How to start a new blog from scratch in [10 steps].

Want to start a new blog from scratch? – well we have covered everything for you in 10 easy steps.

Now that you are familiar with the Basics of Blogging in the very first lesson.

By the way if you have not read and you’re a complete beginner it’s good to read the basics of blogging first so that you have the strong purpose and understanding of why you want to blog.

Otherwise let’s get started!

To become a successful blogger the most important and underestimated topic which very few bloggers talk about is niche selection.

1.      Selecting a niche

If You are thinking to start a new blog from scratch, this step could either make or break your blogging journey if not done properly.

Many early bloggers make this mistake of not selecting a proper niche and end up quitting soon within a few months after they don’t find results. They don’t  find motivation to continue writing.

Now selecting a niche also resonates with your interests and passion.

What it means is if you are blogging about your interests and passion, there is a high chance of you becoming a successful blogger.

It’s more like you are doing what you are interested in and therefore the mindset to be consistent in blogging remains there throughout the journey.

So it’s highly recommended to devote some time to pick up a good niche or even if you can select micro-niche(sports can be your niche whereas football can be your micro niche ) you would be less diverted.

Give yourself some time and decide your niche first before starting. Few niches could be:

•     Digital Marketing
•      Health and Fitness
•     Beauty products
•     Traveling
•     Lifestyles and fashion
•      Technology and Gaming
•      Personal Finance

Your niche should not necessarily come under this. You can select your own

2.      Buying a Proper Domain Name

Once you are done with your niche, it’s time for you to grab a Domain name for your blog. It’s an identity you give to your blog on the internet.

All these Google.com, Facebook.com, billionairediscipline.com you see are Domain names, you have to find a better name for your blog.

Just go to Bluehost, check your domain name availability. once you click search you will see whether it’s available or not.

If it is available, you can just go to the cart and make your purchase.

 

While selecting a domain name, follow these simple rules:

•       Better prefer .com domain.
•       Don’t keep domain names too long.
•       Easy to remember.
•       Don’t mix unwanted characters (Numbers, hyphens).
•       Keep it short and sweet- resonating with your niche.

There are much more Domain and hosting providers apart from Bluehost like- SiteGround, Godaddy, BlueHost, Big Rock are some of the famous ones.

3.      Get hosting for your blog

 After choosing your domain name, connecting your domain name with hosting is very important.

Hosting is what gives life and oxygen to your blog. Without hosting your blog will not be visible to the people.

Selecting a reliable hosting is the crucial decision you must make in blogging.

If you want your blog to perform smoothly and all your content to be available to your readers 24/7, select a trustworthy hosting platform that will take care of everything to make sure your blog is running perfectly all the time.

Most of the hosting companies also provide domain registration along with Hosting, so make sure you get both at one place to avoid any glitches in the future.

According to surveys and feedback from many bloggers these two hosting providers are best in terms of service and support –  SiteGround or  Bluehost. 

You can choose anyone among these.

4.      Install WordPress and a Theme for Your Blog

WordPress is a free blogging platform which you can use to create your blogs and website for free.

It’s the most simple, flexible. powerful and easy platform to use.

If you are a complete beginner without coding skills but want to start a new blog from scratch, WordPress is the best option for you.

WordPress is used by over 31% of all websites online including companies like BBC America, Sony Music, Microsoft News, Walt Disney Company and much more.

WordPress is known for its safety and security. That’s why numerous banks in the world use WordPress to run their sites. 

Your success at blogging goes beyond writing. It includes how attractive your website looks too. It must look neat and pretty. 

There are various themes in wordpress. You can choose whichever you think is the best and user friendly for your audience.

You can refer to Neil Patel’s article on 32 best free WordPress Themes. 

If you are fine with spending some money to buy a good premium theme, you can refer to this article to find the best one. 

5. Must install plugins

 In wordpress you are provided with lots of inbuilt plugins which acts as wonderful tools to help you grow your blog.

It helps you to optimize your blog, improve user experience, protects from spammers and helps to rank better in search engines.

Here are 5 most used plugins you can install and start using from day one.

a).     Yoast SEO:

It simplifies your SEO work. SEO can be a very daunting task but with the help of Yoast plugin you can easily do your most of the On-page SEO.

 It recommends all the optimization you need to perform based on your keyword, which is very difficult for a newbie who has to start a new blog from scratch.

b).     Jetpack :

Jetpack helps to  improve your website loading speed, Protects from spammers, Daily backups and many useful features.

c).     Elementor Page Builder

This is one of the blessings for the one who doesn’t know to code and design  websites. Elementor is an easy drag and drop page builder to help you build a beautiful website with least effort.

d).     Google XML Sitemap

It helps to generate a sitemap of your website which google finds very helpful to index your website faster and start ranking.

e).     WP Forms

You can use WP forms to build a user friendly contact us form through which users can easily contact you. It is very important to keep one contact form on your website.

f).     Smush Image Compression and Optimization:

More images on the blog can slow loading time giving bad user experience. With smush you can upload many images on your page or posts with quick load time.

6. Customization and basic setup

There are mainly three areas to be customized- Header, Sidebar, and Footer.

You can include all main pages in your header or navigational bar to make it easier for users to navigate through your websites.

The sidebar can include your most read articles, Email  Capturing forms, search-bar, or any useful widgets based on your understanding.

Footers can include your few pages such as privacy policy, Terms of conditions, Contact us, and social media profiles of your websites.  

Other changes you have to make is change the url structure from default (Month and name) to custom structure as highlighted below.

This way you’re making your blog’s URL more SEO friendly  and easier to guess what can be expected after they click to your blog.

Further for your Homepage layout modification.

Go to settings under your Dashboard option and select the Reading section and change your default setting from Your latest posts to A Static Page(Homepage if you have multiple pages and you want to show all your latest posts under the homepage section ).

You can choose the least amount of blog posts you want to show on your first page, Don’t keep it more, check by testing how much it would be better based on your theme.

Change the option from full text to the summary, in this case it would only show the first few lines from your posts readers can click on to read more to read complete articles.

This includes what and all should be present on your homepage apart from your posts.

It is very common to be lost and have no idea while You start a new blog from scratch, but this simple but important configuration will help you.

7. Connect  google analytics and Google search console to your website.

Google Search Console allows you to check how your website could be optimized to rank better.

It will notify you to fix if there are any issues with your blog also it will help you to know which keyword queries your site is appearing for in the search result.  

Google Analytics is one kind of free web analytics service that gives you reports about your website traffic. You can use these analytics to improve and grow your blog. 

It will tell you who is visiting your website, how they are finding it and from where they are coming from (Geographical Area) . Whether you audience uses phone or desktop to visit your website.

It will tell you how much time visitors are spending and which page of your site is most popular. 

It gives you real time data about the visitors coming to our website.

However, sometimes you get two different reports that is one kind of report from Google Search Console and another kind of report from Google Analytics

In order to avoid that you can link both of them and get integrated data. 

8. Publishing your first content

Now that you are done with all the basics and important parts in terms of building a successful blog, it’s time to give some meat to your website.

 Contents are everything no matter how well you set up if you don’t have content on your website, why will people visit?

So you need to take this baby step by writing your first article. 

After you have written your first post, hit the publish button. Now pat yourself on the back. it’s a great win for you.

Now its very important for you to be consistent in writing contents for your website. You don’t have to write one article each day.

Commit to yourself how many articles you’re going to publish each week (for example, 1 or 3) and be consistent throughout no matter what. 

9. Create social media profiles

Initially your blog is brand new and hardly anyone knows about it, right?

So what can you do about it? You can not rely only on SEO and keep waiting for the visitors to come from day one.

You have to become a shameless promoter to promote Your blog.

There are many social medias out there and billions of people are using it on a daily basis. So let us take advantage here, by going on a few platforms and creating free accounts.

And creating an account on these platforms seems easier than to start a new blog from scratch.

You must be familiar with mostly used social media like – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Linkedin.

Let’s create our blog profile on these platforms with our website name. Create on each platform as each platform will help you in some or the other way.

• Facebook page
• Instagram page
• Twitter
• Linkedin
• Quora
• Pinterest

You can create on as many platforms as you like to promote your blog after you keep publishing your articles.

Which brings us to our next step – promoting our blog. 

10. Promote your blog

Newbie bloggers can not afford to invest money to promote the blogs by sending the paid traffic to the website.

So what can you do is benefiting from the previous step. 

We have created social media profiles on the platforms where most of the people spend their time on.

So why not start sharing your each new blog that you have written on the website to the social media profiles you have created.

By this way you can start getting few traffics to your website which Google notices and start indexing and ranking your article soon.

Subsequently start collecting feedback from the readers and keep engaging with your audience, by this way you are building trust and winning some of the loyal readers for your blog.

This is one of the easy and free ways through which you can bring some initial traffic until your blog starts ranking higher and bringing more and more visitors.

Conclusion

Now that You know how to start a new blog from scratch, let me give you quick tips which will be a guiding source in your blogging journey.

In blogging, patience and consistency is the key to the top.

It’s obvious not to get the desired results in the beginning but being consistent will give you more than what you could have thought.

Don’t get indulged in a shortcut or illegal methods to grow your blog or think of buying backlinks.

Always remember GOOGLE is too smart to permanently punish your website if you do not follow their guidelines.

The most important part is to get started and keep writing. Further you can think of promoting and growing your blogs.

At last once your blog is gaining consistent traffic, Find out the ways through which you can monetize and earn happily.

We will be covering in-depth dedicated articles on various ways to monetize your blog. So you can sign up for our newsletter to never miss any of the posts.