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How to Start a Blog Step by Step guide

Hello Guys, this is going to be the second blog post on this personal site. I wrote my story as how I came to blogging as the very first article here. There I got a comment from a guy named as “Sunny” asking me to write a guide to start blogging step by step. And My little sis Sugandha also asked for the same. Hence I decided to try writing a guide that can help him as well as other newbies.

[Note: This post is strictly for newbies who have no knowledge about domain, hosting, blogging CMS etc. If you are already blogging and aware of these stuff, don’t waste your time here, please. :-)]

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First of all I want to let you know that I am not very good at writing guides or tutorials but being a blogger it’s my duty to fulfil my readers’ choice. Hence I am writing this post – How to start a blog: step by step guide.

When I write “blog”, the very first question arise here – What actually a blog is?

Different people defines it in a different way but the meaning is same in all cases which says that blog is a type of website where a person writes personal thought, include links of other sites on regular basis. The information which is being shared on a blog is always in chronological order.

In the early days blog used to be a place for individuals to share his/her opinion on the web but now days blog is much more than just sharing the personal thoughts.

I notice the Search engine results are full of blogs. Nearly about 65-70% result pages are from blogs. Creating a blog, posting latest news, how to guides, tips-tricks and then monetizing it with banner ads, Adsense, affiliate marketing etc collectively forms a business called as “Blogging business”.

Oh wait, I haven’t discussed about blogging?  
Creating a blog and updating it with regular postings is called blogging. In fact blogging covers a lot of different things but posting articles is the most basic and important thing.

So Lets move on to discuss how to start a blog?

To start a blog you need to have either your own domain or you can use free blogging platform such as blogger, tumblr, wordpress.com etc.

In this post I will not discuss about creating blog on free platform. I will cover the same later in other article.  In this article we will talk about self hosted blog.

To start blogging you need a fully set up blog. Hence we need to find out things which are needed to start a blog. 

Three most basic things you will need in order to start a blog:-

  • Domain Name
  • Hosting
  • Website design

What is a Domain Name all about?

As every building has its own address, a website has also an address on WWW. Yes when you make a website you should have a name with which people can find your it and that address is called the domain name.
Domain names are subject to availability which means you can only take those domain names which are not yet taken by anyone else.
Domain names can have different TLDs such as .com, .in, .org, .net. These TLDs are at the end of the name. In short, they act as suffix.

box with domains

So if I chose a domain name techtricksworld and book it from a domain registrar with .com TLD then its address would be techtricksworld.com (or www.techtricksworld.com)

The shorter domain names are good as people can easily remember. Stoogles.com domain is much better than techtricksworld.com as it’s simple, short and hence easy to remember.

Read few tips about choosing the best domain names

To get your domain names, you have to purchase the same from any domain registrar such as Godaddy, Hostgator, One.com and so on. There are countless domain registrars available on the Internet.

What is Hosting and why it is important?

After buying a domain you need some space over internet to upload your website’s file. As you save files and folders on PC’s hard drive which you can access anytime, in the way you need web space where you can upload your website’s files and folders which can be accessible to you and public.

Basically hosting is about buying space to run your website. You need to buy hosting from a webhost such as one.com, hostgator, godaddy and so on.
webhosting

Almost every webhost sells domain too so you can buy domain and hosting from the same such provider. Or you can buy a domain from Godaddy and get hosting from hostgator. Both ways are fine. It depends on your requirement.

Even there are free hosting available like blogger.com where you can host blog which look like either yourdomain.blogspot.com [free blog]or  yourdomain.com(you need to buy domain only)] but when you choose blogger.com as your host, you don’t have any control over all the files and database. You can only change the front end design through the HTML editor in the blogger.com dashboard.

Unlike free ones, on the paid hosting package you have all the access to our files, folders and database.

But I always recommend to go with self hosted domain and hosting for professional blogging. Free stuffs are good if you blog just for passion not for business purpose.

Read more about most affordable hosting package

Website Design

Now you have your domain name and hosting where you can upload your files and create your database. So you need a website which either you get developed from developers or use any CMS. Mostly people use wordpress as the CMS for blogging because it saves you from the cost of website development and the most important thing it is built specially for blogging. You can download it absolutely free from wordpress.org.

wordpress

These are the basic requirements to start a blog. After you done with these all you need to upload full wordpress CMS files to your web space and then few settings to make it work.

I am putting a full stop to this post and will write next post about installing wordpress on your web space.

Read a detailed article about setting up a blog on WordPress step by step on my other blog www.techtriclsworld.com.

Hope you like this post!

Comments (38)

  • Blogosphere is not crowded with lot of newbies and most of them even don’t know the basics of blogging. They just start writing for their blog with all the initial setup done by someone.

    Hope this post would help them to know the blogging fundamentals.

    Nice and clear write-up, thanks for sharing this post Atish, keep presenting the blogging essentials 🙂

    Reply
    • Author

      Thanks for stopping by Nirmala. This post is specially for those who are unaware of these stuffs but want to start a blog.

      Reply
  • Hi Bhai,

    I’m glad that you wrote this post. 🙂

    I agree Blogging is now becoming the business instead of just sharing thoughts for ppl and they are doing good in their niches.

    So, instead of free platform they should prefer self hosted domain.. 🙂

    Well, thanks for the Step by Step Guide and this will surly going to help all newbies! 🙂

    Sugandha!

    Reply
  • Wah wah. what a post ! ! 🙂 🙂

    Now I will be waiting for actual WP n Theme setup and then troubleshooting and editing the theme ! ! 🙂

    Reply
  • Hello Atish Ranjan Sir,
    you have mentioned every point neat and clear.
    These are basic step which we should follow while setup a new blog.
    Thanks for this kind of post.

    Reply
  • hello,i like your post,could your wrote,how web hosting works? i mean,is it possible to start web hosting with very little set up? what hardware require/

    Reply
  • Dear Atish ,

    thanks for this post i have a domain+ hosting just recently plz suggest for website like wordpress
    how to make money from it and how much earn in a month approx

    Reply
    • Author

      Hello Mukesh, I suggest you to make a good blog and build better audience base and try getting good chunk of traffic from Search Engines. Then monetize your blog with various monetization ways to make money.

      Reply
  • this post is all the way informative and helpful for me. looking forward to get some more information from you in near future.

    Reply
  • Who says this article is only for newbies? To be honest I’ve forgotten about how to start a new blog since I only did it once 2 years ago. Unless you start a new blog everyday, who can still remember every single step of the thing that you only did once long time ago, right? Even the old guys need some references and tutorials sometimes 🙂 Great step by step guide from you, Atish!

    Reply
    • Author

      Agree, If you don’t do a thing for long you forget the steps but as you said I usually do setting up wordpress for me and even in office I do handle all the stuffs related to wordpress so I remember every step. Thanks for coming by Peter. Sorry for replying late.

      Reply
  • Hi.. @Atish Bhai

    Once again I visit Your Blog Here i saw A Step~by~Step guide for Blog.
    But dear, You Are Not Write Features of WordPress because This Is Not Easy in Use.

    And this is Great Article..

    And Please write ‘Step-By-Step SEO for Blog ‘ In your Next Article.

    Thanks !: )

    Reply
  • Author

    Thanks Shaily for your comment.

    Reply
  • I love how to guides and specially when it is related to setting up websites. Good write up Atish.

    Reply
  • Hi , Dear Admin … I love this article … I have one major problem on my website … I have 75 Articles on my website since last 5 month… But i am getting rarely 20 to 30 visitors from google search engine… Please try to help me … I really need help ..

    Now a days i am editing all posts and inserting backlinks to higher ranked websites… So i can generate more traffic on my website ..

    Please help me … My website is feedingblog dot com

    Alexa traffic rank : 14th January : 3,13,888 and site linking in 17 …

    Reply
    • Author

      Hi Jay,

      The first thing I saw in your blog is content part is at the bottom and at the front you have slider that loads very slow. I would like to advice keep content part on above the fold so that readers find your blog more readable. Rest apply basic approaches of improving traffic like keyword research and then do write the posts according to them, use social media to drag better social traffic and also build better social signals for your site. Do a little bit of guest posting on relevant blogs.

      I would just say try experimenting everything white hat stuffs and then analyse your traffic stats in analytics an try figuring out which thing gave you more traffic.

      Thanks
      Atish

      Reply
  • Thanks for valuable response from you … I am using highspeed broadband so i forgot about low speed internet .. Now my next task to make my website more speedy and fast… Even i will add more contents related to keyword search ..

    I am using google keyplanner for keyword search .. Is there any other tool to search keywords ?

    Well I stared my old post editing in last 1 week and i increase my alexa traffic rank 429892 to 283271 … I think its good by just doing backlinks to higher websites..

    And I have one question .. If i target _blank backlinks to higher ranked websites then google seo consider my website is good for Search engine or direct target backlinks is good ?

    I searched this question in google but i didn’t get proper answer…

    Well Thanks … Stay with you … Bye Bye …

    Reply
    • Author

      There are many tools out there SEMrush, keyword planner etc.. You can search in Google for that. I don’t thinkg target=”_blank” has any direct effect from SEO point of view. But Yes, it helps you keep bounce rate of your website under control as if someone clicks on link then link will open in other tab and that person still stays on your site which is good.

      Bro, focus on content only and do weekly guest blogging and use web 2.0 sites to build links. Directory backlinks are not that much effective as they used to. Thanks

      Reply
  • Do you know about “Sites Linking In” i have just 17 links … and i saw your website has 33 linking In Through Alexa toolbar… But if i saw highly google ranked website has hundreds and thousands of linking in links for those website…

    One of my friend said me to get back links from thousand of directories is good for Search engine .. Is it true ?

    Reply
    • Author

      Bro, Forget sites linking in of Alexa. Try check “links to your site” in Google webmaster. Techtricksworld.com(my main blog) has more than 20,000 quality links according to that. If you are talking about atishranjan.com(this blog) then yes it has less link because its very new comparatively.

      Directory links are almost dead however you can submit sites in high quality directory. but I would suggest you do use web 2.0 sites to build links and also guest blogging.

      Reply
  • I Have Many Problems , I hope you are love to share your knowledge with me … 🙂

    Reply

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