Day 3: How to set up your blog EASILY

Welcome to Day 3!

I hope you are super excited about narrowing down your niche and finding your blog name from yesterday’s lesson!

Now, let’s start building your blog today.

1. Before we start, let’s circle around to the reasons you should start blogging:

You will be able to flex your creative muscles.
You will meet new people and enter a new circle of supportive, encouraging people (bloggers).
You’ll learn new skills and develop as a person.
You have the opportunity to make quite a bit of money. In the book The Go-Giver, the authors state: “Your income is determined by how many people you serve and how well you serve them.” With a blog, you can reach millions.

2. For the second part of the lesson, please head on over to SLL for the walkthrough:

Day 3: How to set up your blog EASILY

Here, I’ll walk you through how to properly setup your blog along with a discount on your hosting, a free domain name and more.

You will be able to start a blog for just $3.95 a month through the link above. I recommend Bluehost as a hosting service because they have the absolute best value, they have a wonderful affiliate program that top bloggers use and if you want to monetize your blog, self-hosted platforms like Bluehost are just the way to go, bottom line.

3. Now, once you’ve started you’ll want a theme.

(I really wanted to name this section: “If you give a blogger hosting, they’ll want a theme” but mayyybe only a handful of parents who’ve read that book to their little ones WAY too many times would get it. Or maybe it’s just too late and I’ve had too much caffeine. Back to the lesson.)

You can go with a free theme if you’d like but there are some cons:

A free theme has limited features and no extra functionality, which many larger and more professional websites require.
Not unique. Many free themes have thousands or millions of downloads.
They do not update and can be buggy, which means you may have functionality problems and when you need feedback support (which paid themes offer) for those problems, you won’t have it.

On the other hand, if you purchase a good theme, it will have routine updates (keeping up with WordPress and improving with user feedback), it will be compatible across multiple browsers, the customization will be simply amazing, you receive free technical help (this was invaluable for me!) and the technical side will be much more streamlined.

With my experience setting up themes for companies and being in the blogging world for a little bit now, I would recommend Divi from Elegant Themes above all others.

The first reason: top successful bloggers I know use it. If and when I redo my website, I will be going straight for Divi. I don’t want to rag on my current theme at all but it really was challenging to set up, even for someone who has a lot of WordPress experience. In addition, I find myself not being able to do things that are simple with Divi.

I wish I had started with it in the first place! It’s beautiful, simple, crazy customizable and allows for some amazing landing pages.

4. Activate Yoast SEO and Google Analytics right now.

I didn’t activate it right away and I had a company contact me (shortly after I launched my blog) for a possible sponsored post asking for my Google traffic report. I didn’t have one! How embarrassing. You’ll need Yoast to properly set up SEO anyway.

Congratulations on starting your blog!

Next time, we’ll dive into branding. Exciting! As I mentioned before, I have a BFA in graphic design and have experience there so I can really help! 🙂

See you tomorrow!