Steps-by-Steps Beginner’s Guide to Start a WordPress Blog in 2021

Are you thinking of starting a blog? But don’t you know how to start a blog? So, do you want to start a blog in 2021?

Are you planning to start a blog from scratch? You are in the right place. 

Trust me, and it will be the best decision to reach your goal.

Blogging can change your life if you give 100% about your work, you have to be passionate about your blog, so it’s easy to start a blog and obviously, you have to work hard and do smart work.

We know that growing a blog to $15k or more a month is achievable.

Starting a blog is easy but maintaining your blog is challenging. 

You have to be passionate about your work.

Consistency is also the utmost essential aspect to grow your blog. 

I wanted to create a simple guide step-by-step to start a blog with all the points in my mind. There is so much to start a blog or set up your blog to think about, including settings, themes, and plugins. 

What is Blogging?

A blog (terms as “weblog”) shares your thoughts, expertise, ideas, pieces of information, and solving others’ problems. 

It is an information website that publishes the content around specific niche or topics and displays the new content at the main page’s top.

You can earn a fair amount of money so you can fulfill your dreams.

You can create your blog as you want, there are no fixed rules for it, but it should be neat and clean, so your visitor enjoys reading your blog and visiting your blog again and again.

A blog usually includes some standard features like

• Blog posts
• Widgets
• Comments
• Videos, Images
• Link internal and external to other websites as well as your own website.

Here’s how most blogs appear. It’s not fixed; as you want, you can start a blog.

• Header: to display the menu, logo, and name.
• Body: Main content comes into the body of the page or post.
• Sidebar: Some blogs don’t have a sidebar, but it’s good to be a sidebar on your blog because of internal links.
• Footer: There are usually social handles, subscribers forms, privacy policy, disclaimer, and more. 

How to Start a Blog: Step-by-Step Guide, A Simple Steps for New Bloggers

1. How to find your Niche

Before you start a blog, you choose a niche and which niche you are going to work with now.

To start a blog, you need to know, or you have to work on your niche. Is finding a niche difficult? Are you in a dilemma about which niche you have to choose?

Don’t think much, here I explain in an easy way to find your niche.

[n] Niche – Niche is all about your passion and talent for your work. Your success and wealth depend upon your niche.

It’s all about your passion and talent; after that, you see the market of a particular niche.

Talent: You need to know about your talent. In which area are you in good? 

If you are good at cooking, technologies, codings, bikes, and many more, all these are niche, and you can choose your blog.

If you are still confused, ask your family members, friends, colleagues, and other people who know you and suggest you for your betterment.

Passion: If you found your talent, now come with your passion. 

Suppose, If you have a talent for coding, but you’re not passionate about coding. So, you can search for any other niche.

It would help if you carried your talent with passion together.

Market: When you confirm your talent and passion, that would be your niche. 

Now, it’s time to search the market for your niche and how it will work in the future.

All these things need to understand to find your niche, and finally, you find your niche.

Here, are some niche

1. Real Estate
2. Food Recipes
3. Technologies
4. Careers
5. Fitness
6. Online Business
7. Parenting
8. Finance
9. Freelancing
10. Dog Food
11. Health

It would be best if you choose a niche that has enough audience interest. 

A 3-steps to start a blog success validation upon these process

1. Check niche size
2. Market research, explore competitor’s blogs research.
3. Analyze the market potential of your niche

These processes will help give you a clear idea of the size, competition, and monetization potential for your selected niche.

Pro Tips: Use some free or paid keyword tools for more research like google keyword planner, ubersuggest, Semrush, Ahrefs, etc.

2. Choose a Blogging Platform

WordPress is a highly recommended way to start a blog because it is easy to work with.

You need to select the ideal blogging platform to start a blog. I recommend building your blog using the self-hosted WordPress platform setup. To know more about WordPress, click this link- What is WordPress? 

But why do you have to select WordPress to start a blog? The below stats says everything.

3. Find a domain name

Before you start a blog, you choose or find the domain name for your blog.

It’s time to find a domain name for your blog, and when you start a blog it is difficult to find the domain name which one you like the utmost. Sometimes, the domain name is already booked by someone.

You can register your domain from 

• namecheap.com
• name.com
• Godaddy.com

and if you are confused to choose your domain name, so you can get an idea from the below websites

• leandomainsearch.com
• instantdomainsearch.com
• www.isitwp.com
• blogtyrant.com

4. Choose Hosting Provider

Before you start a blog, you need a place to host your blog or website. 

The next step is a good web host, and I highly recommend you some hosting providers’ names. When you start a blog it is important to see all the aspects of hosting when you buy, its speed, bandwidth, customer support, storage, and so on.

• GreenGeeks: I highly recommended this hosting if you are fresher or just starting your career as a blogger or affiliate marketer. They have FREE SSL and a high-speed server to support your blogs. Their customer support is fantastic.
• WPXHosting: It’s costly for freshers or those just starting their journey as a blogger or affiliate marketers. You might have seen customer support at various hosting providers but not like WPX hosting. It’s a fast support system and very secure and fast servers. If you are looking for a managed VPS server, WPX Hosting is highly recommended.
• Bluehost: Bluehost is the right choice for just starting their careers online. This hosting provides mostly things like Free SSL, Unlimited bandwidth, Unlimited storage, Easy use of Cpanel, and Live Chat Support. 
• DigitalOcean: This is one for mostly intermediate or professional bloggers for affiliate marketers and the unmanaged VPS server, giving the freedom to host your blog on a per-hour basis. Customer support is fantastic. But it is costly for freshers.
• Other Hosts: If you are using a different host, no problem! You can install WordPress there easily.

But you need to know before purchasing the hosting their customer support, bandwidth, prices, servers, and so on.

5. Install WordPress and Configuration Settings

Now, you buy a domain and hosting. Now, time to install and configure WordPress on your hosting.

If you bought a domain and hosted both from different companies, then you have to change the DNS Server. You have to point the hosting DNS server to a domain server.

After installing WordPress on your hosting server, you can set up to start a blog.

You can install WordPress directly from the hosting server softaculous, or you can install WordPress manually on your hosting server.

Both have easy steps to install.

When you successfully installed WordPress on your hosting server then, you will get this screen when you write this URL in the browser

Use the admin name and password that you created when you set up your information for your hosting account.

www.yourdomainname.com/wp-admin.

After entering the username and password, you will get the WordPress dashboard.

Now, we are going to do the primary and general settings of your WordPress Website or blog.

On this page, basic settings are the fields to enter your Site Title & Tagline. 

You can set the Site Title of your website as per your company or personal blog name. 

Tagline thinks about what your blog or company wanted to start. 

You can do settings at any time, but it is good to do all the settings prior, so it’s easy to proceed further.

If you wish, you can change the time and date format according to your time zone.

Writing WordPress Settings

In these settings, you can set Default Post Category & Post Type for your articles. You also can set Pages for your website.

Reading WordPress Settings

In the reading section, you can set what you want in your Homepage displays. Based on your theme, you may want to use your latest blog posts or a custom static page.

Discussion of WordPress Settings

This page contains all settings relating to comments on your site. It all depends upon you, and you should decide whether you will allow people to post comments directly published on your post or if you want comments to be manually approved. If you wish to have these comments published on your post, sometimes many spam comments are also received. 

Media WordPress Settings

These are the settings where you upload the images & videos from the computer and drives, you can find the cropping options for the media, but it is only for photos, not videos you add to your website.

You also can leave these be or customize them if you want to use the pre-set sizes in your post.

You can also add their alt text, captions, descriptions, and names of the images to help you in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and it is good practice to put all the text there.

Permalinks WordPress Settings

Permalinks are an essential setting for your website or blog. Permalinks have appeared on your visitor browser address bar- it’s your URL plus the unique page or post identifier.

Proper permalinks also help it rank on the search engine.

For example- www.studiowebblog.com/start-a-wordpress-blog

here, how-to-start-a-blog-in-wordpress, this is the permalink of my post

.

It is easy for your visitor and search engine to search for a proper subject by searching by the user.

If I put the permalink like 

https://yourdomainname.com/?=123

You can define or understand what the post is all about, and also, search engines do not define and do not understand this type of permalink.

Your Profile

You can add users to your profile, which can be found under users > Your profile, or by clicking on your name at the top right of your screen.

We have done all the necessary settings for our blog or website. Now, it’s time to select the themes and plugins for our blog or website.

6. Choose a WordPress Theme to Start a Blog

Newbies bloggers get tripped up; they spend hours selecting the perfect theme for their blog and website. 

So let me take a load off your mind: your theme is not that important when you are just getting started your blogging journey. 

Your sole focus should be on creating valuable content and getting it out there for the visitor to see. 

Don’t worry much about your blog design as a newbie until you have sizable visitors to tell you they will like it or not. 

By default, you’ll see the yearly WordPress theme active on your blog or website. The most recent theme is active Twenty Seventeen, but Twenty Eighteen is on its way.

Just navigate your dashboard sidebar to Appearance -> Themes-> Add New. You can also upload the new theme but make sure it is in a zip file, installed, and activated.

There are plenty of free and paid themes to pick and choose from; here are a few of my favorite themes.

• AffiliateBooster: Affiliate Booster theme is the best picked and chooses an affiliate marketing theme for the bloggers, and many affiliate marketers are using this theme now.
• GeneratePress: This theme is an amazing best theme, something which I cannot stop appreciating. They have added all the features to this theme, which makes it an awesome theme. It’s super easy to customize, SEO friendly, fast, and has a super awesome theme.
• StudioPress: I have recommended a StudioPress theme for everyone. They are also fast, SEO friendly, secure, and very easy to use.
• Astra: This is also fast, SEO friendly, lightweight, and highly customizable.
• Oceanwp: This theme is multi-purpose, fully responsive, eCommerce ready, fastest loading time, and SEO base built-in.

7. Install & recommended Plugins

After the theme installation, we now need to install plugins for our blog or website. It is easy to spend hours installing any number of plugins before you get anything done in content creation. 

You don’t need to do coding for your requirements. It will work in the form of plugins. You can install the particular requirements of your blog.

Here, are some recommended plugins for your blog: 

1. Akismet: For Spam Protection, you can try the Akismet plugin. Comment spam will be a huge problem later on if you don’t set up any plugin for this. If the number of visitors is increasing, then spam comments also will be increasing.
2. MashShare: A free social media plugin, a professional and highly customizable ecosystem for social media sharing and optimizing your valuable content.
3. Affiliate Booster Blocks: It has given 20+ pre-made Gutenberg blocks in the affiliate booster blocks plugin, making this one of the must-have plugins for affiliate blogs.
4. RankMath/ All in one SEO/ Yoast SEO Plugin: All these plugins for on-page SEO. You can use any one of the plugins for your blog.
5. Elementor Pro: This is the best page builder. You can create any layout for your blogs using this plugin.
6. Ultimate Addons for Elementor: This is one to add some extra features.
7. TablePress: If you want to create awesome tables in your content? This one is a useful plugin.
8. Broken Link Checker: A must-have plugin for blogs. This plugin will keep checking all the broken links on your blog, and you can remove those broken links with just a few clicks.
9. ShortPixel Image Optimizer: This plugin compresses all the images.
10. W3 Total Cache: This plugin is best to improve the loading speed of your blog.
11. Add Google Analytics & Google Search Console with Site Kit by Google: This plugin offers Google insights about how people find and use your blog. Site kit is the one-stop solution to deploy, manage, and get insights from critical Google tools to make a blog successful on the web.
12. Maintain WordPress Backups with VaultPress: It is a free and premium plugin. It is good to install a backup plugin for your blog. 

8. Important Pages for Blog

1. About Page
2. Privacy & Policy Page
3. Disclaimer Page
4. Terms & Conditions Page
5. Contact us Page

These are the main pages for your blog. 

Delete all the sample pages & posts.

9. Essential tools for your blog

You can use some important tools for content creation, headlines, making videos, and images to start a blog

1. Grammarly
2. CoSchedule Headline Analyzer
3. Camtasia
4. Canva
5. Freepik
6. Stock Unlimited

SEO Tools

1. SEMRush
2. Ahrefs
3. KwFinder
4. alsoasked.com
5. KWFinder
6. LSI Graph

Email Marketing Tools

1. Convertkit
2. Mailchimp

Conclusion

All initial set up with your blog. What are you waiting for? Start a blog! 

Getting started with blogging is as easy as the above-step processes and the learning curve to start a blog. 

Start with recommended themes, plugins, and more research for your keywords, and then use keyword research tools. 

Use other tools to improve all the blog about designs, content creations, and other fancy plugin functionality than they do about your content. 

so, ready to work and the heart of blogging, get creating and start a blog!

All the best!!!