How to Start a Blog in 2023, a step by step guide for beginners15 min read

how to start a blog in 2023?

It’s a right thought in your mind; let’s convert that thought into a decision. If you are new to blogging and don’t know what is a blog then read our “What is a blog” article before starting a blog.

Blogging Guru is here to help you to start a blog. So don’t worry we will help you to start a profitable blog in simple steps.

Are you ready to Take the Decision to Start a Blog?

We are a team of dedicated young professional bloggers and affiliate marketers, when we started our blogging journey we didn’t know how to operate a computer, so we learned from scratch and started our first blog, and make thousands of dollars through blogging and affiliate marketing since then.

The decision which changed our lives was to start blogging.

When we decided to start a blog and earn through it we were not having good knowledge of computers and blogs, so we have started watching thousands of YouTube videos on daily basis. And one day we decided to start our own first blog which eventually failed. But we have not stopped there we started researching about new things and new ideas. So the main thing to start a blog is to have a clear mindset and dedication.

Why we are saying this because if you are confused about taking this decision to start a blog then my friend, we have also taken time to decide before starting our first blog. This opportunity will not wait for anybody even for us. So take a decision and start your blogging journey with us, we are here to help you through your journey and we have added our experiences and learning in this guide.

So this is the Golden opportunity for you, it’s now or never. Take a decision and start a blog today.

Your decision will change your life, so commit to yourself and become an action taker, let’s start the journey with us.

We have covered this guide in 8 simple steps for your better understanding of how to start a blogging career in 2022.

Step 1- How to Choose a Niche for your start of blog.

What is a niche and how to find a profitable niche?

First, we want to answer about Niche, A Niche is a topic or category or a particular subject in which you want to start your blog. Let say you want to write blogs about your travel stories then Travel is your Niche.

To choose a niche for your blog, start observing your day-to-day life and ask yourself that in which area or category you have the knowledge and write articles about.

Today we are taking an example that you are a traveler and love to visit new places. Traveling is your hobby, so in this case, you can start writing about travel experiences, hotel reviews and planning trips in the budget, etc.

So you can decide that your niche is “Travel” and you can start writing about travel, now you are comfortable writing about traveling and travel-related articles you can choose your niche as “Travel”.

Here we are listing some of the profitable niches in the current times:

1. How to Make Money Online
2. Health and Fitness
3. Lifestyle and Fashion
4. Food and Recipes
5. Technology and Gadgets

You can find profitable niches using some useful tools from various developers; you can use the SEMrush SEO tool and Ad-words Keyword Planner tool.

These tools can help you in finding profitable keywords but in the initial days you have to focus on one niche only, if you will choose multiple niches then you won’t be able to write in multiple niches and your blog will fail.

So take your time before choosing one niche, think about one specific niche and write down some questions about this niche. You can Google these questions and see the answers, that how these questions are being answered, and what value you can add to these questions.

Also, you need to write down, how many blog posts (articles) you can write about this niche if the answer is below 10, you have to start this process of finding the niche again.

We have included the links of tools that we have mentioned in this article to our tools section/menu on our website.

Step 2- Choose a Domain Name for Your Blog.

When we have started our blogging journey, we have wasted months for searching the best brand-able domain name for our first blog. At that time we didn’t know about premium domain names and how to research domain names for blogs or websites. We have wasted searching on Google for domain names.

We have come across a tool that can reduce your work of searching brand-able and premium domain names by half.

The lean Domain Search tool will let you find the best domain for your blog. In this, you have to just search for your niche-related or any other names and it will show you the best available domain names in seconds.

Like if you search for travel, then it will show you the best available domain names which contain the word “travel” in them.

We will suggest you pick a name related to your niche, so it will be easy for your user to identify that this blog is related to that particular niche, and it will be easy for you to rank in that case.

You can also search from various websites available on the internet. Some of the best websites are:

1. Name Bounce
2. Dictionary Domains
3. instant Domain Search

 We will recommend you to go with a domain related to your niche, and don’t put numbers in the domain name like domain123.com. and try to get a .com domain name this domain name is universally accepted and can be recognized.

Now you have a fair idea about domain name search, we will go to the next step.

Step 3- Find a best & cheap hosting for starting up a blog

After finding a perfect name for your blog, your next task is to find the best and cheap hosting plan to host your blog. If you don’t know what is hosting then you can read our full detailed article on hosting.

In simple words hosting is an online place where your blog or website files will be stored, or hosted, to find the best hosting you need to check the speed of the hosting server and the charges of the hosting plan. Hosting service plays a crucial role in the speed of the website or blog, so we recommend choosing the best hosting provider which provides a good speed and charges less.

You don’t get confused about the hosting providers, that which is best and cheap. We have compared a list of many hosting providers and tested their speed on our multiple websites.

Here we are listing some of the best hosting providers according to their offering:

• BlueHost – BlueHost gives you a free domain name and a SSL certificate when you purchase a yearly plan of a hosting service. Their support and services are superb; you will find no problems when using their hosting services on your website.

• A2 Hosting – this hosting provider as among the top hosting providers, their support is very helpful. You will find a best hosting plan for your blog for initial days.
• Hostinger – it is one of the cheapest hosting provider currently, the also provide a free SSL and domain name with their annual package. Hostinger is a trusted platform by thousands of bloggers across world, and provide best hosting at cheap price. Their plans start as low as $1 per month.
• Cloudways – Cloudways is a hosting aggregator which provides best in class cloud hosting with managed services, which means they provide services from DigitalOcean, Google Cloud, Amazon AWS, and many others. And top of that they manage the cloud service for you. So if you are looking for long term, we recommend you to choose a cloud hosting over shared hosting. We at BloggingGuru use Cloudways hosting. Cloudways plans start at $10 per month. We have a detailed article on Cloudways hosting review you can check that too.

We have tested all the hosting providers in our many websites and found that for the initial days you can choose hostinger as this is the cheapest hosting provider among all of these. If you want to scale your blog then you can choose Cloudways hosting.

Now you have chosen the right hosting for your blog, we will move forward and install WordPress on your hosting service.

Step 4- Installing & Setting up WordPress

WordPress is a blogging platform, which powers around 75% of the websites and blogs on the internet. So you don’t have to waste your time choosing any other platform to start up your first blog.  WordPress has more customization options than other platforms. WordPress is a simple-to-use software, where you can easily change the setting of your website or blog and update the look and feel of your blog easily. WordPress is also free to use open-source platform so you can easily install on your website and use it for free.

Before installing WordPress on your website, first, you have to log in to your hosting control panel. There will be an option to set up your website or start a website. Choose that option and choose WordPress as an option to install WordPress on your blog.

After installing WordPress on your blog, you have to create a new account to access WordPress. Create an account by providing the below details.

Note: – Please ensure to create a secure password for your WordPress account.

After completing the setup process, go to your WordPress Admin panel by entering the domain in your browser (e.g. https://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/)

And bookmark this web address as this is the address from where you have to access your WordPress admin panel.

Now you have completed the setup of your WordPress blog, you have to customize the look and feel of your blog, for this, you have to choose the right theme for your blog.

Choosing a lightweight theme is very important for your blog as this can increase the load time of your website. So choose a lightweight theme for your blog.

8 things to remember while choosing a theme for your blog

1. Choose a lightweight WordPress theme for your blog
2. Check for responsiveness of the theme
3. SEO optimized and Support for schema data
4. Less load time
5. Security
6. Plugins support and support for Gutenberg
7. Browser compatibility
8. Pricing & Support

We at BloggingGuru using the kadence WP theme for our blog, it is a free theme. And comes with a pro version also but you can customize your blog using the free theme only.

We also use the GeneratePress theme for our other blogs, GeneratePress theme is also free and lightweight, is support by most of the popular plugins.

For installing the theme on your website, you have to go to the Admin panel of your website and then from the menu, you have to choose the Appearance section and then select the theme.

Now you can search for your preferred theme and install the theme on your blog.

After installing the theme you have to activate the theme.

For choosing a perfect theme for your blog, we have compared the best themes available for WordPress. You can visit this link to find the best theme for your blog.

After choosing the theme for your blog now it’s time to start writing a blog post for your blog.

Step 5- How to write a blog post?

Now you are ready for starting your blogging journey, believe us if you write at least 20 – 25 articles on your blog then you will be able to generate good traffic on your blog.

When your blog will start to appear in search results you will find that your blog is getting visits from your audience.

So for starting this journey you have to write a blog post about your niche. For writing a blog, you have to go to your WordPress dashboard and click on the post section from men and then click add new.

Dashboard à Post à Add New.

You will be redirected to a new window where you can start writing the blog post.

For writing a good article follow these steps.

1. Write in a simple words that can be under stable for readers
2. Provide details about the topic which you are writing about.
3. Use related images
4. Give real example in the blog
5. Write a blog at least in 1000 – 1500 words
6. Proof read the blog before publishing to your website.
7. Use simple fonts, and divide your blog in Headings and sub heading

For checking grammar errors use Grammarly, it’s a free tool that checks for grammatical errors in your website.

Step 6- Important Plugins for your blog.

After setting up your WordPress blog you need some plugins for better performance of the blog.

You will need a plugin for monitoring of SEO of your blog, a plugin for caching and security of your blog.

We recommend some of the plugins to install on your blog,

1. RankMath – RankMath is a SEO plugin which provides guide for you on page SEO for your blog. RankMath also provides various schema structures for your blog, if you don’t know how to use schema structure we also have a detailed guide to use schema data on your blog. RankMath also provide the On Page SEO gaps in your blog post which can be useful to improve on-page SEO of your blog.
2. WP Rocket – WP Rocket is a caching plugin for WordPress, it comes in free and pro versions but its free version is also good enough to speed up your website. This plugin optimizes your website for loading fast. This can be a helpful plugin for your blog.

For installing the plugins on your blog you have to go to Plugins >> Add New Plugin

After opening the plugins page you can search for the plugin you want and install the plugin. After installing this plugin you have to activate this plugin.

Step 7- How to increase the traffic on your blog.

After successfully installing WordPress and writing articles for your blog, driving traffic is the concern for you. Driving traffic to your blog is the biggest challenge for new bloggers. But don’t worry we will guide how you can drive traffic on your new blog.

1. First of all make a list of competitor’s websites, which are ranking on Google on various keywords. Then read the posts on their websites, write down the topics they have covered on their website, write new post about that topics on your website with adding some value to these topics.
2. Search for websites which provides guest posting on their website, contact them and write articles for their site and get link from their website.
3. Join forums related to your niche, start helping the members of the forums when they ask some question about specific topic try to answer on your blog and post that article link on the forum website.
4. Subscribe to question answer sites like Quora. Starting answering related questions to your niche.
5. Publish your article on social media.
6. Maintain consistency – always try to publish a blog post once in a week.
7. Setup email marketing for your blog and start sending emails to your readers for your latest blog posts.

Bonus Step for Starting a profitable blog

Bonus Tip – Be passionate; Stay motivated

If you want to become successful in any field of life you have to be passionate and stay motivated.

Read books related to your niche, and gain knowledge about your niche. Stay focused.

If you are still thinking about when I will start a blog, then your answer is now and never. It would be best if you started a blog today. You have to take action and start a blog. The time will never stop for anybody if you start today you will start making money in some time but if you are thinking to start tomorrow, then my friend tomorrow never comes.

Don’t think negative, be positive. 

How to Start a Blog: FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions).