What are the basic steps to start a blog?

Blogs are websites that lay focus on the written content and blogging is an amazing way to share your ideas, interests, and knowledge with other people.

Blogs can also help promote your business through written content.

The biggest question, however, is, How to start a blog?

For this, you need to choose a niche and the type of blog you want to develop. Choosing the theme and colors of your website may also seem like a tedious task, but with little help from professionals, you can successfully start a blog on the topic and idea of your choice.

Bloggers happen to show their personal perspective about things, which helps them connect directly with the readers.

There are comments section in blogs that can help you interact with the readers in a great manner. This direct connection with the reader is highly beneficial when starting a blog as you get to share ideas with other people and helps you build trust with the readers.

Let us get going and understand the basic steps:

• Make your ideas perfect: In my opinion, while starting a blog, you must be clear about why you are starting the blog, like brand awareness, as a job, as a hobby or as a way of earning money online. This is an important step to follow as you must know your purpose in starting the blog. The next step is to choose the type of blog as per your requirement from these three types of blogs:
• personal brand or personal blog: This type of blog is great for those who wish to build their brand online or have taken up blogging as a hobby.
• Corporate: This type of blog helps in promoting business
• Affiliate Marketing Blog: This type of blog helps in the promotion of products and services to the readers.

Have you made the decision, so here is the next step: Choose a niche for your blog

 to lay a clear focus on things. You can also choose multiple niches, but as per my opinion, multiple niches will not provide you with great SEO. Search engines determine the relevancy of the blog through the frequency of keywords, but multiple niches make the readers confused as they require only relevant blogs. Multiple niches will not attract the traffic but will drive it away from your blog. If the readers are looking for travel content then a blog with more topics will leave them confused.

While picking up the niche you need to make sure that the topic has required relevance and that you will not run out of content after some time. For this, you need to perform research about what your readers wish to read about. A keyword checker can help you find out what other people are searching for.

Keywords marked in yellow are the best finds and avoid using the red marked keywords as they are hard to find. Green marked keywords are very easy to find, so they are not much preferred. The research on this part must be done properly so that your ideas are perfect and come to life on your blog.

All you have to do is think about what you wish to write about and start.

Think about what your forte is and everything will come naturally to you. Write innovative blogs with complete confidence and more ideas will rush in to take over. I can suggest several blog ideas to you, so comment underneath for help.

Creating the website:

Your website is the most important part of writing the blog and there are four steps for creating a website:

• Choose a web hosting provider (Hostgator, Bluehost)
• Choose the domain name (Godaddy)
• Choose platforms for website
• Set up themes and plugins to get the power of writing, editing, and publishing content

The first step is to find a web hosting provider that suits your requirements and if you have already chosen your host, then choose a domain name for your blog. While choosing a web hosting company, look for the best qualities like daily backups, reliability, and 24/7 customer support. The main features that are important to be a successful blogger are:

• High performance: A website with slow loading speed will be no good if you want more visitors on your website. The audience wants the website to load within two seconds or they leave the web page immediately. It is better to opt for a host that has the servers nearby so that the website loads quickly and you get more visitors.
• Better disk space: While initiating the website, I suggest that you buy a plan that provides you with a 10GB disk space. During the initial stage, you might not need it, but later on, when you will upload plugins, articles, and pictures, you will need more space.
• More uptime: Your website performance needs to be great and for this your software needs to be well-written. Many times errors arise on websites if your website runs on old platforms. Upgrade your software to the latest version for better uptime.
• 24/7 Customer Support: Choose a web hosting provider that gives you 24/7 assistance if you require support for your website.

There are numerous web hosting providers like GoDaddy, Hostgator, Hostinger, etc. that provide you with all the above-stated features. It is always better to buy hosting plans with a longer time period to save loads of money and get some extra features like free SSL and free domain registration. Many web hosting providers offer a 30-days money-back guarantees, in case you are unsatisfied with the services.

The next step is to choose a domain name that enhances the identity of your blog. For this, you can make use of a domain checker.

 to check the available domain names, along with their annual prices. There are websites like a name generator and Nameboy that can help you receive inspiration for the website name. Many web hosting companies offer free domain name registration for the first year if you invest in a long term plan. Look out for such companies in order to save money on domain name registration.

The next step is to install the CMS or content management system. This can be availed through a trustworthy web hosting company as you will need a trustworthy CMS like Drupal, Joomla or WordPress. The last step to create a blog is to set up the theme and plugins. There are many blogging platforms that offer free themes and plugins to choose from. You can choose one as per your requirements and niche.

I hope you can now easily follow these basic steps and start your blog right away.

Happy Blogging Peers! :)