Starting a blog quickly these days is as easy as ordering food from Grubhub.
It's easy and fast. The only thing you need to put some effort in is to figure out the topical focus of your blog.
Here is a checklist to follow to get your blog started right away on the WordPress platform.
Niche Research
Building a website is easy, but the hardest part is to select your niche topic correctly. A good niche topic is:
- Something you are interested in and good at
- A niche is a specific focus of something inside a genre, but not the entire genre (For example, sports car stereo is a niche, sports car is huge car market)
- There is a market demand for it
- There is tons of search volume, but not too competitive
- It has products and services to generate revenue
- A topic that has many different angles
If you already have a topic in mind, you can move on to the next step.
If you have not decided on a topic yet, please use this trigger word list to find a niche. This is a very powerful process to locate a niche that may never come across your mind, including odd niches that lead to big money making opportunities.
Buy A Domain
If you're a seasoned SEO professional, we highly recommending buying a expired domain to accelerate the ranking process, but they usually cost a lot more.
For beginners, we recommend buying a domain that is either brandable or exact keyword domain. These are as cheap as $9 - 12 / year
Brandable domain - It means you can use a fancy name as the web domain. These domain names can distinguish your blogs from the competition. if it becomes successful 5 - 10 years down the road, the name you pick now matters a lot.
These domain are something like: Grammarly.com, Amazon.com, spotify.com, yelp.com, etsy.com...etc
Exact keyword match domain - These domain names are hyper focused on the niche topic. These domains are very identifiable for the visitors as well as the search engine to figure our what the website is all about.
Find your domain using the search bar below:
Buy Website Hosting
Once the domain name is purchased. You need a website hosting that is fast.
We highly recommend the following options as they are the fastest & best customer service:
Fast hosting definitely boost your SEO performance, which reduces page load time significantly. Search engines analyze page load time as one of many critical ranking signals.
Slow page speed turns the visitor off, and they bounce off the page. Every time a user bounce, it sends poor user experience signals to the search engine algorithms.
Install WordPress
Once the website hosting is done. Install WordPress on your hosting plan for free. Most website hosting offers one-click install.
The installation prompt will also allow you to set a user name and password to access the WordPress dashboard.
Once the WordPress is installed under your domain directory, please wait 1-2 hrs for the domain propagation to complete. This is the process of updating name servers around the world following any changes to your DNS records. Sometimes it can take up to 48 hours to complete.
Once your domain is live, the site will usually greet you with a Hello World home page as its default theme. Now it's time to login to the WordPress dashboard.
For default, it's always domain.com/wp-admin
Install Theme
For a new website, fancy theme shouldn't be your main focus. Any free theme that isn't slow or ugly can get you started right away.
We recommend the Astra theme to download.
You can always update the theme in the future.
Publish Content
Now you can start writing articles under post or page.
You can write them yourself, or you can outsource the article writing. There are many different tools you can use to create content fast such as Jasper AI or Grammarly to fix spellings in real time.