How To Start A Blog With Zero Experience

How do you start a blog with zero experience?

Yes, you can start a blog even if you have no prior experience blogging. What’s a blog? It is short for weblog. The owner of the blog is called a blogger. Blogging is a great medium to express yourself and deliver your message to your intended audience. People blog for many reasons such as to share information, to showcase a product and earn an income, to promote yourself and your skills, to offer services, to sell products, and many other reasons. This post contains a list of steps to guide you on how to start your blog.

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Let’s Brainstorm

Here are a few questions you can start with while planning for your blog:

What will be the main focus of your blog?
Who is your target audience?
What does your target audience need?
Where can you find your audience?
Can you provide value for your audience?
What channels are you going to use other than your blog to connect to your audience?
How will you connect with your audience?
Do you have a physical product?
Do you want to create digital products and market it to your audience?
Do you have a future vision for your blog?
What skills do you have that you can use to create products or use to serve your target audience?
What colors do you want to use for your brand?
What is your logo?
What type of images will you use that will be consistent with your brand?
Can you list down 5-10 adjectives describing your brand?
What platform will you use for your blog?

After brainstorming about your idea, message and your brand let’s get started with the very important steps.

1. Web Hosting and Domain Name

To begin with, you need a domain and a hosting service. A domain is the name of your website. You can obtain a domain by purchasing it from a domain name registrar or a web hosting service such as Siteground. You want to make sure no one else owns the domain name you have decided to use. You can register your domain when you sign up for your hosting service. Your hosting service is a virtual space that will store your website.

Siteground has 3 types of plans and you can upgrade anytime.

Start Up
- This plan is great for a starter website.

Grow Big
- This is for those anticipating web growth

Go Geek
- This plan is designed for web geeks.

2. Accessing Your CPanel

Once you have purchased your web hosting service and your domain name, you will have access to your CPanel where you can download WordPress for free. The primary tasks you will complete on your CPanel are:

Download WordPress

On your CPanel, you will see the WordPress icon as shown on the image below. Click on the WordPress icon to install the software.

After WordPress is downloaded, you need to create a new sign-on for WordPress to access your WordPress dashboard so you can start creating your website.

WordPress is a content management system software that you will use to set up your website such as creating pages, post, upload images, just to name a few.

Encrypt your site

Click on the “Let’s Encrypt” icon to encrypt your site. Once you have completed encryption, your URL will start with https:// instead of http://. It protects the privacy and security of your users and it is also a requirement of most browsers.

Set up your personalized email address:

Click on the email accounts icon and set up your personalized email address where your domain name will be added at the end of the email. This is important because your email will display when you send emails to your followers. It should be coming from an official website email.

3. Create Your Website

WordPress comes with different themes to choose from. You can choose a selection of beautiful free and paid themes. Select a theme that best suits your needs. Take into consideration the layout, colors, and functionality of the theme.

4. Install plugins.

Plugins are tiny bits of software that can help enhance your blog. There are so many free plugins available that are compatible with WordPress. Click here for a list of free plugins you can install in WordPress when you start your blog.

Click here to read my post on The 10 Free WordPress Plugins You Need To Start A Blog.

5. Media Library

WordPress comes with your own Media Library. You can upload and add images for our blog in your media library. Don’t forget to compress or resize your images to optimize your blog. Start with a user-friendly tool like Canva to create your images.

6. Social Media

Set up your social media accounts on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Once completed, take the URL of these accounts and set them with your shareable icons, and display them strategically on your website. Beautiful Instagram and Facebook posts can also be created in Canva.

7. Search Engines

The 3 top search engines are Google, YouTube, and Pinterest. Make sure you have accounts set up with these search engines and linked your shareable icons to your accounts. Pinterest is an image search engine. When you select Pinterest as a marketing tool, you need to create Pins to link to your website such as this. It can easily be created in Canva. Save your template and update it accordingly.