is informing your story. Every person is unique, as well as your story is a significant one. The important part of storytelling, however, is certainly removing the superfluous details that produce the story uninteresting. A great storyteller removes 99% of what really happens-the absorptive details-and leaves the interesting 1% for the reader.
7.Be Honest. Your weblog must be authentic-it needs to feel real-if you wish people to read it. You may be your blog, or your blog can be you. That is, do you embody the stuff you write about really? If not, people shall look out of you. “Be the change you want to see in the globe,” is the famous Gandhi quote. Perhaps bloggers should build the blog they want to write for the global world.
8.Transparency. Being transparent is different from becoming honest. You needn’t share every details about your life just for the sake to be honest. Be honest always, and be transparent when it adds value to what you’re composing. (You won’t ever observe pictures of us using the restroom on our site, because that’s not relevant.)
9.Time. Once you’ve discovered how to start a blog, you’ll learn that blogging requires a complete lot of time, particularly if you’re as neurotic as we are (we spent over 10 hours testing the fonts on this website). And see those Facebook and Twitter icons in the header? We spent hours on those, deciding that which was right for all of us). That said, after you have your design create, don’t tweak it too much. Instead, spend enough time on your writing.
10.Vision. The reason our site style looks good is basically because we have a great host, we have a great theme, and most important, we had a vision of how we wanted our weblog to look. Once the eyesight was experienced by us, we worked hard to create that vision possible. (Note: neither folks had any design experience 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 tone of voice and their writing tends to develop a specific aesthetic, one that is appealing to their visitors. Finding your tone of voice makes your composing feel even more alive, more real, more urgent. For additional reading, check out our essay about Getting Your Voice.
12.We of You Instead. Use the first-person plural when possible. Statements of we and our are stronger than you and your, when discussing negative behaviors or tendencies specifically. The first person comes off as far less accusatory. Think of it this way: we’re writing peer-to-peer-we are not gods.
13.When to create. Question: When may be the best day and time to create a blog post? Response: It doesn’t really matter. We don’t adhere 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 details.
14.Social Press. Yes, we Twitter recommend using, Facebook, and Instagram to greatly help connect to your audience and various other bloggers, but get too swept up in it don’t. Focus on the composing first, public media thereafter.
15.Ignore Bad Criticism and Stupidity. Sure, we get a lot of detrimental comments and stupid queries from ignorant individuals who aren’t actually our readers (e.g., detrimental comments like “You’re not true minimalists” and stupid queries like “Are you men gay?”). We contact these people seagulls: they fly in, crap on your site, and fly away. But we pay them no mind, because we didn’t begin our weblog for them. Delete their comment and move on.
16.Research. Spend time researching what you’re authoring. The good reason we're able to use therefore many helpful, relevant links inside our essays is because we put in the time to research our topics.
17.Keep It Basic. This is where minimalism can be put on starting any blog, irrespective of its genre. No need to place superfluous widgets or advertisements all over your site. Stick to the fundamentals and remove whatever you don’t want. Remove anything that doesn’t add value.
18.Picture. Put an image of yourself on your own blog. People identify with other people. If two goofy men from Ohio aren’t too scared to put their pictures on the site, you then have nothing to get worried about.
19.Comments. If you’re likely to have comments on your site, then read The Five Terms That Kill Your Blog by Scott Stratten.
20.LIVE LIFE. You’re blogging about your life (or around certain elements of your daily life, at least), and that means you still need to live your life. There are things that we constantly put before writing: workout, health, relationships, encounters, personal growth, contribution.
We were inspired to analyze and write this essay after reading Joshua Becker’s 15 Reasons I BELIEVE You Should Blog, in which he discusses 15 great reasons why a weblog should be started by you. Why being the key word here. Basically, he talks about the objective of blogging, not how to start a blog just. That’s what all these other blogs about blogging seem to miss; they miss the purpose-the why behind starting a blog.
3 Factors You ought not to Start a Blog
So you have 15 reasons why you should start a weblog now, and we’ve proven you how to begin a blog, step-by-step, predicated on our personal experience. But after giving you those detailed guidelines, which could save you the thousands of hours of wasted time, we also want to give you some good reasons why you should not start a blog. (Remember that these reasons are simply our opinions, and we do not pretend to provide them up as some sort of collection of empirical blogging maxims.)
1.Money. You should not start a blog to make money. We need to get that out of the way first. If most of your objective is to replace your full-time income from blogging, forget about it. It doesn’t work that way. Do this Jimi is thought by you Hendrix picked up his first guitar so he could “health supplement his income”? No, he didn’t. Rather, it was performed by him for the like of it, for the pleasure and fulfillment he received, and the income arrived thereafter, much later actually.
2.Notoriety. Don’t anticipate getting “Internet famous” immediately. Not every site grows as fast as ours do, but that’s totally OK. The simple truth is that we sort of got lucky. We got a great domain name, we cobbled a logo and site design that people really liked together, we write well fairly, and our articles connects with people in a distinctive way. We didn’t start this site to become “famous” though. That’d end up being ridiculous. Our notoriety and quick rise to “fame” came as a shock to us, and was a complete result of just 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 thousands of readers right away.
The funny thing is that these plain things can happen. You could make a full-time income from building a blog. We do it, Corbett Barr does it, and so do many others. And you could become Internet popular like Leo Babauta or Chris Brogan. But if these are the sole explanations why you start blogging, you’ll be miserable, because it will appear like a job, and if it feels as though a working job you won’t be passionate about it, and so you’ll either (a) hate it, (b) fall smooth on your encounter, or (c) hate it and fall toned on your face.
Instead, write because you’re passionate about it…
20 Tips for Your Blog
We receive lots of emails asking for advice about starting a blog, about how exactly to blog, about weblog topics, and about creating meaningful content-even a few pre-determined questions about whether we use briefs or boxers. These are the suggestions and answers we tend to give.
1.Find Your Market. You needn’t have a niche, nonetheless it assists. When learning how exactly to be a blogger, it’s important to consider what you’re passionate about. Running? Cooking? Being a parent? Have you found your enthusiasm? If therefore, whatever it is, write about that. If not, you then must initial find your passion. (Note: We generally recommend that people don’t start a blog about minimalism or the paleo diet plan or any additional heavily saturated topic. But what we really mean whenever we say that is: don’t create a weblog about something if you don't have a unique perspective. If you’ve embraced simple living and also have a unique perspective, then you should have at it. Enjoy yourself.)
2.Establish Your Ideal Readers. Once you’ve discovered your niche, you should know who will be reading your blog. For example, we blog about intentionally living. Thus, our ideal visitors are those who are thinking about exploring minimalism so they can clear the road toward more meaningful lives. If you would like to create about your newborn baby growing up, that’s great: your ideal visitors are probably your friends and family. If you want to write about restoring classic cars, that’s cool, too. Tailor your writing to your readers (whether it’s your loved ones or local community or whoever else will examine your blog).
3.Add Value. Your blog must add worth to its readers’ lives. This is actually the only way you will get Great Quality Readers to your internet site (and keep them coming back). Adding value is the only way to get somebody’s long-term buy-in. Both of us learned this after ten years of managing and leading people in the corporate world.
4.Be Primary. Yes, there are other blogs out there a comparable thing you need to write about. Query: So why is your blog different? Answer: Due to you. You are why is your weblog different. It’s about your perspective, your imagination, the worthiness that you add.
5.End up being Interesting. Write epic, amazing content. If you want people to share it with others especially.
6.Be Yourself. Part to be interesting is informing your story. Every person is unique, as well as your story is a significant one. The important part of storytelling, however, is certainly removing the superfluous details that produce the story uninteresting. A great storyteller removes 99% of what really happens-the absorptive details-and leaves the interesting 1% for the reader.
7.Be Honest. Your weblog must be authentic-it needs to feel real-if you wish people to read it. You may be your blog, or your blog can be you. That is, do you embody the stuff you write about really? If not, people shall look out of you. “Be the change you want to see in the globe,” is the famous Gandhi quote. Perhaps bloggers should build the blog they want to write for the global world.
8.Transparency. Being transparent is different from becoming honest. You needn’t share every details about your life just for the sake to be honest. Be honest always, and be transparent when it adds value to what you’re composing. (You won’t ever observe pictures of us using the restroom on our site, because that’s not relevant.)
9.Time. Once you’ve discovered how to start a blog, you’ll learn that blogging requires a complete lot of time, particularly if you’re as neurotic as we are (we spent over 10 hours testing the fonts on this website). And see those Facebook and Twitter icons in the header? We spent hours on those, deciding that which was right for all of us). That said, after you have your design create, don’t tweak it too much. Instead, spend enough time on your writing.
10.Vision. The reason our site style looks good is basically because we have a great host, we have a great theme, and most important, we had a vision of how we wanted our weblog to look. Once the eyesight was experienced by us, we worked hard to create that vision possible. (Note: neither folks had any design experience 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 tone of voice and their writing tends to develop a specific aesthetic, one that is appealing to their visitors. Finding your tone of voice makes your composing feel even more alive, more real, more urgent. For additional reading, check out our essay about Getting Your Voice.
12.We of You Instead. Use the first-person plural when possible. Statements of we and our are stronger than you and your, when discussing negative behaviors or tendencies specifically. The first person comes off as far less accusatory. Think of it this way: we’re writing peer-to-peer-we are not gods.
13.When to create. Question: When may be the best day and time to create a blog post? Response: It doesn’t really matter. We don’t adhere 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 details.
14.Social Press. Yes, we Twitter recommend using, Facebook, and Instagram to greatly help connect to your audience and various other bloggers, but get too swept up in it don’t. Focus on the composing first, public media thereafter.
15.Ignore Bad Criticism and Stupidity. Sure, we get a lot of detrimental comments and stupid queries from ignorant individuals who aren’t actually our readers (e.g., detrimental comments like “You’re not true minimalists” and stupid queries like “Are you men gay?”). We contact these people seagulls: they fly in, crap on your site, and fly away. But we pay them no mind, because we didn’t begin our weblog for them. Delete their comment and move on.
16.Research. Spend time researching what you’re authoring. The good reason we're able to use therefore many helpful, relevant links inside our essays is because we put in the time to research our topics.
17.Keep It Basic. This is where minimalism can be put on starting any blog, irrespective of its genre. No need to place superfluous widgets or advertisements all over your site. Stick to the fundamentals and remove whatever you don’t want. Remove anything that doesn’t add value.
18.Picture. Put an image of yourself on your own blog. People identify with other people. If two goofy men from Ohio aren’t too scared to put their pictures on the site, you then have nothing to get worried about.
19.Comments. If you’re likely to have comments on your site, then read The Five Terms That Kill Your Blog by Scott Stratten.
20.LIVE LIFE. You’re blogging about your life (or around certain elements of your daily life, at least), and that means you still need to live your life. There are things that we constantly put before writing: workout, health, relationships, encounters, personal growth, contribution.
