Ultimate Guide To How to Start a Blog

The blogging field has a big increase in the last few years. Each one of us has experience with some situations in life in all fields and he needs to record them on the internet to make it useful for other people and make it as marketing for himself.

Owning a website for your business became one of the essential things that must attract your attention. Especially after the spreading of social networks and the big progress in the technology. The website will help you in marketing, branding,  sharing your experience, and increasing your customers. So with the help of this article, you can set up your website using WordPress to raise your work easily and efficiently.

There are many platforms for blogging as content management systems” CMS”. The most popular platforms for blogging are WordPress, Blogger, Joomla, and Drupal. But this article is special for WordPress blog.

Why WordPress?

• Huge market share: WordPress supports 74.6 million websites around the world.
• It’s free: WordPress was created to be an open-source project.
• Security and reliability: WordPress is secure and fully reliable. The team of WordPress developers is always keening to update the CMS to ensure the security of the system. NASA is using WordPress for its systems so you can too.
• Scalability: WordPress can hold any size of the content. It’s bigger than your imaginations. You can check the size of the CNN website as it’s using WordPress.
• easy to use: Even if you have no technical experience in web development you can use WordPress to customize your website.
• huge community: if you faced any issue during your work on WordPress, you will find a big help to go over it.
• Expand functionality: you can use “themes” and “plugins” to expand the functions of your website easily and in a short time without a big effort in development.
• WordPress is free: it’s open-source so you can start using it without affording any money then you can pay for more development or special customization.
• Easy customization with SEO: it has a very good SEO optimization so you can make your blog or website suitable for SEO without especial effort or learning about it.
• Large websites like Mashable, CNN, Techcrunch, and a lot of others are using WordPress to manage their website content.

After all previous reasons, you can launch your blog with a little time and money and start to rock the internet.

How to start your own WordPress Site?

there are many simple steps that can give you the ability to build your own blog without a lot of effort and in a short time.

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Step 1: Choose a suitable hosting

you can choose between free hosting or to fork a few dollars to buy one cheap host. But we recommend the paid hosting because of the disadvantages of free hosting as follows.

The disadvantage of free hosting

• URL problem: Free hosting afford to you long URL with a bad and unprofessional name.
• Ownership problem: The free hosting is on someone’s server which you don’t pay for it so your content can’t be all yours.
• SEO problem: Free hosting are mostly invisible on search and SEO is ignoring it.
• you can’t customize your blog as you want or according to your business.
• The space on free hosting is limited so you can’t expand as you want.

If you need to achieve success for your blog and get the purpose of it, you need to be careful about your choices and free hosting can’t upscale for your ambition.

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Step 2: Installing WordPress

Before using of paying on your host, you need to know if WordPress can be installed easily or automatically without the need of your interference. Each hosting has few steps to install WordPress on it but don’t worry because it can be by clicking the install button and everything will be set.

1.Download WordPress files from the wordpress.org.

2. You have to install a tool named “FileZilla” or other alternatives to enable you to upload your website on the host and control it.

3. Type your domain on the web browser and use the username and password to go through the control panel of your website host.

4. Open your “FileZilla” and press “ctrl+s” on your keyboard. Then write your domain, username, and password in their fields. Then press connect.

5. The program will connect to your core of the website and get all folders on it in the part of the filename.

6. Inside the folder “public_html” right-click from the mouse in the part of “filename” and create a new file to setup “WordPress”.

7. Open the folder that you create in the previous step. Then upload the compressed file of WordPress on it. Don’t forget the compressed or Zipped file to make the process quicker.

8. Now, you need to enter your website and search for the file that you created. So you will find the compressed file of WordPress.

9. Besides the WordPress file, you will find the order extract so you can press it.

10. Return to the website on “FileZilla” and refresh it to activate the changes. You will find all the files extracted in the file.

11.Press “ctrl+a” to select all files and move them to the folder “..” at the beginning of the current folder.

12. Open the path in your browser like “zytheme.com/wordpress”. And select the language that you want for your blog. And then start your installation.

13. Go to the part of the database in your host then create a new database with a specific name. And enter its name in the fields like below.

14. You have to complete the configuration of WordPress on the host. So you need to copy the text that appeared like in the image below and go to “FileZilla” to create a new PHP file “wp-config” and paste the text in it then save and press yes in the popped message to upload changes.

15. Go back to the browser to press “Run installation”.

16. Enter your website name like “Zytheme”.

17. Also, you will need to input the admin user and its password and don’t forget about it. Because you will use them to go through WordPress in the beginning.

18.Finally, you can log in to your blog on the URL like “http://example.com/wp-admin” using the previous username and password.

After the previous installation and inputs, now you have it. You have your blog on your website using WordPress.

3.More about WordPress dashboard

1.WordPress General setting

1.New user default rule: must be subscriber until farther notice. This menu enables you to determine the access for the users of your website.

2.Timezone: You need to determine the timezone for your website to ensure the correct time on the website.

3.Time format and date format: which you can customize the formatting of them as you are usually use.

4.Also, You can determine the start of your week to make everything more arranged.

2.Writing Setting

1.You can specify the default category which all posts can be under after writing any post. It can be useful but if you have more than one category to write, it’s preferred to not set it.

2.Post  format: you can choose between a lot of formats which enables you to customize your posts to be suitable better for the purpose of the website. And you can make it as “standard” if your write articles.

3.Post via email: It will be removed for newer versions of WordPress and instead, you can use some other plugins.

3.Reading setting

1.Your homepage display: you can determine the front page for your website.

2.Also, you can determine your posts number in the front page.

3.Feed posts and you can control their number too.

4.You can make your website out of the view of the users on internet by activating the feature of “search engine visibility”. If you want to make money from your website, you can’t activate the square beside it.

4.discussion setting

1.Default article setting: you can have notifications about using your links in other websites and modification on it too. Also you can allow commenting on your posts or close it. You can edit these settings inside the post too.

2.Other comments setting:

• Force the person who comment to enter the mail and name or not.
• Making anyone who want to comment is the one who is login on the website.
• Close the comments on the older articles for specific duration.
• Specify the number of levels for reply  on comments.
• Dividing the comments for pages after specific number.

3.Email me whenever: control the mails notification for comments when adding new comment or approving comments.

4.Comment moderation:  to catch the spam and advertising links. You can block any comment which has more than specific number of links.

5.Blacklist: you can determine group of words which ban the comment and stop it from appearing.

6.Avatar: you can block any pictures which shouldn’t appear on the website and comments.

7.Default avatar: If the person who will comment has no avatar, you can make one default for him.

5.Media setting

1.You can determine the dimensions of your images on your website with different sizes.

2.WordPress organizes your images and media according to the date when it uploaded on the website.

6.Permalink

You can change the format of your link according to what you want. Please, don’t work on this part if you are not have a good experience about indexing and SEO.

7.Privacy

You can edit the privacy which declare the responsibility of your website.

You can edit the privacy in the same page or creating new page to appear in a link under the login information.

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Step 3: Select a Theme

you can choose from a big list of themes on the internet free or paid.

Installing themes on WordPress

1.You can hover over appearance in the right bar in the dashboard so you can press themes button in the menu.

2.Press “add new” button.

3.A new page will appear with a big collection of free themes that you can choose from.

4.Or if you have other paid theme, you can upload the theme in zip file using upload button.

Once you install your theme via either method, make sure to click the Activate button to make it live on your website.

Customizing themes

once you activated your theme, you can customize it as you need.

1.If you hover over appearance button you can choose “customize” from the menu.

2. Like in the image below, you can choose from the menu which item you want to modify according to your website.

you can customize your site’s navigation using the “menu”. And add new functions from “widgets”. In the end, don’t forget to press on the button “publish” to update the changes on the website.

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Step 4: Starting a blogging

1. Hover over the “posts” button and press on the “Add New” button in the extracted menu like in the image below.

2. After loading, You can have the dashboard for writing a new blog with all access buttons you will need title, text, and formatting.

3. you can add an image using the “add Media” button like in the image below.

4. In the dashboard of media, you will find all the images that you will add on your all blog.

5. Also, you can upload videos, audios, and documents beside images.

10.Adding more users

you can’t work alone on great blog content for your business so you need to add more users to blog with you. you can add more users on WordPress dashboard in simple few steps.

1.Hover on “Users” and click “Add New” from the menu.

2. The loaded page will have man empty fields to input group of data for the new user.

3. Once you filled the required fields, the user can log in the dashboard using the mail and password that you wrote before.

4.the dashboard for the user after logging in.

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Step 5: Install Plugins

Adding plugins on WordPress is so simple. Once you installed it, you can use it immediately.

1. From WordPress dashboard, you will find plugin button so you can hover over it and press the button “Add New”.

2. A list of so many plugins will appear, so you can choose what you want and just press the button “Install Now”.

3. You can activate the plugin after it had been installed.

you have to remember that you have a limited memory storage on your host so don’t waste it on adding and installing plugins. you will need this storage for your blog so use it wisely.

Some important plugins

• Contact form Plugin: Contact form 7 and GravityForms.
• Caching plugin: W3 Total cache.
• SEO plugin: Yoast SEO
• Kiwi social sharing WordPress plugin.
• Jetpack plugin.
• Back up plugins.
• Analytics plugins.

We thought that you will need the previous plugins as essential ones. You can use one instead of the previous but be sure that you are in the need of them.

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Step 6: How to Make Money

The most important part about blogs and websites.

1.Marketing

You can get commissions by referring to products or services from some companies as advertising for them and get a commission for that sale.

2.Advertising

you can make especial advertisements to other companies or use Google Adsense. While Google Adsense isn’t the best choice but you can use it as a start until you can develop your work in advertising.

3.Offering a service

Now, blogging can be a job where a lot of people can work as a blog writer for other people and get money for this service.

There are many more things in the Blogging field more than that we cover in this article. Hopefully, we could help you to start and go on.