How To Start A Blog In 2021. Best Step By Step Guide For You

Are you interested in learning how to start a blog? This is not rocket science and it is very easy if you follow this entire guide thoroughly.

Hello friends, my name is Snehil Prakash and today I am going to explain to you everything that you need to know in order to start a beautiful blog for yourself.

I have been into blogging space for more than 10 years but my seriousness towards blogging grew its interest around 2014. I was too eager to write a blog but I had no idea how to start a blog. During 2010, I was using blogger.com to write poems or short stories but had a keen interest in blogging. I have been a self-learner in starting and learning how to start a blog and never had any mentor.

Whatever I have learned in a similar way as you are doing right now by reading resources that are available online.

So it’s now my turn to help you understand how to start a blog from scratch in 2021.

Before you go ahead and understand it better I want to again remind you that it is super easy and has got no complexity if you follow this guide properly.

9 Clear steps on How to start a blog in 2021.

I will make it super easy. Here are the only 9 steps that you need to follow in order to be a good beginner in blogging. I had explained it in detail later in this block. So follow them to start a blog today.

1. Select the best niche for blogging according to your passion.
2. Choose the best blogging platform for your blog.
3. Find a good domain name for your blog.
4. Get the best web hosting service.
5. Start a blog on WordPress.
6. Design your blog with a beautiful theme.
7. Learn how to write a blog and content.
8. Understand the practice of promoting your blog.
9. Making money with blogging.

Before we can think of or learn how to start a blog in 2021, let us first understand why we want to do so.

Why do you want to start a Blog?

• Do you have any reason or a message to send to the community?
• You want to build a community for yourself through which you are willing to spread love, message, information or anything like that?
• You could also have a fan base to whom you want to keep updated about you or anything that is related to you. So probably blogging is the best way to keep them self updated and in touch with all your activities.
• You may also have some reasons like making money online through blogging.

So the purposes are many but you need to identify your sole motive or motivation behind learning on how to start a blog in 2021.

Whenever you start blogging, you need to start this with a motive to enjoy

If you are enjoying this with no expectation then you will get too many things that were unexpected.

Let me give you some reasons to start a blog.

1. You have to create an expert online portfolio.
2. If you wish to improve your writing skills.
3. Do networking in your industry.
4. Sell your products or recommend someone else’s.
5. Or making money with blogging.

These are some core reasons to start a blog or learn how to start a blog in 2021.

Now let’s begin with learning.

1. Select the best niche for blogging.

There are a number of ways to identify what are the best niche to blog. There are many online tools as well which are available to help you identify your niche.

But before trying to understand the tools, you need to first self introspect. A lot of bloggers make this mistake by selecting a niche just by identifying the kind of money we can make from that niche.

Whenever you select your niche, make sure it is backed by your passion and not by money motivation. When you write a blog, straight from your heart, from your knowledge and information then that is written in a pure format.

When you rewrite by reading somebody’s else blog and then making your own version of it on your blog, that’s more difficult. This way is not impossible to start a blog but there are high chances that you will saturate over a period of time.

I would highly recommend you to follow your passion in order to select your blogging niche.

Some Tools to help you find your profitable niche.

• You can use Google trend to identify the potential of your blog

Google Trends tells you the growth graph of a particular niche and its future potential growth. This can save your from choosing the wrong niche.

• Alidropship niche finder tool.

This is used basically by drop shipper to find their profitable e-commerce niche but it can also be used to find your niche for blogging.

This way you can find the best niche for blogging. Now let us choose the blogging platform.

2. Choose the best blogging platform for your blog.

A blogging platform is a tool that helps you manage your content on your blog. There are two options to get started.

Either you try a free blogging platform or go for a paid one.

I would strongly recommend you all to go with the paid blogging platform that is very cheap. You hardly have to invest the cost of Starbucks coffee every month.

So there are two types of blogging platforms.

1. Free Platform
2. Self Hosted Platform. {Recommended}

The free blogging platform.

The free blogging platform is good for a beginner who wants to grow in writing skills. You can start blogging for free on platforms like medium, blogger, WordPress or tumbler but they will restrict your growth as a blogger.

If you have plans to make money from blogging through ads then it won’t be possible with these blogging platforms. If you wish to do affiliate marketing through blogging then a platform like “medium” would be good but they are not the best and recommended solution from my end. You don’t own them completely.

Self-hosted Blogging platforms.

This is the most recommended way to start blogging. In this format, you not only own your blog but you can also grow online business for yourself around it.

Try WordPress recommended Bluehost for blogging

Using a self-hosted blogging platform, you need to choose a domain name of your choice and the best web hosting service.

The benefits of using a self-hosting platform are

1. You own the entire online infrastructure and not abide by any rules or restrictions as in the case of a free platform.
2. This platform helps you open multiple revenue resources like ads, affiliate income, personal branding and much more.
3. You are free to practice any business over your blog and invite other experts to share their content as well.
4. You will own authority on the internet with a self-hosted blogging platform.

3. Find a good domain name for your blog.

This is one of the core and important decisions to take while you start a new blog. The name of the blog decides a lot of things.

1. Your future brand or business name around your blog.
2. The potential of getting ranked in a country or internationally.
3. SEO friendly growth.

It is always preferable to have a “dot com” domain name but if your choice is very country-specific then you can choose your domain TLD’s accordingly. For example, if you want to be a blogger only in India then you should purchase a domain name with “dot in” TLD.

But having a dot com domain is always superior then any other option. It will cost you between 10-15$ a year which you can easily afford.

4. Get the best web hosting service.

Choosing a good hosting decides your blog growth. While you are here to learn how to start a blog, you must understand this section on choosing the best web hosting.

I had already written an extensive blog on choosing the best web hosting solution. You can read Here

A good hosting solution helps your blog to remain live 24/7. For suppose you choose a poor hosting solution, your website may observe some glitches like server downtime which affects your SEO.

Your website loading time is very important. If your servers are poor, your website loading will be very slow and ranking such a website is generally difficult. Search engines love ranking fast loading websites on top.

Blogging platforms like WordPress and me personally recommend Bluehost as the best web hosting solution.

5. How to Start a Blog On WordPress.

In this section, I will be explaining the entire process of how to set up your blog. Just to make it more clear for you, I will be using the Bluehost web host service. Bluehost is recommended worldwide by experts and I personally also felt this is the best after using many other hosting services previously.

5.1. Visit the web hosting solution [ BlueHost My recommendation ]

Visit this link here to go to the Bluehost web solution. Once you are on that page then hit the “Get Started” button.

5.2. Choose a hosting plan for your blog.

Here you get multiple options and plans to select from. You should start from basic plan if you have just started the blogging world. Once you start improving the process of learning how to start a blog then you can upgrade later.

The above plans belong to shared hosting plans. There are different hosting plans. I had explained different hosting plans here.

For beginners, I will always recommend you all to start with the above plans in the image.

5.3. Setup Your Domain Name

As we discussed previously that having a self-owned domain is important to start a career in blogging. Now, if you have already decided on the name of your domain, its time to integrate your domain with your hosting. So you need to enter the domain name to your hosting company or you can also buy it right away while purchasing Bluehost WebHost.

I always recommend buying a domain from the same company from whom you are buying your host. It becomes easier for you to manage your DNS. I will explain about DNS setting later in this article itself. It is super easy to understand. So don’t panic and proceed ahead with me.

5.4. Complete your registration with Bluehost web hosting.

This is only a couple of minute consuming step. Like you purchase anything from an e-commerce website, similar is this registration and purchase.

Once you complete your registration, you will have to choose the period for which you want to buy the host. It will vary from 1 month to 12 months.

You can choose for 3 months at least. You will get some addon things also like domain privacy protection etc. Just uncheck them if you are not willing to spend money on them. A beginner doesn’t need to have all of them.

5.5. Launch your WordPress with Bluehost.

Congratulations, it’s time to set up WordPress. Now your domain is connected with your Bluehost web host. It’s now super easy to set up the WordPress on your host.

Just go to Bluehost Cpanel and find the option of ‘My sites’ option. Click Install WordPress and Boom. That’s the perfect one-click setup offered only by the Bluehost web hosting service. It’s that super cool way to install WordPress on your hosting service and you are ready to go.

Go to your Bluehost cPanel account, find the ‘My Sites’ section and click Install WordPress. That’s the famous one-click set-up offered by Bluehost that makes blog creation a breeze.

Once you do that, you will see that you are shown a coming soon page on your website URL. It needs some WordPress customization. For now, you can simply go and hit the launch button. I will explain about website customization in the coming article block.

6. Design your blog with a beautiful theme.

Many bloggers who know how to start a blog or start a blogging career has this question popping up first. Whether we should use a free or premium theme.

Having a premium theme is good when you have learned everything. You should be good enough in customizing any type of theme. Once you have understood the basic method of customizing any premium theme then you can design any type of website.

Designing websites with a premium theme is easy. All you need to understand the documentation that comes with a premium theme and some knowledge of HTML, CSS which is not a compulsion. If I talk about my knowledge in these languages then I would say I just have beginner knowledge of HTML and CSS.

Most of the time you don’t even need to know coding with these languages and trust me, I had built many e-commerce websites without any coding knowledge.

As far as the question is concerned, you should first learn how to start a blog with free themes. There are approximately 3000+ free themes available in the WordPress library itself.

The price range for single-use licenses ranges from $30 to $500, depending on which premium theme you choose.

If you don’t want to customize the theme yourself then it would cost you somewhere between 50-2000$ depending upon your requirement. You can get some freelancers do the same job for you on Fiverr.

You can also connect with me. I will help you in guiding to build the right design.

6.1. How to choose A premium theme for your blog?

As I already said in the article above that there are more than 3000+ themes available in WordPress. There you will find a lot of themes giving sufficient features with the free theme but some advanced features would be available at a premium price.

I would recommend you to purchase themes not from the WordPress repository but from theme marketplaces like ThemeForest.

Here is a checklist to buy or choose a theme from Themeforest.

1. Go to Themeforest.
2. Alternatively, you can also choose WordPress templates by TemplateMonster [ My persoanl favourite ]
3. Visit the WordPress theme section.
4. Choose your blog category for example technology, education, e-commerce, etc.
5. Choose the theme that has high sales as well as a high rating in your desired category.
6. Add to cart and make the payment.
7. Once you paid, the theme file will be available to download from your download section.

6.2. How to Install Premium theme on WordPress?

Let me explain to you in steps.

1. Download the complete package of your theme.
2. Now, in your WordPress admin dashboard, go to the Appearance section.
3. From there, choose a theme.
4. A new page will open, there you need to upload your theme files.
5. Once the upload is complete, you need to activate your theme.
6. After activating your theme, your website premium theme is live on your URL.
7. Now you can customize your theme on WordPress by reading the documentation and its instruction given in the document step by step.

Don’t worry, throughout the process, you won’t need to code anywhere.

7. Learn how to write a blog and content that is SEO Friendly.

Writing SEO friendly content is important in blogging. It helps you get the readers by placing your blog in the right position and attain visibility.

Do you want to write texts for a blog and don’t know how to do it correctly? In SEO Content, I will teach you the steps to make a difference.

You can also read these 10 techniques to write SEO friendly contents.

Perhaps we have all started our wanderings awkwardly on the Internet, creating a small blog where we captured our emotions, feelings, curiosities and everything we liked to share.

You may have started writing about your hobbies or about the reflections that life has made you do, but the intention never went beyond that.

Now the concept of the blog has changed a lot and you can find real wonders that provide fresh, innovative and well-structured content.

You can be a wonderful poet, a fantastic cartoonist or that your thoughts are precious, but that your quality content does not reach the people it deserves because, simply, you do not know how to do it.

How to get your blog to reach this scale, both in quality and in the number of followers?

It is not easy, it requires time and a lot of effort. But, above all, it needs the necessary knowledge so that your blog is able to reach all the people who search for its subject: it needs SEO optimization.

7.1. Don’t You Think Blogging Is For Everyone?

We could start from this premise if we believed that not everyone is capable of writing texts for blogs that generate interest and visitor traffic. Great writers have remained at the gates of fame for not knowing how to advertise.

If the only thing you are looking for is an escape route, a way to free yourself from all those thoughts that you need to share so much, writing a blog will be very useful.

On the other hand, if you have a broader vision of the concept of a blog, hoping to get some economic income or a way to expand your company or professional profile, we are speaking in bigger words.

With the rise of digital technologies, the Internet has become a fierce battlefield for the fight of new and potential clients; Blogs are the way to contact them in a personal and close way.

But can anyone make their “professional” blog profitable? What achieve the visits and the objectives that had marked ?.

Not without the necessary knowledge, which is what we call SEO. A blogger must know what keywords to use and how to contribute the content of the topic in an agile and pleasant way.

Writing SEO articles for blogs has become not only an art but a way that many good writers make a living. They know how to write these texts, and here are some of their tips.

7.2. Tips for writing texts for a blog

Let’s assume that your content is more technical than artistic, making it easier to tailor its format to specific keywords and concrete structures.

A good content writer for a blog must take several aspects into account when writing, be it your own or for those who are working.

7.3. Soak up its theme and content

In the event that you are writing for someone else’s blog, it is important that you discover what that website is giving you.

Whether it is to avoid repeating yourself in some definitions or terms or not to backslide on specific aspects of the same topic, it is essential that you know the content that it brings to blog visitors.

What’s more, if you don’t have any knowledge about its subject matter and content, it can help you get inspired to write texts and find the information you are looking for to complement your content more accurately.

7.4. Reference previous content

Curious visitors get caught up in knowing more. Linking to other content on the same blog (whenever possible) helps make your visit more entertaining and lasting.

You can avoid repeating yourself in definitions that had already been made in previous entries or make comparisons with a post from years ago, to see how the scope of your text has evolved.

In any case, it is very nice to see links in the texts of the blogs, especially if it is not yours.

7.5. See what kind of tone they use when interacting with the reader

A blog, depending on what type of client and intent is focused, will be written in one way or another. It is very important to realize this if we want to maintain the same tone line with the reader.

The tone with which the words are typed helps us to make a text more or less pleasant to read, to feel close, or not, to what it is explaining and to catch us to continue reading.

You don’t have to address the reader as a friend grabbing a couple of canes, but you also don’t feel like a robot without any kind of feeling just typing in the vital and necessary information.

7.6. Use simple or specific language if required

Science, sport, cinema or any other type of theme use specific words to refer to some elements of them. Knowing how to introduce them in the text will generate additional wealth for experts on the subject.

Depending on the type of approach that the blog has, you will need to use some specific terms, and knowing how to adapt them to simple language can be a difficult obstacle to overcome for many.

The important thing is that the information is understood and if it is in the appropriate words for that specific area, much better.

7.7. Have the text answer the main question

Or satisfy the reader, at least. When we create entries in our blogs it is to give a solution to a problem, or an answer to a question. Everything else is unnecessary text if we do not deal with an artistic aspect.

Yes, sometimes we like to make the roundups and paragraphs that do not contribute anything in particular, but sometimes the reason is as simple as generating an attitude in the reader that helps us finish our fantastic text.

That your text directs the reader to end up knowing more about the subject than it is about and that, for subsequent consultations, they know that your website is trustworthy by providing optimal information to solve their doubts, it is your final objective.

Writing SEO blog articles is usually not as easy as it sounds. If you do not feel prepared, you prefer to take advantage of your time in other activities or you feel lazy, let me do it for you.

8. Understand the practice of promoting your blog.

How to promote your blog on the Internet? How do I promote my articles on social networks? Or how can I promote my content to get more visibility? This is a question that I am often asked on the blog and on social networks.

Many marketing experts claim that you should spend about 54 minutes a day promoting your content, for every hour you have spent writing it . If an average article costs about four hours to write, this means that you should spend almost 4 hours a day promoting it.

It seems crazy, right? Although, if you stop to think about it, Have you not invested a lot of time and effort into that article? Isn’t it worth trying a little more? Don’t you deserve an increase in visits after working so hard?

This advice, although it seems crazy, makes a lot of sense; Promoting your blog on the Internet will allow you to get the most out of your content. To help you with this part, today I am going to share with you some promotional tactics.

You should follow these 5 practices to promote your blog:

1. Submit your blog to search engine console.
2. Content leverage
3. Relationship marketing by outreaching.
4. Social media marketing.
5. Email Marketing.

8.1. Submit your blog to search engine console.

This is very important. When you search different guides on the internet to promote content, I found most of them skip this point. Since this method requires a bit of advanced knowledge but no rocks science method, so probably many people don’t take heeds explaining this method. But I will guide you in your learning to how to start a blog and submit it to the search engine.

I am taking the example of the google search console. Similar is the case with other search engines as well.

1. Visit the search console.
2. Create an account.
3. Add your website’s primary URL.
4. You will get a verification HTML or CName record to add to your website header. Add that to your header of the website. If you are using a WordPress website then you can install ‘Insert header and footer plugin’ into your WordPress dashboard. There you can add HTML record to your website header.
5. Then go back to the search console and click verify.
6. Now you need to submit your site map to google search console.
7. For this, install the Yoast SEO plugin and then go to its general settings. There you will find a tab called Features.
8. Under features you will see XML Sitemap, click on the question mark just to its left and this will give you ‘See the sitemap XML’ hyperlink.
9. Click the Sitemap XML, this will give your sitemap URL.

You need to submit this sitemap URL to all the search engine consoles so that the different search engines can discover your website.

If you don’t submit your sitemaps to search engine then the search engine may take too much time to discover your website and hence getting quick traffic via a search engine will become a slow process for you.

8.2. Content leverage

Content leverage helps you reach a larger set of audience. I am going to explain to you 3 ways under this.

1. Content Curation
2. The Content aggregators
3. Content syndication

Content Curation:

This helps you create a collection of your content in the form of a list and spread it to the right set of a large audience.

Here are a few sites where you can curate your content:

• Scoop.it
• List.ly
• Paper.li
• Pearl Trees
• Flipboard

Content aggregators:

This is the best way where the aggregate websites collect all the posts from a blog and present it to its audience in a formated and category wise presentation. This helps the audience get a wide verity of contents from different websites in a single place. There is no copy or republishing of content in this method.

Here are some of the most popular content aggregators:

• Alltop
• AffDaily
• Blog Engage
• Popurls
• WP Clipboard
• WP News Desk

Content syndication:

This is a method of republishing content that is already published somewhere else. You can understand this method more on the search engine watch article.

When you republish your article on another blog then the link is produced in the canonical format which doesn’t create any plag issue.

You can use websites like Medium or Linkedin to import your content for republishing.

8.3. Relationship marketing by outreaching.

Outreaching is the most authoritative way to promote your blog. In this section, I will explain to you 3 ways by which you can do that.

1. Blogger Outreach.
2. Guest Blogging.
3. Blog Commenting.

Blogging Outreach:

This is one of the most fantastic ways to build a network in your niche or industry. In this method, you need to reach out to bloggers or webmasters in your niche and you can follow the link acquisition campaign.

This method helps you get high-quality contextual backlinks from a good website which directly improves your website authority.

5 tips to write a good outreach email.

1. Keep your email very short. Nobody loves reading long emails.
2. Write a straight and simple email subject.
3. Pitch 3 -5 content ideas in your email according to the outreaching blog content.
4. Gift the blogger, an option to get a good opportunity to get backlink too by the three-way approach in which you can give a contextual backlink to their blog/website from any other authority website as a return gift.
5. Offer them the option to share their content with your email list and social media channels.

This method is very helpful in getting high-quality backlinks and create an authority website for yourself.

Guest Blogging:

Guest blogging is a way where you find websites that allow you to write content on their website. Here you can add a link to your social profiles or website in the author bio.

The benefit of guest blogging is

1. You can obviously get a backlink from the content that you post.
2. You also get the opportunity to be an author in prestigious websites that create a good portfolio as an online blogger or a personality in your niche.

Blog commenting:

This method has been practicing since the advent of the internet and blogging. Where people build relations with authors from various blogs by praising their content in the comment section.

It’s those friendships and connections that will help you promote your content better in the future. Just be sure to avoid dropping links to your content within the comment itself.

8.4. Social media marketing.

Sharing content is social media helps you get massive traffic. But there has to be the right way to share content as well. If you start sharing content links continuously over social media sites then your website may lead to getting blocked.

Getting blocked on big social media can lead to massive traffic loss so you must use social media smartly while sharing your content.

1. Do social bookmarking of your blog on popular social websites like Reddit, Flipboard, Digg, etc.
2. Share your content is social groups on Facebook, Linkedin that are specific to your niche.
3. Always write answers related to your blog on Q&A websites like Quora and add a link to your blog.
4. Convert your content into videos using tools like Lumen5 and share the content videos in video sharing websites or social media pages.

These methods will help you build massive traffic from social media and create an influencer position of you or your brand.

8.5. Email marketing.

The email marketing method is a compulsory method to promote your blog. This is the best way that helps you track your returning people to your website and understand the loyal audience for which you are producing content.

You can use free tools like MailChimp. It also has a paid upgrade but for starter blogger, this is pretty much good. It helps you.

1. Stay in touch with your website audience through blog automation emailer.
2. Pitch your service or product to a target audience.
3. Share good content with people and an audience who are in need.

Make sure you have email signatures and a good email format that you are automating to reach your subscriber.

Try WiseStamp for a professional email signature with links to your social profiles and latest blog post.

So now you are ready to have a massive audience for your blog. The next and last step in blogging is to make money out of this audience that you got from promoting your blog.

So now you will learn how to earn money from your blog with the tips listing.

9. How to earn money from Blogging.

The end goal of blogging a career after making massive visibility and reach is to make money out of it. Since now you have learned how to start a blog, it is also essential to learn how to earn from a blog.

I am sharing the top 5 ways that will definitely make money from a blog.

1. Start Ads on your blog.
2. Allow sponsored guest posts on your blog.
3. Do affiliate marketing.
4. Sell ebooks.
5. Sell your own products or service.

Let us understand them one by one.

9.1. Start Ads on your blog

The first step that every blogger takes to monetize their blogging career is by adding ads on their blog. You can do this by applying to google AdSense to start running ads on your website.

Once you get approved to display ads, then you can earn money according to the clicks and impression that you get on your website ads.

9.2. Allow sponsored guest posts on your blog.

In the article above, I explained about guest posting/blogging. In this, if your blog becomes an authoritative blog with time having high domain authority then you can charge people for doing a guest post on your blog.

Google doesn’t allow paid links hence whenever you do such publishing, make sure you give sponsored links to such posts.

Even advertisers will approach you to run their ads on your platform for which you can charge them.

9.3. Do affiliate marketing.

This is one of the richest sources of revenue for any blogger. In affiliate marketing, you promote a product or service and get sales from your blog.

You need to get approved by the product owner to allow you to promote their product on your blog. Once you get approved, thereafter you get your unique URL to which, if you readers click and make a purchase then you get a commission.

9.4. Sell ebooks.

You can write ebooks and sell them on your blogging platform. You can use woocommerce if you are running your blog on WordPress.

This way you can write multiple informative and value-adding ebooks on your blog and sell them to make money from blogging.

9.5. Sell your own products or service.

You can offer your website visitors services around your blogging niche. For example, I had written this blog on how to start a blog in 2021. Now, if anyone wants a service of creating a blog for anyone in any niche, I can pitch myself as a service provider who can help you build your blog.

So you can offer your service and make money out of the work you do for someone.

So these were 5 practical ways through which you can crack massive revenue if done right.

That’s all about how to start a blog in 2021.

Final Thought.

Whenever you feel like you are ready to start a blog, you need to first sell introspect. If you are really looking forward to it or its just out of any ego or to gain something without any knowledge.

Blogging needs patience when you start a blog. It doesn’t grow overnight until an unless you already have a fan base. You need to put in a lot of effort to make this happen. Make sure you have all the necessary knowledge that I had explained enough.

I assure that whatever I had explained if you implement it in a directed way then Making money or business or anything out of your blog won’t be a challenge.

Frequently Asked Questions