I recently helped my daughter set up her WordPress blog.
Blogging today is much more complicated than when I began. Today you need good quality, preferably original, photos. Social media activity is a whole additional industry.
The bottom line is that the competition for eyeballs is very tough.
Setting up self-hosted WordPress takes longer, though this is the path you want to take to control and own your content.
Getting started involves…
- choosing a customized theme
- plugins
- learning and working on SEO
- getting and setting up a domain
…the learning curve gets steeper and the time and money spent increases (many plugins are premium, and you will probably want a premium theme).
However, it is simpler in some ways, too. The platform has made so many improvements that the process of maintaining is SO much easier: I love the automatic updating.
Found A super Helpful Video Tutorial
The Big Decisions
The biggest decisions for a self-hosted WordPress installation are:
- choosing a name for your blog,
- getting a domain name,
- and choosing the hosting to home your writing.
Then The SEO
Once you learn about SEO (which is short for search engine optimization), the keywords and choosing a niche becomes the second most important of decisions to be made.
Topics for posts, categories, and tags, it is about finding your audience and writing targeted posts for those people. You want to build a tribe.
Blog Themes
Choosing a theme is more than finding a look that appeals to you or your audience, it is also important to how the blog functions. WordPress can do all sorts of things, but the way the theme handles those can make a difference between headaches or headway.
Which WordPress Themes Are Best?This section is meant to help you skip right to making headway in starting off. Success will come from your own determination and hard work. The advice here is simply for a smooth start.
Start Writing
This is my most important piece of advice.
Right after you get your hosting, set up your WordPress blog, buy and point your domain name, start writing. Don’t worry about making perfect posts. You can always edit and add to them later, but if you have no content, there is nothing to see on your blog. Writing improves with practice.
Just start.
Niche, Evergreen, and Seasonal Blogposts
Costs can range from “free”, with no real outlay of money from your pocket, to quite expensive. Start small and upgrade. I recommend finding the best host you can afford with the lowest price… that will mean “shared” hosting.
The next thing to spend money on is your domain name.
Finally, I would get a good theme as a start-up cost. For most bloggers Genesiss will likely work best (even though I use Elegant Themes, myself).
All of the blogging products below are highly reliable:
Ecommerce on WordPress: Getting Started
