HOW TO OPEN A BLOG: THE COMPLETE GUIDE FOR THOSE STARTING FROM SCRATCH

Creating a successful blog allows you to make your business known, to express yourself and, if you are good, even to make money. How you do it? We explain it to you in this step by step guide. From the choice of the platform to that of hosting, here's how to open a blog in 2021! Surely starting a personal project is among the things that give the most satisfaction ... Want to know what the others are? Find out in the video below!

What a blog is and why you should open it

A blog is nothing more than a website with contents (articles and photos) that are updated regularly. A blog can have two objectives: to earn money, monetize with advertising revenue and online traffic, or simply be a tool. of personal expression without any earnings ambition. The blog is also a very useful tool if you have an e-commerce where you sell your products because it tells something about you and helps your customers find you on Google. Many wonder if in 2021, with the advent of social networks, it still makes sense to open a blog: well, with its 70 million new articles published every month and its 77 million new comments, Wordpress, the most popular platform for bloggers, proves to be still in good health!

Before starting a blog, however, it is important to reflect on what we are going to write and what will be the niche in which we will position ourselves. Choosing the topic and theme of our articles (or posts, as they are called in jargon) is essential to offer readers a clear idea of who we are and what we want to communicate. Many marketing experts recommend opting for a topic that is also our passion, so it will be much easier to write the right content and always find new ideas: in short, it is about monetizing your passions!

Writing new articles every day is the hardest part when starting a blog, and it is also the reason why more than 60% of them are abandoned. To ensure that it constitutes a source of income, many say that it is necessary to treat the site just as if it were a "company: that is, to trace clear business objectives and pursue them consistently. However, if the economic aspect does not interest you. and you want the site to be just a personal space where you can express your thoughts, there is no need to publish new articles every day.

The steps to take when you want to start a blog are not complicated and, after reading this guide, you too will be able to choose a platform to create your site, decide on an impactful domain name and understand what it is. web host You will then learn where to find a suitable theme to create the blog and learn about the plugins needed to add useful features.

Choose the platform that will host your blog

To become a successful blogger, the first thing to do is to choose the platform that will host your site. This is technically called CMS, and although some are paid, many options are available to users for free. Wordpress is the best known CMS, in fact more than 26% of the sites are made with it (even that of the New York Times!). Wordpress offers various customization features, both from an aesthetic point of view (such as the choice of the theme, colors, font, ...) and from the structural point of view. Also, thanks to the thousands of plugins offered to bloggers, with Wordpress you can do almost anything!

Wordpress is available in two versions, one called Wordpress.org and one Wordpress.com. They differ because while the first provides for the separate purchase of a hosting space and the domain, the second, on the other hand, limits itself to hosting the blog, not providing, however, all the customizations necessary for successful blogging. of a few hundred euros a year, Wordpress.org allows you to fully exploit the potential of the CMS, in the face of a little more onerous effort to download it and understand how to install it.

The other possibilities to open your blog are to rely on the Tumblr platform (the so-called social blogs), which are currently no longer in vogue, or the one offered by Blogger. Blogger is a historical platform owned by Google which, although it was very widespread a few years ago, today no longer allows for a very high degree of customization. The advantages of creating a blog with Blogspot, however, are economic: Google, in fact, gives this service for free and has also made it very easy to understand.

How to choose the domain for your blog

Once you have identified the topic of our blog and chosen the most suitable platform, you can proceed to register the domain. The domain, or domain name, is practically the address of our website on the Internet and its choice is very important. It should be designed with care because it is the name with which users will look for us on the search bar and helps to give a very precise image of our web space. Furthermore, once you have decided it is strongly not recommended to change it because this decision can confuse regular visitors. and, above all, reduce the visibility of your blog on search engines (ie Google).

Generally it is advisable to use a name linked to our brand as a domain that is easy to write and remember. Once chosen, you need to register it so that no other user can use it in the future. There are two ways to do this: the first is to use a domain registrar (such as www.register.it), or delegate the operation to your web host and let him take care of it.

How to choose web hosting

The web host is a fundamental step because it allows you to install the CMS (Wordpress or others) and, therefore, to make the blog publicly available online. The quality of the web hosting is an equally important aspect as it will determine the frequency with which the blog is online and, above all, the speed with which it loads. The provider, then, is a real point of reference, so in case of problems it is better to choose one that has good customer service! you are planning a big investment, you can evaluate the idea of choosing a host just for you instead of the shared ones.

Choose your blog theme

Once you have decided on the domain name and hosting and created the blog (just follow the instructions on the provider's website), you can choose the theme. This is the funniest part because we can indulge ourselves in changing the theme, that is the general aspect , of the site. We can modify the structure, the colors, the fonts, ... Everything that is the external aspect of our new blog. There are many portals (Theme Forest is the most famous), where you can see the various options. Beware because there are thousands!
Free themes are the simplest ones, but there are also many paid products or so-called freemiums, that is, largely free themes with only some features to be paid for separately.

What are plugins

If you use Wordpress for your blog, you will notice that there are additional features (some paid, some free) that you can install to make your site more complete. When you create a blog for the first time with WordPress, in fact, you have the possibility to write only posts and pages, without intervening with forms to perform specific actions. Just to make a few examples, by installing plugins on your website, instead you can:

Insert contact forms
Check your SEO settings
Add social network buttons
To backup

There are more than 50,000 free plugins for Wordpress, plus all paid or freemium ones: practically with plugins you can do anything!

Create your blog pages

Once you have chosen the theme and installed the necessary plugins, you can proceed to create the main pages of your blog. Before doing so, however, it is better to think carefully about the structure we want to give to the site and the contents we will publish. This step, in fact, greatly affects the positioning on Google and is not to be taken lightly. The most important page of the blog is certainly the Home, which is the first page of the site and the one where users usually land.

The About page is also very important because it represents our business card and makes it clear to readers who we are and what they will find on our site; finally, the Contact page should not be overlooked: anyone who wants to communicate with us can do so from here!

How to write valuable content for your readers

To be successful as a blogger, a fundamental aspect is that of writing. The more valuable your content is, the more users will be interested in reading it and spending time on your page. In fact, blogs are based on internet traffic, that is to say on the visits they receive from their readers. To have good traffic, however, it is important that the site appears in the top positions of the search engine (or Google), otherwise it will be very difficult for someone to find us and be interested in us.

The best way to attract traffic to our site is to take advantage of SEO techniques. This is a series of operations that aim to optimize our site to make it perfect in the eyes of Google; the goal is to bring us traffic in line with our target.
The most important aspect, however, always remains that of publishing good quality content that may interest our readers. Here are some tips to improve your blog articles: