Blog

I've had a few friends who still kept on asking me about blogging. What do I do? Why do I blog? How do I get visitors? What is required to blog? What programs are used? To answer all the queries I decided to dedicate a few posts on  Blogging. In the last post, I explained the terminology used in Blogging. This post will teach you about how to start your own blog website?

Well, I couldn't possibly address all the topics in one or two posts and therefore I have decided to share my knowledge in the form of a complete series and you will find more posts in coming days dedicated to this topic.

So let's get started with the various steps involved in starting your own blog website.

The first step would involve selecting a profitable Niche. Niche is the topic on which you build your website. You will have to be careful in selecting the niche as the success of your online business would depend upon your niche. Most of the gurus would advise you to select the niche in the area of your expertise. It would definitely be easier for you to keep on writing and sharing your experience.  I have written a complete article on " How to select the most Profitable Niche" 

Get your own Domain Name:

Once you have selected the niche, the next step would be to buy a Domain. I will not advise you to use a free Blogger account. You are building your business and Your website is your asset.

Spend the dollars, and buy a domain name that is simple, easy to remember and relate with the topic of your website. You can search the Domain for your website below.

Namecheap sells cheap domains and allow for certified domains which protect you from spammers finding your personal information and doing the unthinkable: SPAMMING.

I can write the whole book on selecting a domain name and keyword research, but I'm just touching on it for the sake of keeping this article to a readable length.

Now you will need a hosting account.

There are a lot out there. I use a Wealthy Affiliate web hosting. As a premium member of Wealthy Affiliate, I can host 30 websites for free.

Web hosting will also cost some money,  but usually hosting accounts will allow multiple domains to be hosted on them. I know some even allow unlimited domains. You will have to search around to find one you like the best.

To host your blog on your site, you will need a platform to host it on.

WordPress is the best out there, and it's free. They have an easy 5-minute install that will show you how to install WordPress onto your site.

Once you have the WordPress installed, you would like to add WordPress Plugins.  Plugins are the small piece of software used to provide various functionalities to WordPress.

A couple of plugins to download would be:

• Yoast SEO
• Social Snap
• Ninja Popup
• Google Analytics
  There are tons of others out there that will help you with managing your site, your visitors, your content, etc. Just do a Google search for "Best WordPress Plugins" and you will find tons of plugins to add to your site that will help optimize it for efficiency, traffic, etc.
  You can then search for these plugins by going to the plugin tab in your WordPress dashboard and clicking on plugins. You can then type in the name and install them to your site.

Themes for your Website:

WordPress theme also plays an important role in the beautification of your website. The theme must be selected very carefully. The theme must be easy to configure and must have a lot of functionalities.

The theme you use can be as complex as you want it or as simple as you want it.

It's really up to you, but lots of people have found that the simplest is best. It is easier for the indexing bots to read your information and get your site indexed in Google where people can find you. But complex can also help you organize.

You can find many good free WordPress themes in the theme area but I do not have good experience with the free themes. They always lack functionalities in free version and upgrade may be costly.

You can visit Envato for ThemeForest Paid themes and select anyone of your choice. You may look out for a mobile responsive theme with header, Slider, Color options, etc. Further, you can find a theme which is fully SEO optimized.

To add more functionalities like Content Box and opt-in forms etc; I use thrive-Architect.

In case you still want a free theme,  you can just type in "free wp themes" in Google and you'll find a bunch as well there.
So now you have your looks up, your software installed. Now all you need to do is log into your WP dashboard and start typing up contents for your viewers.

Traffic for your Website:

A website without traffic is just like a shop without a customer. To achieve sales, you must have a saleable product and customers.

Now you have set up your blog and the next aim should be to write great contents for your blog. so as to drive organic traffic.

High ranking in search engines index will help you get traffic right off the start just by people typing in keywords and your site showing up in the organic results.

There may always be the bloggers in your niche ranking high in search engines and it would be difficult for a newbie to just start and get ranked above them for common words.

You will have to search the Low hanging fruits i.e Long-tail keywords having low competition. You can use Jaxxy keyword research tool for finding the right keywords with a low ranking.

You may be aware of the fact that For an extra boost, setting up your blog so it syncs with your Facebook notes helps as well.

You can only sync one blog though, so you may want to leave that for your personal blog. If you start up a Facebook profile just about your topic though, you could sync it there.

Writing articles, and submitting them on article directory sites get traffic as well.

Lots of these sites have good rankings with Google as an authority site, so lots of times when your article shows up on their directories it'll show up high in the listings of Google gaining you lots of views to your article. You put a resource box at the bottom of the article, and after people read the article they will click on your link to your site which you will place in the resource box.

Videos on YouTube and other video sites is another good way to gain traffic.

Put together an informative video about your topic and tell viewers that more great information can be found at your site. Tell them in your video and have a link in your video description.
if you are not much aware of video creation techniques, You can use explaindio video creator to create videos from your blog post.

Bottom Line:

You can set up your blog very easily. To break down what I just said into the simple form:

1. Buy a domain name related to the topic.
2. Host your domain name.
3. Install WordPress.
4. Find a good clean theme/.
5. Drive traffic

Now if your website is good quality, and the content is interesting, people will start linking to your site to share with others. This is the best way for traffic to generate, cause it means that people that click through these links to your site are interested in your content.

It sounds so simple but in reality, you need step by step training for all the stuff.