Hi! I’m Anastasia from anastasiablogger.com, and today I will teach you how to start a
blog step by step. I've been blogging for about 5 years now, and the #1 thing I see
beginners are worried about is that they won't figure out all the tech they NEED to start
a blog. I'll show you today that it's totally doable!
Step #1 is to Choose a Domain
Your domain name is the name or the address of your blog.
The golden rule of website naming – make it as short as possible and easy to memorize.
You can use this tool called Instant Domain Search the address is namehero.com/domains
- I'll give you a link to it in the description below.
The second rule is that domains in .com zone are always preferable because users automatically
think of .com when they memorize domains. Also, domains in .com zone are considered
more trustworthy both for users and for search engines.
I actually have a very detailed video on how to choose a domain name, so I'll link to it
up there and we are moving to the second thing we need to choose.
Step #2. Understand What is WordPress and WHY You Should Use It
So, you've probably heard of WordPress, right? It's a super popular platform for creating
websites and blogs. It's a free, open-source software that you
can download and install on your own web server (which you'll need to get from a hosting provider).
This gives you total control over your website, like customizing it with themes and plugins,
using any kind of monetization options on the site and so on.
You'll also need to buy a domain name, which is your website's address on the internet
(like yourblog.com). The cost of hosting and domain name varies, but it's usually pretty
affordable.
I always recommend WordPress for a blogging business because:
Popularity: WordPress is used by over 40% of all websites on the internet. Crazy, right?
This means there's a massive community of users and developers, so you'll have tons
of resources, tutorials, and support available. Flexibility: There are thousands of themes
and plugins that allow you to customize your site and add new features.
User-friendly: Even if you're not a tech wizard, WordPress is pretty easy to use. The dashboard
is intuitive, and you can start publishing content without needing to learn code.
SEO-friendly: Search engine optimization (SEO) is important if you want people to find your
blog on Google. WordPress is built with SEO in mind, and there are free plugins (like
Rank Math or Yoast SEO) that can help you optimize your content even better.
Step #3 Set up a Hosting
Let me explain why you need a hosting provider to get your blog up and running.
Think of your blog as a house. You need a piece of land to build your house on, right?
That's where a hosting provider comes in. They offer you the "land" (or server space)
where your blog will "live" on the internet.
You see, every website, including blogs, is made up of files and data that need to be
stored somewhere. A hosting provider offers you space on their servers to store these
files, so your blog is accessible to people online.
So for today's tutorial we'll use NameHero hosting and I'll show you all the steps so
that by the end of this video you can have your Wordpress Blog up and running.
NameHero sponsored this video but I I think they really offer a great value for the pricing
you will find on the WordPress Hosting page.
So what you need to do is click on the first link you'll find in the description below
this video and you'll get to this page. If you are just a beginner all you really
need at this point is the first option for one website, and it gives you a ton of free
bonus services, for example you can have unlimited email accounts linked to your website,
you get a free SSL certificate for your site, A free access to the LiteSpeed caching plugin,
which will help your blog load faster, which is an important factor for Google SEO
if you hosted your site elsewhere, you can make a free migration of your Wordpress site
Free daily backups of your site On the Turbo plan you can also get a free
domain name for the first year.
The two things on which NameHero is mostly focused with these plans are
First, they have them super optimized with Lightspeed caching and I already mentioned
you get the Lightspeed plugin by default. A Lightspeed web server is up to 15x faster
than Apache which is what many other web hosts use.
And the second thing they are really focused on with these plans is support. The NameHero
team has been trained for a lot of specific WordPress issues and aims to have all tickets
answered in less than 15 minutes. You can send them emails and they also offer live
chat. Now, we know that a lot of companies say they
have the best site speed and fastest support but in NameHero the team truly strives to
be one step above!
So let's start with the cheapest plan for demonstration, on the next step you can either
try to search for a domain name available in .com zone or if you already have a domain
name you can submit it here. Let's pretend I'm going to add a new domain
anastasiabloggernew.com. On the few steps, you'll be offered some extras
but you can totally skip them because they are not really necessary and anyway, you can
add them later. By the way, in your shopping cart you can
even remove the domain name if you changed your mind and want to purchase it elsewhere.
But we need to keep the hosting package that's what we are buying here.
There will be a boring part of submitting your personal information and your credit
card or you can use Paypal to purchase, it's pretty straightforward so I'll skip this.
Once we finish the checkout we'll end up in your Dashboard.
So first we'll see here our WordPress hosting service, we can click here and the first thing
we'll see is this thing here called nameservers. So to get our domain name working, we need
to use some name servers. Don't worry, it's easy!
You just need to copy these two lines here and insert them in the custom DNS IF you have
registered your domain name on another provider, some of the companies that people often use
to register their domains are Namecheap or Godaddy. For example, this is how easily you
can do in in Namecheap, just click on the Custom DNS and copy and paste here nameservers
that NameHero hosting provided.
Once you saved the new nameservers, it takes some time for the changes to take effect across
the internet, up to 48 hours but usually, it happens much faster.
During this time you can already work on your blog, it just means that during the next few
days, the blog might not yet be available to everyone around the world.
By the way, if you chose to purchase the domain name together with your NameHero hosting package,
then you don't even need to set nameservers, they will be automatically set to NameHero
for your domain.
Step #4. WordPress Set-up
Now our next step is to setup Wordpress on your website.
If we look down here, you will find this Wordpress Manager button. Great news for you!
It means that WordPress has already been installed on your blog so it's minus one technical step
for you. And this is one of the benefits of purchasing
Wordpress Hosting package on NameHero! They will automatically install and set up WordPress
at your root domain. So by the time you complete your purchase, you will have WordPress installed
at your domain name and your login credentials will be emailed to you within 10 minutes so
you can login right away to WordPress.
Here you can just click on this button and login into our Wordpress Control Panel.
And the first thing I wanted to show you is when you click on Plugins, you'll see that
LightSpeed Cache plugin is already installed for you! You can just quickly check the settings
of the plugin but you don't need to change anything from the default settings.
I would delete these other two plugins. For filtering spam, we can use a better option
than Akismet - I use Antispam Bee for example. And Hello Dolly is an absolutely pointless
plugin that adds no functionality at all. Definitely delete Hello Dolly without it having
any impact on your site. Step #5 Install Other Important Plugins
On the next step we need to install a few additional essential plugins, and don't worry,
most of them have a free version.
SEO Plugin: So you know how we want people to find our site on Google, right? An SEO
plugin like Yoast SEO or RankMath can really help with that. They let you tweak your content
and make it more search engine friendly, which means your website has a better shot at showing
up higher in Google's search results. Both plugins have very generous free versions,
personally, I never needed their paid features on my blog.
You might also want to install an image optimization plugin and something for social sharing buttons
which are very important if you want to get traffic from social media platforms like Facebook
or Pinterest. By the way, I'm getting over 80k/mo visitors
to my blog from Pinterest for free, and if you want to learn how I do it, watch my free
Pinterest Masterclass, you'll find the link in the description below.
Getting back to the plugins I can recommend, there are so many options of free and paid
WordPress plugins, but even if I wanted to cover here the most important ones, I think
it still deserves a separate video. Which I actually already published, so I'll link
the video about the must-have WordPress plugins up there and in the description below, you
can watch it once we are done with this tutorial today.
If you have any questions, let me know in the comments below the video, I’ll be happy
to help! And if you found the video useful, give me a thumbs up! Subscribe to my channel
if you want more tutorials like this from me in your feed!
Step #6 Install a WordPress Theme
Now we need to choose a WordPress Theme. ​​Using a theme is like giving your website a makeover.
It can control stuff like colors, fonts, layout, and more.
Plus, you can find themes that are built specifically for certain types of websites, like blogs,
portfolios, or online stores.
So we'll click here on Appearance and then Themes to get to this page.
This is the default theme on WordPress but it looks too basic, we can click here on Add
New button and we'll see a huge variety of themes.
I suggest looking at the Popular themes and here we'll see for example Astra theme which
I use on one of my blogs. There is also Kadence theme and I heard very
good reviews about this one. OceanWP and GeneratePress I've also seen on
the list of the fastest WordPress themes. I would say how fast your theme loads is very
important because site speed is one of the factors affecting your Google SEO. So you
might want to do some additional research, and check some articles like this one with
a list of the fastest themes before you make a decision.
Before you install any theme you can make a quick preview, just click on the preview
button and you will see how your website will look by default once you install the theme.
See this is Astra theme and the homepage you will get. Or check other themes the same way.
Now you can try to install one of the themes and it's pretty easy just click install, then
Activate the theme and then you can start Customizing the theme to make it look the
way you want it too. You can decide to use a static homepage or you can set it to show
your latest posts.
If you choose the latest posts option, you could get your homepage to look similar to
what I've done on one of my blogs where I use the Astra theme.
Making all the customizations of the WordPress themes would require a whole separate tutorial
and is beyond the scope of today's video, so I will just quickly scroll here and show
you what you can get by default in Astra theme on the homepage but you can change any of
these elements, it will just take a bit of tweaking and setting up.
STEP #7 Set up Email Accounts in NameHero
There's one more feature I wanted to explore here. If you look at the features, all these
plans offer unlimited email accounts, even the cheapest one. Which great because it means
you can have your official email address, not something on a gmail account and any emails
you might need to send to some brands or your website visitors, will look very professional.
For example, I wouldn't try to email someone for a sponsored collaboration using my personal
gmail address, I will email them from hello@anastasiablogger.com.
So, let's see how that works. Back in our NameHero client dashboard, we can find "Email
Accounts," and this is where we can add new ones.
Adding an email account is pretty straightforward. Just click "Create," here you'll have your
domain name, and now jus think of a username like "alise@yourdomain.com," and choose a
strong password. I don't recommend usernames like info or admin because they sound too
generic and usually end up to the Spam folders. If you can't think of anything else, just
use your name. After clicking "Create," you can see a list
of email accounts. I'll save my password, and now we have a new email address.
To check emails, there's a browser-based webmail client that comes with NameHero. Just look
here at this Webmail button, it's the last one on the right side. You can check your
inbox right here inside NameHero but it means you'll need to login every time to the hosting
dashboard. To avoid this, you can click on this Configure
Mail client button and it'll show you the settings needed to configure a mail client
on your phone, tablet, or other software like Outlook.
Again, to take advantage of the professionally looking free unlimited email accounts all
the other benefits of this hosting package, check the link in the description below to
set up your WordPress website on NameHero.
And if you want to learn how to make your newly created blog a profitable business,
check out my free 7-day course that includes all the information you need to know about
monetization strategies for your website. I'll drop a link in the description below
and we'll leave you with my video with the full history of my income reports starting
from the first year of blogging till today. The video is up there, and I'll see you in
the next one!