Blogging is a great way to share your interests and ideas, educate, entertain people or promote your business.

However, knowing where to start is not always easy. You need to pick your niche, type of blog to develop, a hosting company, writing platform...

Sometimes, even coming up with the right colors for the website may seem to be difficult!

In this topic, I’ll cover the basic steps you need to make to start a blog and even make money while blogging.

Without further delay, let’s get going!

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Part I. Refining ideas to perfection

The very first thing you have to do is to decide whether you’ll start a blog as a hobby, to increase your name, your brand awareness, or as a full-time job.

Take a moment to figure this out as it is quite an important step. When you do that, the next step is to pick the type of blog that suits your purpose the most.

Here are the most common ones:

a) Personal/Personal Brand blog - excellent for blogging as a hobby or building a brand online.

b) Corporate. I believe the name speaks for itself, doesn’t it?

c) Affiliate marketing blog - product or service promotion to your readers.

Already decided? Great!

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Now you’ve got yourself some guidelines.

Let’s move on to the third step: picking a niche. While some blogs have multiple niches, it is always better to have a clear focus.

Why is this step necessary? Well, multiple niches may result in poor SEO.

There are several ways that search engines determine the blog’s relevancy, and keywords frequency is one of them. Having multiple niches might attract fewer readers as they stay on the blog for the relevant content.

By meaning, multiple niches tend to drive traffic away. For example, readers who want to read about sports will feel reluctant to visit a blog that writes about ten more different topics.

It is tricky as when you pick a niche, you have to make sure your topic is relevant and big enough so that you won’t run out of content to make. It is always useful to research what your readers are interested in.

You can do this by investigating keywords most people are searching for, using a keyword checker.

Note that it is best to reach for keywords marked in yellow, since with the red ones it’s too hard to get to the top, and the green ones are too easy.

In my personal belief, this part of creating a blog is the hardest one as it requires a lot of research and refining ideas to perfection.

Others believe that it is not necessary to know your niche - you just have to start and it will come naturally.

So it’s really only up to you how you’ll come up with what to write. Simply think about what you’re best at and give it a go!

People will be interested in your blog if you are unique and confident with what you write.

Newsletter about your company? Technologies? Traveling? If you feel like you need any ideas, check out this list of the 25 most popular blog ideas. I am sure it will help and inspire you.

Hey, the hardest part of creating a blog is almost over!

I just assume you are interested and considering going ambitious with your future blog, right? If not now, then one day, for sure!

You may have even thought about making money from blogging! If that’s the case then there are many ways you can do it.

Read this article to understand better how various tactics work.

Great! We are done with the first part. Let’s move on to the technical part.

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Part II. Website creation

Here we have four steps to make: to choose a web hosting, domain name, a platform for your blog, and to set a theme and some plugins that are necessary to give you the functionality you need to write, edit, publish and manage the content.

So, to begin with, we need to find a web host that would suit your needs. If you already have your preferable host in mind, feel free to skip this step and move on to choosing a domain name for your blog. If not, let’s get to it!

Before picking the web hosting company, you have to know what you need. Reliability? Daily backups? 24/7 Customer Support? Here are the main features that are considered crucial to a successful blogger and his website:

Performance. A poor website loading speed can be harmful. Most consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less. If not, the majority say that they would not return to a poorly performing website. Look for a host that has its servers nearby.

Disk space. When you’re just starting, my advice would be to look for a plan with a 10GB disk space on it. You won’t need all of it for the first 3 months or so, but later on, when you’ll be uploading more pictures, articles, plugins, and more, you will find yourself needing more space.

Uptime. It is as crucial as website performance. It depends not only on a web hosting company but on your software as well as it should be well written. Also, if your website is running on old platforms, the chances of errors rise. It is recommended that you always upgrade the software to the latest version.

Moreover, wrong configuration settings can be a cause of downtime too. So we definitely don’t want a host with low uptime - we aim for the best possible one, right
Support. This one is easy. It is always best to have 24/7 support by your side in case you find yourself in need of assistance. Look for the one with a fast reply time.
Depending on your choice of a web host, you can get these features and even more, starting from $0.80/month at Bluehost.

Note that it is always better to buy hosting for a longer period of time as this way you can save money and even get some freebies such as free domain registration and free SSL.

If you’re unsure whether you’ll like the host and you are hesitant to buy their hosting, look at their refund policy. Usually, there should be a 30-day money-back guarantee you can use.

Next up, we have one of the last steps - choosing a domain name that defines your blog’s identity.

With Domain Checker, you can check which names are taken and which aren’t, as well as their prices for annual registration.

If you’re looking for some inspiration, check out Name Generator, Nameboy, and Wordoid sites for it.

Keep in mind that some web hosting companies offer free domain name registration for the first year if you get a longer plan subscription.

That is one of the reasons why purchasing a domain name from the same company that you want to purchase your web hosting plan is a smart choice to make.

You’ll save yourself some money as well as time pointing the domain name from one provider to another.

Next up is an installation of your preferable content management system a.k.a. CMS. With any trusted web hosting company you can install a trustworthy CMS.

A few of the most popular are WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. If you’re having trouble deciding which one to go with, read this article that will help you make that choice.

We’ve come to the very last step until we can be proud to have created a blog! Setting a theme and some plugins.

The theme forms the look of your blog, while the plugins provide features. Blogging platforms such as WordPress have many free themes and plugins to choose from.

Feel free to experiment and find what suits you most!

That’s it. We’ve covered a lot today. I hope this article helped you to understand the basic steps of how to start a blog.

If you wish to read more on how to start a blog, use this article that covers even more useful information. Cheers!