Welcome to the beginner’s guide to starting a blog. Today you will learn how easy it is to create a blog on your own. Blogging has allowed me to both share ideas and help many people change their lives for the better and you can easily do the same. Plus, you can start a money-making blog for next to no money!
So do you want to start a blog? If yes, then grab your favorite brew, bookmark this page, and scroll through this simple guide.
Steps to Make a Blog:
- Choose a blogging platform, domain name, and hosting option.
- Pick a theme for your blog that fits your design taste
- Alter your blog to get your desired look and impression.
- Select plugins that best accentuate your blog.
- Write unique content that provides massive value to your readers.
NOTE: The Drunk Millionaire’s blog is hosted by Bluehost. For only $7.99 $3.49 a month, Bluehost can help you set up and host your blog. Because The Drunk Millionaire is a Bluehost affiliate partner, our readers can use this link to receive a 50% discount off the monthly price plus a free domain.
So you want to start a blog and never took any coding classes in college, did you? Guess what- neither did we. In fact when we started The Drunk Millionaire, we had no idea how to this whole website/blog thing worked.
The good news is its easier than you think. Sure, we had to grind thorough the process for hours to figure out which options were the best but we created this tutorial to help you start a polished blog in under an hour. Here’s how we started our blog, step by step.
- Domain and Hosting. The first thing we did was go to Bluehost and register our domain. You don’t have to set up a WordPress page first (which is the platform we use) since Bluehost does all that for you. Bluehost’s basic price is
$7.99$3.49/month, which is sufficient for most bloggers (note: readers at The Drunk Millionaire can use this link to receive a 50% discount off the monthly price and a free domain). Then, we did a simple free install of WordPress through Bluehost.
- Theme. A good theme gives you the aesthetics you imagine for your blog, allowing you to design it however you want. Themes are important if you don’t have experience with coding (which we didn’t). Themes vary in cost from free, to middle of the road, to fairly expensive. The benefit of purchasing a theme is that once you buy it, you own it for life. A theme has two parts: the framework (bones) and the Child Theme (the beauty):
- Framework. There are several WordPress theme frameworks on the market, but Genesis is without a doubt the best and most flexible choice. Genesis is the first half of your theme. Many themes merely handle the aesthetics of your new blog, but Genesis provides a necessary foundation for your Child Theme. Simply go to StudioPress and purchase the Genesis Framework.
- Child Theme. After you get your Genesis Framework, you’ll want to find the right Child Theme (design). The Drunk Millionaire uses the (in)SPYR theme, which is available at BYLT, the Genesis Community Marketplace. Head on over to BYLT, browse their carefully curated collection of themes, and find the design that’s right for you.
- Alter Your Blog. After we procured our domain, hosting, WordPress, and theme, we spent a lot of time making small tweaks to the theme to get the look and feel we wanted. We set up a Mail Chimp account so people could subscribe to our site via email and RSS subscriptions (FREE).
- Plugins. We use minimal plugins on our site: “Yoast SEO” to optimize our website for search engines and really simple Facebook and Twitter share-button plugins. They take seconds to install on your site. There are many other plugins available so we recommend skimming through some.
- Write Unique and Valuable Content. With The Drunk Millionaire finally set up, we got started writing and uploading content via WordPress. Finally we started writing new pages and posting them about once a week and the rest is history.
Now that you’ve learned how to start a blog you can follow us on social media or via email. Let us know if you follow our steps to set up a blog. We’d be happy to help or critique it!
Reminder: TheDrunkMillionaire.com is a Bluhost affiliate partner, which means in addition to using their service, we also receive a referral credit for referring new customers. We only recommend products as an affiliate that we are extremely familiar with- products that we use and that have helped us achieve something. If we’re not confident in the product and we don’t feel it will positively help people, we won’t promote it. With that being said, we recommend Bluehost because they are the best, most reliable option. Plus, because we’re a partner, Bluehost offers a special price for The Drunk Millionaire’s readers: only $3.49 a month. That’s a phenomenal deal!