How To Start A Blog In 2024 – Step-By-Step Beginner’s Guide

So you want to start a blog and are not sure where, to begin with? In this blogging guide, I have explained step-by-step how to start a blog successfully in 2024.

If you are not yet sure to start a blog, no worries! Let me give you some reasons you should start blogging now.

Blogging is a great way to spend your extra time, with a blog you can express your thought, knowledge, and experiences, you can help others with problems you’ve overcome, you can establish yourself as an expert in that field, and last but most important you can even make money from your blog. I hope these reasons are enough to get you started.

But if you are new to blogging (I was also a newbie when I started), It’s really confusing, as to where to start with. Thus it really helps to have someone to help you get the start with the right techniques and avoid mistakes (which I did when I started).

Someone once said that “It’s better to learn from others’ mistakes, rather than from your own“, It’s well said! Isn’t it? Here I have created a simple guide that I have learned from my experiences and mistakes to help you create a blog and make it successful.

It’s very easy to start a blog, it only takes just a few minutes. I will walk you through the whole process here on how to start a blog in the easiest way. It’s a bit longer guide and covers almost everything on how to start a blog, so I would suggest you, go through this guide thoroughly so that you won’t be stuck anywhere in between. Let’s get started!

Here’s How To Start A Blog

It’s a simple step-by-step guide to set up your blog in just 3 easy steps. Don’t believe me? Alright! Here are those three steps, which are all enough to start a blog from scratch.

With these “3 simple steps to start a blog” you can easily create your new blog in just a few minutes. (Here I would suggest you start creating your blog along with this guide). So, Are you ready to create your blog today? Alright, let’s get right into it.

Choose A Blogging Platform

Before you start with anything, you’ll need to choose a blogging platform to create your blog. There’s a lot to choose from, you can create a blog with many different blogging platforms, such as WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and many more.

Here I would suggest you, go with WordPress. WordPress is the most popular blogging platform today and is used on many top blogs all around the world.

WordPress powers almost 50% of websites and blogs on the internet. Also, WordPress is very easy and user-friendly, it’s one of the best blogging platforms for beginners who don’t know how to start a blog and are starting their blogging journey.

There are more reasons to choose WordPress:

• It’s Completely FREE: WordPress is an open source software and thus it’s completely free for everyone to use. It has also got many Free Themes and Useful Plugins.
• It’s Very Easy: WordPress is very user-friendly better we say very beginner friendly. It’s very easy to install and setup WordPress to create your website or blog.
• Customization: With WordPress, you can easily customize your blog with thousands of available themes and plugins. There are many free themes and plugins available, but if you need you can buy premium themes or plugins for your WordPress blog too.
• Community Support: In case you get stuck somewhere in WordPress, There’s great community support available 24/7/365 to help you get going.

While the other blogging platforms are also good, no one, in my opinion, has ever come close to matching the freedom and customization options that WordPress offers (Did I mention? This blog/website is also created using WordPress). So without a doubt, I will suggest you, go with WordPress, especially if you are a beginner.

Free Blogging Platform V/S Self Hosted Blogs

There are many free blogging platforms that allow you to create a blog on their sub-domains. The only good thing about these free blogging platforms is that you would not incur any cost. Whereas for self-hosted blogs, you need to buy a domain name and web hosting to start a blog (which anyway is not that expensive in today’s time).

Why you shouldn’t create a blog on a free blogging platform? With free blogging platforms, you will get your blog address as a sub-domain of the blogging platform (something like www.yourblog.blogspot.com), which does not look professional at all. Also, you will never find a successful blogger using a free blogging platform.

There are also some other disadvantages of using free blogging platforms.

• Lacks Control: You do not have complete control over your blog or blogs content on free blogging platforms. Also, free blogging platforms may delete your blog anytime for any reason if you violate any of their terms and conditions.
• Limited Customization Option: On free blogging platforms you will have a limited customization option, You can not install your custom themes or plugins.
• You May Not Advertise: Also on free blogging platforms you might not be able to advertise, which will be a big set back if you want to monetize your blog.
• Third Party Advertisements: Also free blogging platforms can put their own advertisement on your blog. Just think, you are not able to monetize your blog with advertisements whereas someone else is earning from your blog only.

Thus I would suggest you, go with a self-hosted WordPress blog. It’s very easy to set up your blog on your own hosting and, believe me, it’s not that expensive.

Register A Domain Name And Web Hosting

To start a blog (Self Hosted), You will basically need two things.

• Domain Name: Domain name will be the web address of your blog.Hosting: You need web hosting to host your blog, basically it’s a space in the web server where all files of your blog reside.

WordPress platform which we selected for our blog is completely free, But Domain Name and Web Hosting will cost you somewhere 3$ -10$ per month.

A Quick Guide To Choose Domain Name

• A Domain Name (www.domainname.com) of your blog should reflect the theme of your blog or the purpose you are creating your blog.
• Try to go with popular domain extension (.com, .org) or country or business specific domain extension (.in, .co.in, .biz, .club).
• Choose a domain which is short, catchy and easy to write and remember.

A Quick Guide To Choose Web Hosting

• Reliability: Before finalizing a web hosting company, check thoroughly how reliable they are, the easiest way to do this is check their social media pages and check what people are saying about their services. More positive comments, More reliable services.
• Site Uptime: All good web hosting company will give your blog a 99.9 % uptime. What does this mean? There will be likely less downtime for your blog.
• Load Speed: Load speed really matters for any blogging sites. As your blog grow, you will have many pages, images in your blog and more visitors as well.
• Support: Check if they provide 24X7 technical support if you get stuck somewhere.

I will suggest you spend some money and go with a reliable hosting company. I have used many web hosting and thus I will suggest you choose from our recommended best and affordable web hosting. They stand clear on all the above-mentioned grounds, they are reliable and offer better speed and performance.

Install WordPress and Setup Your Blog

Once you have purchased your domain name and web hosting, you are good to go ahead. If you have purchased domain and hosting from the same company, then you might not need any further setup. But if you have purchased the domain name and web hosting from a different company, you are required to change the NameServer in your Domain DNS, follow our guide on How To Connect Domain Name and Web Hosting.

Now it’s time to install WordPress.

All of our recommended web hostings provide 1-Click-WordPress-Installation, which makes this part easy when installing WordPress. Installing WordPress with 1-Click-Installation usually takes just a couple of minutes.

Steps To Install WordPress: Here are the simple steps you need to follow in order to install WordPress (The process will be almost similar in all good web hostings).

• Log in to your web hosting control panel.
• Look for the “WordPress” icon (Generally it’s found in Script Installer).
• Click the “WordPress Icon” and you will see a setup page.
• Choose the domain and enter the details and click on “Install Now”.

If in case your web host does not provide 1-Click-Installation (dealing with a bad web host), You may need to Install WordPress Manually.

Choosing & Installing WordPress Theme

The fun part starts now! Once you have successfully installed WordPress, you’ll see the WordPress default theme installed on your blog.

Now you can customize your blog

Just access your WordPress Login Page, “www.yoursite.com/wp-admin/” (replace “yoursite.com” with your domain name). Enter the login credentials (got at the time of installing WordPress). Once you are logged in, You will see a WordPress dashboard.

Installing WordPress Theme

Once you’re in your blog (WordPress) dashboard, Just look along the sidebar for “Appearance”, then click “Themes”, search for the theme you want to install (you can upload third-party themes as well, if you have purchased the theme from somewhere else) and then click on “Install Now” to install a theme, once installed you can activate the theme.

In the WordPress repository, you’ve got access to over 2000 free WordPress themes but all of those themes are not good, As I have been using WordPress for a while, I have selected some of the Best WordPress Themes For Bloggers.

Setting Up Permalinks

Now let’s get into the setting part. Here you will find many options but I will take you through the most important settings that you must set up before you start your first blog post.

With the permalink setting, you can actually set how the links of your blog should be displayed. Nobody likes the ugly links and even search engines too do not rank them well. With WordPress, you have different options to choose from.

• Go to “Settings” –> “Permalinks”

Here I would recommend you to choose the “Post Name” option. Your links will look something like – https://webrecourse.com/start-a-blog/

Managing Comments

Comments are an integral part of any blog. As your blog grows, you get lots of comments on your post, that’s good, but it also attracts spammers to post spam comments. If you don’t moderate them, soon your blog posts will be filled with SPAM comments.

WordPress lets you control when and how your comments should be displayed.

• Go to “Settings” –> “Discussion”

I would suggest, you check both the boxes in “Before a comment appears”. Also, you can activate Akismet, It’s a pre-installed plugin that helps protect you from SPAM comments and messages (you need to activate this plugin).

Creating A New Page

• Look along the sidebar in the WordPress Dashboard for “Pages” -> “Add New”.
• You’ll find a WordPress Editor, add text, images and other options to build the page you want, then click on “Publish” when you’re done.

Quick Difference Between Pages & Posts: In general posts are time-bound whereas pages are permanent. For Example Your “Contact Us” page, which will remain the same and will be important anytime. Whereas posts sometimes get obsolete (If you don’t update the posts) as new things come and you publish a new post on the topic.

Creating A New Post

• Look along the sidebar in the WordPress Dashboard for “Posts” -> “Add New”.
• Again You’ll find a WordPress Editor, you can write your post and then click on “Publish” when you’re done (you can add category and tags for posts too).

Understanding WordPress Block Editor (Gutenberg)

WordPress Block Editor is very easy to use, once you click on “Add New Page” or “Add New Post”, then you see the WordPress Block Editor, you can “Add Title” to your page or post, and then in the editor type “/” or press “+” button to add a block.

All of those blocks are self-explanatory, you can choose a paragraph block to add a paragraph, a heading block to add a heading, an image block to add an image, button block to add a button. You can select any text that you want to style bold or if you want to add a link.

Adding Widgets to Sidebar

• Go to “Appearance -> Widgets” in the WordPress Dashboard.
• From here, you can use use the same WordPress Block Editor to create the widgets.

Installing Plugins To Extend WordPress Functionalities

WordPress “Plugins” are basically extensions that are used to extend WordPress functionalities. WordPress plugin directory has over 25,000 different FREE plugins, You can easily get the one as per your requirement!

Install a new Plugin

• To start installing plugins, go to “Plugins -> Add New” and simply search for a plugin.
• Once you find a plugin you want, just click “Install” and then “Activate”.
• Then you can go to the plugin-specific setting page to set up that plugin

Remember: Every plugin adds weight to your website and thus it slows down your website, so use the plugins sensible. Do not overuse them!

Which Plugin To Install? Here I have compiled the list of recommended best plugins for a WordPress Blog, This list will help you get started with the WordPress Plugins.

Congratulations! You Have Created Your First Blog!

I am sure, by now you know how to start a blog, and if you have followed up this guide properly, you should have set up your first blog. Great! In case you still have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask me, I can also help you with Free Blog Setup.

Starting a blog is not that difficult but many people just keep planning and never actually take any action. In case you are thinking to start your blogging journey, it’s the best time now to start your blog and also, now you know how to start a blog. In order to make your blog successful, do subscribe and follow the tips on our blog.

Monetizing Your Blog

So after the all hard work and learning how to start a blog, you have successfully created your blog. Now it’s time to publish quality content on your blog and promote your blog posts, you need to Write SEO-Friendly Content on your blog and do SEO to get organic traffic, you can also promote your blog on social media to get more traffic.

Once you start getting good traffic on your blog, you can monetize your blog to make money from your blog. Knowing how to start a blog is the first step but you need to put hard work into creating good quality content for your blog and promoting your blog, then there are several ways you can earn from your blog.

FAQs About How To Start A Blog and Blogging

Do you still have some unanswered questions about blogging?  Below are some of the most common and frequently asked questions I get about starting a new blog. If you also have any questions on how to start a blog or about blogging in general, you can leave your question in the comments below, I will try to answer your question ASAP.

Conclusion: How To Start A Blog?

As we have come to the end of this guide, now you know how to start a blog. You can easily start your blog following this step-by-step blogging guide but do note that success in blogging takes hard work, time, dedication, and lots of patience.

You can not expect the traffic on your blog and/or money from your blog from day one of starting your first blog, it takes around 6-12 months time to see the expected result of your hard work. So, all the best for your blogging journey.

If you find this guide “How To Start A Blog” useful, please share this with your friends too. Believe me, this helps me a lot and keeps me motivated to keep all the information on this blog updated and bring you new stuff like this.