Since the dawn of the internet, blogging has been a great way to share information with others all over the world through the internet. Widely considered to have begun in 1993, blogging is the process of creating, editing, and publishing content on a website. This content is typically formatted in a longer format, similar to newspaper articles, or diary entries.
Blogs can be written in a wide variety of formats as well, with some posts being more text-driven and dense with information than others, which may feature infographics, before and after pictures, or even portfolios.
One of the most popular platforms for blogging is a content management system called WordPress. WordPress offers many features out of the box that allow bloggers to easily begin creating content, categorizing and tagging that content, and then making it available on the internet for others to view.
Choose Your Niche
One of the best first steps to creating a blog is picking a topic to write about. Blogs are often used to provide both information and entertainment to their readers. To achieve this you should write articles in your blog about topics that you are passionate about and have some interest and expertise in. Your goal is to create valuable content for your readers so that they keep coming back to read your articles, and perhaps explore further on your site.
Choose A Blog Name & Domain Name
Once you’ve picked your niche and set of topics that you want to talk about, it may be a good idea to select a name for your blog. This can always be changed later, but you will want to set up a name for both visitors and search engines to see. We recommend picking something 50 characters or less.
Next, you’ll want to pick a domain name for your website. Your domain name is the address that people will use to access your website on the internet. You’ll want to pick something that is short, easy to remember, and related to your blog name, or the niche you have selected for your blog.
Set Up WordPress
After picking your blog name and domain name, you’ll want to purchase your hosting account and domain name to use on the internet. This will allow you to get WordPress up and running so that you can begin dropping in your content. Be sure to select a hosting provider that supports WordPress such as Falls Technology Group.
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Once you have your domain purchased and your hosting account set up, you may need to install WordPress. You will want to check with your hosting provider whether this is something you need to do manually, or it may be already done for you as part of your plan purchase.
Style Your Website
With WordPress installed, your next step is to style your website. A great first place to start with something easy is to pick a theme from the WordPress Theme Library, and utilize this for your site. You can do this by going to Appearance > Themes in the WordPress Admin Area.
Once you’ve installed your theme, you’ll want to refer to the Theme’s documentation on how to set up your own desired colors, logos, styles, and other branding settings.
Select a Page Builder for WordPress
For the best experience, you will want to pick a page builder for WordPress. A page builder is typically a plugin that is installed into WordPress that enables you to have a more advanced (usually drag-and-drop) editor for your site that allows you to quickly create pages, standardize styling, customize things like your header, footer, and more.
We highly advise utilizing a page builder like Elementor to accomplish the most on your website without having to install multiple plugins. Elementor includes a page builder, as well as a Theme Builder that gives you the ability to override theme settings if your theme doesn’t offer much customization.
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Developer Note: We recommend pairing Elementor with the Hello Elementor Theme (Free – Download from Appearance > Themes in the WordPress Admin Area) which will allow you to have full control over your theme from within the Elementor Theme Editor.
Create Main Site Pages
Now that your styles are selected, you can begin building your pages. Pages on your WordPress site are the main landing zones where people arrive on your website. When thinking about pages, think of things like your “Home Page”, “About Page”, and “Contact Page”. Pages are a great way to build out your traditional website structure, and later on display your content for others to find.
To do this, you can go to Pages > Add New Page.
Upload Your Blog Posts
Once you’ve got your website built, you can go ahead and upload your content. To create a new post on your website, you can go to Posts > Add New Post. Within the Add New Post page, you can drop in your content, and have a rich text area to put in your content.
After you’ve written your content, before posting you should set a category for your post to help organize the content on your blog. Categories are a great way to group together content with a similar niche or topic. You can nest topics within each other, much like folders on a computer.
Another optional (but very useful) way to organize your content is with Tags. Tags are typically topics that your content covers or references, and you can assign multiple tags to a single post. Tags, however, are not nestable, meaning you can’t nest a tag under another tag.
Promote Your Blog
Once you’ve built your website and have some content available, you can start promoting your blog on social media, forums and other sites that grant you permission to share your content within. This will help with getting more traffic to your site, and in turn more eyes on your content. With more viewers, you can begin to build a following that will faithfully return back to your blog to consume more of your content. If you don’t promote your website, there is very little chance that you will get visitors other than bots and indexers.
Engage Your Audience
Once you’ve published your content, and continue to do so, you may want to give your readers a way to interact with your posts. This can be done on social media, through the comments section of your blog, or through any channel you may want to communicate with your audience through.
Continuing to engage with your audience is important to help you build relationships with your readers, build a community, and gain more insight into what content your readers may want more of.
Starting a WordPress blog is a fantastic method of sharing your expertise, authority in a field, and interest on a particular niche or topic. By utilizing the steps above, you can create a successful website or blog that is engaging to your audience and helps you to build your following.
Blogs are a long-haul project, and it will take time to build your following and create your content, but it is time well spent.
