How To Start A Blog

Do you want to start a blog to write about your hobbies, business, and day to day activities or about something that you like and want to share with others? You may be wondering how this stuff works. How do I start a blog online?

To answer your questions about how to start a blog, I have written step by step tutorial on starting your blog in 20 minutes. In this tutorial, the whole blogging concept is divided into 3 parts for proper understanding.

Step 1: What To Write About:

A Blog is an online journal that is updated regularly. So, ask yourself a question, what you want to share with people? Are you passionate about something that you want people to know?

Some examples of blogging concept are;

• Hobby: A hobby is done for pleasure. It is a regular activity that brings happiness on your face. Some people have a hobby to play guitar; while playing guitar they learn many new things about music. So, they can make a blog about guitar and connect with others who are learning guitar. As a hobby reflects your experience, you can write regular articles about it on your blog, thus your visitors get fresh information, and they will visit your blog regularly.
• Business: You can start a blog to connect with your customers. A blog can be an extremely powerful medium to provide useful information to your customers.
• Daily Activities: Some people write a blog to keep them accountable for daily activities. Imagine a student preparing for an exam, he can blog about his preparations, write questions on his blog, and get help from his visitors. He can also post about new things he learn while studying for the exams.

Blogging can be anything that you can write about regularly to keep your visitors coming back to your website and connecting with you. I hope you have surely found a concept about which you will be blogging soon. Let’s move onto Step 2.

Step 2: How to Start a Blog:

You need a domain name and web hosting to start a new blog. A web hosting company provides you with all technical aspects of a blog like domain name & website hosting.

What is a domain name?

Like we call each other by name, a blog has a unique name too; by which it is recognized by others. It is termed as a “DOMAIN”. You may have noticed that the name of my website is “howtostartasuccessfulblog.com”. If you write this in address bar of your browser, you will come to my website. You may be familiar with facebook, yahoo & Google, there domain name are facebook.com, yahoo.com & google.com, so when you type it in the address bar, you visit their website.

A Domain is registered by a Domain Registrar who keeps records of all the domains on the World Wide Web.

Some tips and tricks to remember before getting a domain name are:

• Catchy: Do you remember facebook.com? What if it was named something long on its concept of sharing pictures and other things? What if the name of facebook.com was shareyourpicturesandmemories.com, it would have been recognizable by its name but would not be as catchy as it is now.
• Easy to remember: How many times have you type facebook.com directly instead of searching for it on Google? The domain name should be easy to remember just like facebook, Google or Yahoo.
• Unique: The domain name should be unique. You can always choose a domain name that matches your blogging concept.
  • Let’s take an example: John has a hobby of playing guitar. He has learned many things about guitar that he wants to share with others. So, what are possible names that he can use to start a blog? Guitarlessonsbyjohn.com; John-guitar-lessons.com; Many More…

It will take some time to find a great domain name, but it is always worth the efforts. You can also read 12 Rules for Choosing the Right Domain Name to find a good domain name for your blog. Let’s move on to hosting part.

What is web hosting?

Website Hosting is the type of activity or business of providing storage space so that it can be access on the World Wide Web. Once you have finalized a good domain name for your blog, it requires web hosting. Web hosting is the place where you host all your website content like pages, images, videos, etc.

Step 3: How to register a domain and web hosting?

I personally use and suggest Blue Host to all my readers. It just costs less than $5 a month to host your blog on Blue Host. They offer free domain name when you purchase their plan for a 12 month period. In my opinion, you should get a domain name and web hosting from same place, as it can help you save money as well as time. You can host unlimited blogs on Blue Host.

Click Here To Start Your Blog With Blue Host For Less Than $5 Per Month

Once you visit the Blue Host website, Click get started now button & Search for domain name for your blog, as shown in the image below;

Once you find a domain name, you will be taken to second page; it is divided into 3 parts;

• Account Information: Fill Details like First Name, Last Name, Address, Phone Number, Email ID, etc. Use email that you use regularly as Blue Host will send login details like username and password to this email id.
• Package Information: This is where you select a hosting plan for your blog; it is by default set at $3.95 Per Month for 36 months plan. You can change it to 12 month or 24 month plan. The higher the plan tenure, the lower the amount charged per month. I recommend a 36 months plan as it brings down the monthly amount to as low as $3.95 per month.
  • You can uncheck other options like Site Lock Domain Security and Site Backup Pro as they are not needed as of now. You should however keep the Domain Whois Privacy box checked.
  • Domain Whois Privacy: All Domain Registrar maintain WHOIS details of their domain name owners. Anybody can search for your domain name in the WHOIS database and find your personal information like name, phone number and address. Blue Host provides a Domain Whois Privacy Service which enables you to hide your information on WHOIS database and replace it with Blue Host’s Information. So, I strongly recommend you to keep the Domain Whois Privacy box checked. It just costs $9.99 for 1 year, that’s just $0.84 per month; however the benefits we get are potentially great.

• Billing Information: This is where you need to enter your credit card details to make payment of web hosting service to Blue Host. Once you have made the payment, your web hosting account will be created immediately, and you will receive your login details like username and password through email you put in Account Information Section.

Once you have completed above steps, come back to read about what is WordPress, a blogging tool and content management system; and how you can use it to start your blogging journey. I would have put that things here but you have to have a domain name and web hosting before we dig into what is WordPress…