How to start a successful blog in 2020. (7 Steps)

June 08, 2020

7 Steps How To Start a Successful Blog.

If you are thinking of making a blog or if you already have a blog, remember that it is 2020.

Blogging has reached an advanced level and competition has also increased a lot.

Therefore, when you start a blog, to achieve success you have to plan everything well in advance. But don't worry, in this article, I will tell you in 7 steps how to start a successful blog.

1) Choose the right blogging platform.
2) Buy a domain name and good web hosting.
3) How to make a blog on WordPress.
4) What to do after installing WordPress.
5) Plugins required for each blog.
6) How to make WordPress blog more SEO Friendly.
7) Start Blogging with Engaging content.

So let's start…

How to start a successful blogging.

The trend of blogging is increasing day by day and many new blogs are being created every day but not all blogs get success. The biggest reason, they do not follow any strategy and their blog lags behind in the competition.

If you are thinking of creating a successful blog, then you have to follow some steps which I am going to tell you below.

Blogging Platform.

There are many Paid and free blogging platforms available for creating blogs. In which Blogspot and WordPress are very popular.

If you initially choose a wrong blog platform, it can be very difficult to switch later.

I would recommend you to start a blog on Self-hosted WordPress (WordPress.org). But do not choose WordPress.com instead of WordPress.org. Here's a guide - what's the difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com.

For WordPress.org, there are thousands of premium & free WordPress themes available in the market that give a great look to your blog and millions of plugins help to add new features to your blog.

Also, if you have any problems with your WordPress blog, you will find lots of tutorials on the Internet to fix them.

But to start a blog on WordPress, you will need a domain name and web hosting.

Buy a domain name and good web hosting.

If you want to start blogging professionally then you will need a domain name and a good hosting.

A domain name is the name of your site on the Internet, such as techbrain18.com, while hosting is the storage where your blog data store is located.

Always choose a domain that is short and unique for your blog. In addition, your domain must belong to your Niche. It helps to rank your blog.

But do not make a mistake when purchasing hosting. Always buy hosting from a trustworthy company.

There are many web hosting companies in the market that promise to be the best, but after purchasing hosting from them, you will feel that they have cheated you.

If you make a mistake in choosing web hosting, it will affect both your blog SEO and traffic. Because, your blog will be in downtime most of the time and your site will load very slowly. Here I have made a list of Best Web Hosting Companies that you can use.

I recommend you to buy hosting from Bluehost as it is a very reliable and oldest hosting company and offers hosting at a low price. It also offers you a free domain for 1 year.

Bluehost.com offers a free domain for 1 year. But Bluehost.in does not provide free domains.

Here is a guide on buying hosting from Bluehost.in:

First, go to the Bluehost website and click Hosting >> Linux Hosting.

This will take you to the Pricing page. Scroll down the page and choose a pricing plan. Its business plan is very popular among the users and allows to create 3 websites whereas Standard Plan allows you to launch only one website.

After selecting the plan, click on the buy now button.

Now it will ask you "Do you already have a domain for your hosting plan?" That is, do you already have a domain.

All you have to do is click "No" and enter a domain name for your site. If you want to use another extension instead of .com, click on the .com extension and select the other extension.

In this page, you have to click on the Select >> Checkout option. After clicking checkout, it will redirect you to the Order Summary page.

You can remove Unwanted order here. You choose the time duration for your hosting and domain name, that is, how many days you want to register.

After checking everything properly, click on the proceed to payment button.

In the next step, you have to sign up for a Bluehost account. Click on "create an account in 10 seconds".

Now fill your account informations like name, address, email etc.

When you click on the create account button, it will redirect you to the Payment Options page.

After the purchase is complete, you will receive an email containing details related to cPanel.

How to make a blog on WordPress.

Log into your hosting dashboard (cPanel). You will see many options here. 90% of them do not require you to use them, so you ignore them.

First, log into your Bluehost account and then click on the "Manage Orders >> List / Search Orders" button.

Then click on the domain name.

In the next page you have to click on the "Manage Web Hosting" button.

Now your hosting cPanel will open, scroll down and go to Software section and click on "Softaculous Apps Installer".

In the next page, select WordPress and then click on the Install Now button.

A new page will open, here you have to enter your blog name, Username and password. You can also change these later.

Below you will see some templates that you can install on your site. But you don't need to do it right now. You can also install the theme on your blog later.

After making all the settings, click on the install button. The WordPress installation process will begin, it will take about 1 minute. After the process is complete, the login and password information will be sent to the register email address.

congratulation! You have created your first WordPress blog.

Now update the nameserver in your domain name

Again, log into your hosting cPanel and click on the "Manage Orders >> List / Search Orders" button. Then click on the domain name.

Click on the Name Server details in your Hosting section,

This will give you two name server, just copy and save them in notepad.

Now go to the Domain Registration section and click on Name server. A popup box will open, paste the saved Nameserver in these boxes. Then click on the Update Nameserver button.

Nameserver takes 72 hours to propagate. After this, you can log in or visit your blog.

What to do after installing WordPress

If you want to start a successful blog, then after installing the blog on WordPress, you have to make some necessary settings.

1. Install SSL Certificate.

The SSL Certificate converts your site from HTTP to HTTPS.

And HTTPS is a ranking signal. So this is the most important setting after creating a blog on WordPress.

By using Https on your blog, you can easily increase your search ranking and blog traffic.

2. Delete the default post, page and comment.

When you create a blog on WordPress, it gives you demo content like posts, pages and comments.

Like the first process, click Pages >> All Pages then delete the default "Sample Page" page. Finally, click on "Comments" and delete the demo comment.

3. Set Your Timezone.

Set the blog's time zone to your local time so that when you schedule a post, they go live according to your time zone.

To set the time zone, click Settings >> General.

4. Change Blog Title and Tagline.

If you have not changed the title and tagline of your blog during a WordPress installation, you can change it now.

Click on Settings >> General page. Here you will see the title and tagline of the blog. Just you need to change it.

5. Delete Inactive WordPress Themes / Plugin Inactive WordPress Themes / Plugin.

Affects the loading speed of your blog.Also create security vulnerabilities.

Click Appearance >> Themes to see the theme installed. If you see an Inactive WordPress Themes theme here, delete it. Similarly, you can delete the Inactive plugin by going to the plugin page.

6. Enable Spam Protection for Comment Spam Comments.

Takes unnecessary space on your WordPress hosting, which increases your database size and affects the loading speed of your blog. There are many ways to moderate spam comments in a WordPress site. You can moderate it manually. But it will take a lot of time.

Alternatively, you can deal with Spam comments using Antispam WordPress plugins. These plugins automatically block Spam comments on your blog.

7.Set favicon.

The favicon is a small icon that appears in the address bar of the visitor's browser.

This makes your brand professional and reliable. Furthermore, when a visitor bookmarks your site, your site's favicon appears.

8. Connect your blog to Google Search Console.

Google Search Console is a very good tool developed by Google. This helps in tracking your blog performance (how your site is performing in Google).

You can get Valuable Insights of your blog like Crawl errors, Ranking Keyword, impressions etc. in Google Search Console.

9. Submit sitemap.

First, create a Sitemap for your site. To create a Sitemap,

After creating the Sitemap, click on the 'Sitemap' option in the Google Search Console Dashboard, then paste the last part (sitemap_index.xml) of the Sitemap's URL and click on the Submit button.

10. Check your blog's Visibility Settings

WordPress comes with a built-in option that prevents your blog from being indexed in search engines. If you accidentally check this option, then your site will not appear in Google search results. This option is very good for a newly launched website / blog.

To check this, click on the Settings >> Readings page and uncheck the box Discourage search engines from indexing this site.

Search This Blog

Engineer Moin18.blogspot.com