If you’ve ever wanted to start a blog, but not sure how, look no further. This article will explain how to make a WordPress website in 10 minutes or less on the same platform as Woblogger.
The method I show you here is budget friendly. With our exclusive deal, you can start a WordPress blog less than $10 a month.
Around five years ago, I didn’t know a thing about starting a blog. Over the years, I taught myself the skills to set up many of my own successful blogs. Today, I know what best practices to use to get results and what risks and mistakes to avoid. I’ve even started helping others create blogs of their own.
So, what’s the best way to build a profitable blog that makes you money? The short answer is— it’s both easy, and difficult. I’ll explain why.
The easy part is it requires little cash investment. You don’t need a degree, the field is wide open, and the profit margins are impressive. However, setting up a successful blog requires a lot of tedious effort, consistency, and perseverance. To put it simply, it takes time. But in the end, it is well worth it.
Want to check out my first blog income report? My First Ever Blogging Income Report
What Do You Need to Start Your Blog?
To start your WordPress blog, you will need the following things.
- A domain name – this is the web address of your blog. For example, www.woblogger.com is my domain name.
- Web hosting – this is the place where your website is stored.
These are the essentials. Without a web host, your blog can’t be seen live on the Internet. Without a domain name, your blog is missing an address for people to search and find you.
How Much Does a WordPress Website Cost?
As I mentioned before, a website requires little capital investment, but that doesn’t mean it’s completely free. For beginners, I recommend starting with a small budget. This will include your domain name and web hosting fees.
Domain names usually cost around $10 per year. There are plenty of domain name registrars to choose from. I recommend Namecheap. Because they offer a free domain name for 1st year. I’ve had great experiences with them since 2014. Their customer support is awesome!
The next thing to consider is web hosting. I highly recommend Cloudways to first-time bloggers. Not only they power more than 100,000 websites worldwide, but also they are the most well-known hosting company for fast and reliable service.
Thankfully, Cloudways has agreed to offer our users a $30 free hosting credits. As a result, You can try Cloudways for free for 3 months if you sign up using the links in this post.
How to Make the Most of This Blogging Tutorial?
Today, I will show you how to start a blog one simple step at a time. I’ve broken it down into an easy to follow 7-part guide. Just follow the simple steps below, and your blog could be ready in 20 minutes or less.
- Find a profitable topic for your blog
- Choose a domain name for your blog
- Sign up for a Cloudways account
- Launch your first Cloudways server
- Configure WordPress settings
- Brand yourself by choosing a theme
- Customize your WordPress blog
- Start writing!
Have fun creating your blog. Let’s get started.
This step by step blog setup guide is useful for users of all ages and skill levels. However, if you need help, then you can contact our expert team to help you setup your WordPress blog.
Step 1: Deciding On Your Blog Topic
Topic choice is going to be one of the most important decisions of your blogging journey. I always choose topics I am interested and knowledgeable in. That way, I never run out of ideas and get stuck.
The best choice is a niche you’re passionate about. Something you love that is unique.
It’s fulfilling to connect with others and provide helpful information that solves their problems. If you’re passionate about your topic, you’ll be more invested in your blog in the long run.
Read: What to Write About on Your Blog?
Step 2: Choose a Domain Name for Your Blog
The domain name is the URL, or web address, that identifies your website. This is your blog’s name. For example, Woblogger is the name of my blog, and Woblogger.com is the domain, the domain for YouTube is Youtube.com, and so on. See? It’s simple!
Your domain should articulate the mission and purpose of your blog. Don’t hurry through the process of picking a domain name. It’s your brand and something you’re going to love for years to come. Give it a name that is meaningful to your topic and what you do.
Here are a few tips to consider when naming your blog:
- Choose a .com. They are common and easy to remember.
- Avoid using numbers and symbols. They are confusing and difficult to remember.
- Try to use your brand as your domain name.
- Aim for 2-3 words. If your brand name is longer, try simplifying it.
- Avoid longer domain names.
- Choose a memorable or catchy domain name.
- Try to include a phrase that represents what your blog is about. This helps people to identify your blog’s niche. It’s good for search engines.
Be sure to take the time and effort to consider different names. Brainstorm ideas and bounce them off your friends, family, or coworkers for their opinions. After you narrow it down to a few names you like, check to see if the domain name is available before jumping ahead and settling on any name.
Read: Techniques to find the perfect domain name.
Step 3: Sign Up for a Cloudways Account
The next step in starting your WordPress blog is selecting a reliable hosting provider that can handle your website’s needs. Cloudways is an excellent option for bloggers as it offers managed cloud hosting with numerous benefits:
- Performance: Cloudways provides lightning-fast servers powered by top-tier cloud infrastructure providers like DigitalOcean, AWS, and Google Cloud.
- Ease of Use: With its intuitive interface and user-friendly dashboard, even beginners can easily navigate through the setup process.
- Scalability: As your blog grows and attracts more visitors, Cloudways allows you to scale up resources seamlessly to accommodate increased traffic.
- Security: Cloudways takes security seriously and offers built-in firewalls, regular security patches, two-factor authentication (2FA), and free SSL certificates.
To get started with Cloudways hosting, follow these simple steps:
- Visit the Cloudways and click on “Get Started Free.”
- Fill in your email address and password to create an account.
- Choose your desired currency and timezone.
- Provide additional information such as your name, organization (if applicable), country, state, city, ZIP code, and phone number.
- Review the terms of service and privacy policy, then click on “Start Free” or choose a suitable pricing plan based on your needs.
Step 4: Launch Your First Cloudways Server
Now that you have a Cloudways account, it’s time to set up your first server:
- Log in to your Cloudways dashboard.
- Click on the “Launch” button to create a new server.
- Select the cloud infrastructure provider of your choice (DigitalOcean, AWS, or Google Cloud) and the server size that aligns with your blog’s requirements.
- Choose the location nearest to your target audience for optimal performance.
- Assign a name to your application and server (e.g., “MyBlog”).
- Create an application by selecting “WordPress” from the drop-down menu.
- Add project details like project name, organization (if applicable), and team members (optional).
- Review the selected options and click on “Launch Now.”
Step 5: Configure WordPress Settings
With your server launched successfully, it’s time to configure WordPress:
- On your Cloudways dashboard, navigate to Applications > MyBlog > Access Details.
- Note down the application URL, username, and password provided.
- Access your WordPress admin panel by appending “/wp-admin” to your application URL (e.g., `https://yourblog.com/wp-admin`).
- Enter the username and password from step 2 to log in.
- Customize essential settings such as site title, tagline, timezone, permalink structure, and more via Settings > General.
Step 6: Brand Yourself By Choosing a Design
At this point, you should have a basic website up and running. Now, we have to make it awesome!
How to Find a Great WordPress Theme?
You have several options to choose from when it comes to themes. The first option is to search within WordPress they have lots of selections to fit your style and preference.
Go to “Appearance” > “Themes” in the side menu, then click “Add new” at the top:
You can sort themes by “featured”, “popular,” or by any advanced “feature filter” you’re looking for.
If you like the look of the theme’s thumbnail, click on it to open a preview window:
To continue searching other theme previews, clicking the close button (X) brings you back to the thumbnails. When you find one you like, click the “Install” button.
Once you install a theme, you must activate it. You can do this from the successful installation screen. Or, go back to your themes page (Appearance > Themes) and you’ll find your new theme as the first option.
Click on the theme thumbnail. You will find a “Live Preview” option to see how your blog will look in real life. When you’re sure it’s the one you want, click the “Activate” button.
Option 2: Find a Theme Using a Third-Party Site
If you can’t find what you’re looking for on WordPress, or you want something more original, you can find lots of great themes online. There are many free options, but the best ones are more expensive. You can expect to pay somewhere between $20 to $100 for a premium theme.
I recommend premium WordPress themes to start if you’re serious about your business. If it’s not in your budget, you can always use a free theme for now and convert to a premium one later. It’s a one-time fee, but worth the investment.
If you want to buy a theme now and save yourself the trouble later, the most well-known marketplace is StudioPress. If you can’t find a theme you like, you can go to sites like:
I use the Monochrome Pro theme from StudioPress for Woblogger. What I love most about premium WordPress themes is the support you get from the theme’s creators, which can be very useful for beginners.
Recommended WordPress theme: Essense Pro by StudioPress.
Step 7: Customize and Optimize Your WordPress Blog
This is where the fun begins. One of the benefits of WordPress is the endless features for customization. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll stick to the essentials for now.
Themes are the foundation of your blog’s design and functionality. They give your pages a unifying style to embellish your brand. WordPress also has plugins that can add to or extend the functionality of your blog.
Change the Site’s Identity
The first step is to click the “Customize” button on your active theme.
Menu options in the sidebar will vary, depending on the theme you choose. The main category to edit is “Site Identity.”
Here, you can add the name of your blog and a tagline of your choosing. When you’re done, click the “Save and Publish” button.
Set up Permalinks
Permalinks are static hyperlinks that lead to a particular blog post or page. Kind of like mini domains that take viewers directly to a certain page in your site instead of the homepage. You can change the URL structure of your blog by changing permalinks. The default permalink structure of a WordPress site is yourblog.com/post-ID.
Permalink structure is quite simple. In the left sidebar, go with your mouse over “settings” and select “Permalinks.”
There are five custom permalink structures that WordPress displays as common settings. I use the “Post name” structure on my blog. It uses keywords from my title to create a recognizable URL link. Check “post name” radio button and save the settings.
How to Create Great Blog Content?
Congratulations on setting up your first blog! Now you can get to the most important part—creating content. This is where your ideas can shine and you can share your passion with your audience.
The content of your blog is what attracts visitors to your brand. Without great content, even the most well designed and structured blogs will fail. If you want a quick growth with a large quantity of content, you can use a tool like Content At Scale to generate quality content in bulk.
Adding New Posts
To create a new post, go to the left sidebar, select “Posts” and then “Add New” from the sub-menu.
There, you’ll find a screen that looks similar to a Microsoft Word file.
Simply write the title of your post in the first tab. Then, begin adding content in the second tab. You can add text, images and more to build the page you want. When you’re finished and ready for the world to see your post, hit “Publish.”
You can view your published post by clicking “View Post” on the next page.
Another important thing to consider is optimizing your post’s content for readers. You can do this by writing content people are interested in, containing words and phrases people are likely to search for to find your blog’s topic.
Without optimization, you’ll never gain the exposure necessary to get backlinks and rank well in search engines. If you write content that people love to read, you get traffic, social media shares, and links from other sites as your audience grows.
Adding New Pages
Once you begin acquiring lots of content, the next step is to structure your website with static pages to help organize content. You’ll also want to include pages that tell people who you are and how to get a hold of you. You can do this with the following:
About Page
This page is essential for any decent blog. An About page tells visitors who you are, what your blog is about, and describes your chosen topic in more detail. This is the centrepiece that defines your brand.
Read: How to Create an Amazing Blog About Page
Contact Page
This page allows visitors to contact you and find you elsewhere on the Internet. It can be a simple page with your email address and social network links. Or you can use plugins like Ninja Form to have a simple contact form. Your visitor can use it to contact you without leaving your blog. This can be helpful to gain feedback, maintain relationships with your followers, and create business opportunities and partnerships.
How to Promote Your Blog And Its Content?
The next phase of your blog is to promote yourself to a wider audience. To do this, you must learn some online marketing strategies. As I mentioned before, optimizing your content is a great way to grow your audience and reach more readers. A strong marketing strategy will help you promote each piece of content you create.
Let’s talk about content marketing. Your content marketing skills will determine how many visitors come to your blog site. More visitors mean more shares on social media, more comments and engagement, and more email subscribers to your blog.
Your ultimate goal should be to have as many visitors as possible. When you start to monetize your blog, the bigger your audience, the more profitable your website. Advertising is one of the best ways to make money online. Businesses will pay you to advertise their products to your readers. Convert your reader’s visits into profit with a comprehensive monetization strategy. More engagement means more clicks on ads, more referrals, and more buyers of products and services through advertisements on your website.
Now that you see the financial opportunities, let’s explore the ways you can promote your blog and its content.
Share Your Blog Posts on Social Media
The best thing I ever did to get visitors, was to promote my blog posts on Social Media (Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn) and the forums I was a member of. Social Media is a great place to connect with others and share your knowledge and expertise. Building a social media following will fast track the growth of your audience.
Additionally, there are many WordPress plugins and tools that make it easy to share old blog posts automatically. Here are a few:
- Revive Old Post – Shares your old blog post to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
- Tweetily – Effortlessly share your old posts to Twitter.
- Hootsuite – A great tool for sharing posts, new and old, on Social Media.
Submit Your Blog to Search Engines
I suggest using a plugin called WordPress SEO by Yoast. This plugin helps to optimize your content and allows you to create a custom XML sitemap for your blog. You can use this sitemap to submit your blog to search engines through Google Webmaster Tools (for Google) and Bing Webmaster Tools (for Bing and Yahoo).
Start Building Your Mailing List
One of the first things you should do is start building an email list from the beginning. The longer you wait, the more time consuming it will be. When you are first starting your blog, it’s absolutely essential to get those first few followers on your email list. You can update them on what’s happening with your blog and you’ll develop a solid reader base that keeps coming back to your website. Later, you can use your followers to promote your monetization strategy.
It’s not too expensive to build a mailing list. Services like MailChimp allow you to have up to 2,000 subscribers with up to 12,000 emails for free, while services like GetResponse allow you to have up to 1000 subscribers with unlimited emails for $15 per month. Choose the best option for your blog based on how often you plan on sending emails and how large your audience is.
Optimize Your Blog for Search Engines
The best way to get noticed by search engines is like Google by Creating valuable, outstanding content on your blog regularly. The main goal of your marketing strategy should be to optimize your content for search engines. You can do this by editing content to rank well for keywords. This can be as simple as using the WordPress SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tool to optimize your titles, meta descriptions, static pages, and individual blog posts.
Learn SEO: The Ultimate Guide for SEO Beginners.
Avoid stuffing your blog post with keywords if you want to stay on Google’s good side. Choose one keyword phrase to optimize on each page and post. Include it in your title, meta description, and to one image (image title and alt tag) on the page for best results. It can be helpful to do some research on what keywords and phrases are most popular in your topic. SEO can be tricky because it is constantly changing, but a bit of trial and error will help you learn as you go.
Read: Top 7 mistakes That Everyone Makes in WordPress
That’s a Wrap!
You have officially set up your website and you are on your way to creating your own successful blog. This is only the beginning of an exciting journey for you. If you have any questions or issues, please leave a comment below. I try to check my comments daily.
