I have been a full-time blogger for 4 years now and starting my blog has completely changed my life.
Blogging allows me to work from home and choose when and how long I will work. I can also take long holidays and work from anywhere in the world with my laptop.
Looking back, starting my blog was definitely one of the best choices made when it comes to my career.
Bluehost is recommended by many bloggers as well by WordPress itself.
Here are few steps that will take you no longer than 20 minutes, so that you can begin with your blogging journey on Bluehost.
Bluehost is one of the major internet web hosting providers in 2021 and you may begin your very own blog with them for as low as $3.95 a month.
I particularly suggest signing up for the 12-month web website hosting plan through Bluehost. It’s lower-priced and you will save your money by signing up for as a minimum 12 months. Bluehost is so easy to use which is great for someone like me totally none tech person. Yes, ANYONE can create a WordPress blog without problems with just following few easy steps.
Table of Contents
1. Choose Your Domain Name
You can click here to buy a domain name and create a blog, then continue to follow the easy steps below.
The very first thing you will need to do when starting a WordPress blog on Bluehost is to decide what your domain name will be. The name of your business. This the most important thing. You have to be serious about it. Your domain name should be short 1-3 maximum words long, easy to remember and spell.
You have to do brainstorming by yourself but here are domain name search tools you can use that can help you out.
You can get a domain directly through Bluehost and make the whole process easier. If you do this, you can get a FREE domain for the first year as long as you buy 12 months plan of Bluehost web hosting. In this way your domain name and hosting is connected immediately.
If you however decide to purchase your domain somewhere else, I highly suggest Namescheap or GoDaddy. I must recognize that I don’t like GoDaddy as company as they always have a sneaky way to add things on your card without you purchasing it. Be careful with free trials and unchecked boxes. However when it comes to domain names they are one of the oldest registers so it is safe, just take care of upsells and make sure to uncheck unnecessary boxes before making a purchase, You won’t make any mistakes by choosing whatever you prefer. Namescheap is a great choice and more affordable. On Bluehost with 12 month of hosting plan you get a free domain. Just start, make that step!
2. Buy Hosting Server
Web hosting is the space that you buy on a web server to store your website files. It is from the major importance to have a trusted website hosting provider.
Why Bluehost?
Since you are reading this post, I am pretty sure you already heard about Bluehost however here is what makes it awesome to choose it as your hosting provider.
Bluehost makes it very smooth and easy to create a WordPress blog.
- Bluehost internet web website hosting gives 24-hour technical help through chat or free phone call.
- You get a FREE domain name.
- 2 million use it because of the exceptional features and trust. Bluehost powers over 2 million websites all around the world. Recommended by many bloggers and WordPress itself.
- One-click on WordPress installer. And that’s precisely what it sounds like. You press a button and then you definitely have a WordPress website much like mine set up. WordPress installation through Bluehost is FREE and easy.
- You’ll be self-hosted.This from the great importance if you want to create a business out of it and monetize with ad networks and affiliate so you can start earning.This means you will have full control over your website.
- CDN. This is important for the speed of the website and user experience.
- SSL certificate. You can use this to feature an additional layer of safety on your website (that is some thing Google and lots of others are becoming very clear about).
- 30 day cash return assured. If you’re no longer happy with their service, which I am sure it won’t happen, then you definitely’ll get a refund. •
- Free email for your business
- Bandwidth is unmetered – this indicates you don’t have to fear or worry you’re your website will crash if it suddenly receives a ton of traffic. Whether you get five humans or 10,000 humans visiting, you’ll be charged the equal amount. That’s huge!
- Extensive library for learning
When you are ready to star creating your blog, follow the steps below to buy hosting for your blog.
- Go to Bluehost and click the “Get Started Now” button.
- Click on the package you are interested in. The longer the period, the more discount you get.
- Enter your domain name you registered with earlier, or sign up for a new domain name here.
- Enter your personal and payment information.
- Next you will be asked to enter a password. Make sure to remember it as this information is very important.
Click here to start a proces.
3. Connect your domain and your hosting
Note: Skip this section if you purchased domain name from Bluehost.
If you buy your domain through Go Daddy, then you will need to connect your domain to your hosting account. Go Daddy has explained process for setting nameservers for your domain names.
How to modify your DNS Nameservers when you are using Go Daddy for your domain and Bluehost for your hosting:
- Log into the GoDaddy.com Account Manager.
- Select Manage Domains from the Domain Names drop-down menu or the Manage Your Account
- Select the domain name you wish to modify using the checkboxes and then click Set Name Servers.
- Enter your updated name server information in the spaces provided under the blue Name Servers heading on the right side of your page and click Save Changes at the bottom. Your entries should look like this: bluehost.com; ns2.bluehost.com.
How to modify your DNS Nameservers when you are using Namecheap for your domain and Bluehost for your hosting:
- Sign into your Namecheap account.
- Select Domain List from the left sidebar and click the Manage button next to your domain:
- Find the Nameservers section and select your preferred option from the drop-down menu. Click on the green checkmark to save the changes.
4. Install WordPress on Bluehost
Now it is time you were waiting for, excited? I know you are. This step is not hard at all, actually it is really simple. Bluehost made easy to create a WordPress blog and it is free. Bluehost guides you through the whole process of starting a blog.
- Click the website option from the sub-menu
- From the WordPress section, click the install now button
- Now the Bluehost will ask you to pick a theme. You can just pick a random one. You can change it later so you can just skip this step.
- Click on “Start Building”
- On the next screen, you can choose “Business” or “Personal” – it’s up to you. Or, you can click the “I don’t need help.”
Congratulations! You have WordPress installed and you are ready now to customize according to your wishes.
5.Choose A Theme
It is time to set up your theme now and choose the look of your website. The most important thing you should consider when choosing your theme is loading time (speed) and mobile responsive design. These are among other things google ranking factors.
You can choose some of the free themes available in WordPress. There are many options to choose from. Pick the one you like. To find free themes, you have to be logged in to your WordPress website panel and in the left column click Appearance and then Add New.
Take some time to search and find the one you really like, the one that will fit you, your personality or your business and brand. And don’t worry to much about having to pick the perfect one, you can always go back and pick another one with just a few clicks.
There are also many premium themes for WordPress available that cost little bit of money. They offer professional support and many advanced features. These themes are easily customized with more options. I am using Premium Theme from ASTRA as well Elementor Pro for page building (drag and drop builder makes it really easy to create beautiful looking site).
As I said the most important thing to consider when choosing your theme is speed and to be mobile responsive. The fastest themes on a market and the ones I love the most are.
- ASTRA
- Genesis by Studiopress
- GeneratePress
- You can also purchase themes from:
- ThemeIsle WordPress Themes
- Themeforest
6. Install Plugins
Some plugins are necessary but there are many that are not. Please note that plugins can lower your sites speed and more plugins you use slower your site will load.
Here are essential WordPress plugins I use for my websites:
Akismet Anti-Spam. Used by millions, Akismet is quite possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from spam. It keeps your site protected even while you sleep.
Antispam Bee. Antispam plugin with a sophisticated toolset for effective day to day comment and trackback spam-fighting. Built with data protection and privacy in mind.
Broken Link Checker. Checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.
Elementor. The Elementor Website Builder has it all: drag and drop page builder, pixel perfect design, mobile responsive editing, and more. Get started now!
Google XML Sitemaps. This plugin improves SEO using sitemaps for best indexation by search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and others.
Insert Headers and Footers. Allows you to insert code or text in the header or footer of your WordPress blog
LiteSpeed Cache. High-performance page caching and site optimization from LiteSpeed
Meks Easy Social Share. Easily display social share buttons for your posts, pages and custom post types. Supports Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest, Email, Google+, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, WhatsApp and vKontakte.
Meks Smart Author Widget. Easily display your author/user profile info inside WordPress widget. Smart feature of this plugin is user/author “auto detection” which means that it can optionally show author of current post on single post templates or on specific author archive.
Meks Smart Social Widget. Easily display more than 100 social icons inside WordPress widget. Choose from different icon shapes and sizes and quickly connect your website with your social profiles. Aim, Apple, Behance, Blogger, Cargo,
Prettylinks. Shrink, track and share any URL using your website and brand! Transform your affiliate links that look like this aa.67.taa to yourdomain.com/product
WP User Avatar. Use any image from your WordPress Media Library as a custom user avatar. Add your own Default Avatar.
Easy custom sidebars. Replace any sidebar/widget area in any WordPress theme (no coding required).
Yoast Seo is widely used as well. However I am not using it. As google suggested posts should be optimized for user search intent not robots. I allow my meta description to be written by Google itself. Guess Google knows the best. Traffic increases naturally and most of my traffic comes from Google.
7. create High Quality Content
Here are some tips that can help you write your content:
1. Target Low Volume Keywords
as knew website search for low volume keywords that have less than 200 searches per month even 50 or 10 can be worth targeting. Why you should go for low volume keywords? Simply because as a knew website you will start ranking on Google and get that authority ( note* to start getting traffic from google it will take 8-12 month) but it will pay of since your website will get organic traffic.
How to find low volume keywords?
Keyword Surfer extension for chrome is free. Other paid tools for keyword research that I used are Ubersuggest and Semrush (if you have a bigger budget it is worth investing in Semrush as beside keyword search has many great seo tools and competition analysis, backlinks analysis etc).
2. Write 1500 – 2500 words long content
This is the blog post length that is proved by many case studies that gets the most Google traffic.
3. Make sure you had written at least 30 blog post to publish
It takes time to start building authority, no search engine will take you seriously if you have only few posts written. If you want start ranking faster, than this is the number I would always suggest you to start with.
CONCLUSION
Hope you found this article helpful. You can download for free and print my online business checklist below that can help you track your progress. Good luck in building your website and enjoy the journey!