Net your Empire

So if your reading this then you already have some kind of interest in creating a blog of your own, yes?

Maybe you have a hobby you want to discuss with people who share your interests? Maybe your an expert in a discipline and want to share your knowledge with those who needs it? Maybe your aim is to make money? Or just maybe .. you just got loads of stuff on your mind and need somewhere to vent! Whatever your reasons, starting a blog can be great fun, and the best bit is, it’s not that hard. Follow my 5 steps and you will be blogging with the best of them in no time!

Step 1 Find you niche

This Sounds obvious, but if you want your blog to be popular with lots of visitors, you really need to think about what it is you want to write about. Is it something that lots of people would be interested in, or is it something that only you are into. Make sure there’s a market for it, it doesn’t matter if the markets only small, sometimes that’s better because there’s less competing blogs . It needs to be something that has life in it, for example, my blog is about making money online and building websites, so there are numerous things i could blog about, but if i started a new blog called ‘vegetables beginning with the letter C’ , i’d soon run out of ideas after ‘the pros and cons of the carrot and cabbage’ post . Bit silly, but you get my drift.  THINK .. has my blog subject  got a market? will people be interested in what i have to say? … and does my subject have enough to it that i’ll have lots to write about to keep myself and my readers entertained?

Step 2 Register your domain name

Ok, so we know what were going to write about, were totally excited and raring to go, but first we need somewhere to house all that creativity in the form of a domain name. This is a hugely important part of creating your blog as it will be with you till the day you shut up shop so we need to get it right! To get it right, we need to make sure it’s three things , firstly it need’s to tell people a little about what your about , for example, netyourempire.com aims to explore how to create a money making empire on the internet, so the title works. Secondly, it needs to be easy to remember, use something simple that people will be able to tell there friends about, something that’s easy to spell and isn’t too long.  Finally, it needs to be something that could one day be a brand, not saying that every blog will one day be famous, but you never know where you can take it!                                                                                                                                                   

I used godaddy.com to register my domain, they are a well known company and very reasonably priced (I paid around £8 pounds for a year for this .com domain ), but there are many other well known companies you could use.

Step 3 Getting hosting

Another small cost, but an essential one, you need to find a company to host your website on the internet. Again, make sure you use a reputable company that has standing in the online community, hostgator.com is a popular choice, for this website i used go.daddy.com again, as i already had the domain name there so it was easy to manage with all my eggs in one basket. It also ticks all the boxes for running wordpress ( which is next ). I paid £38 for my hosting for a full year, but you can get discounts on that if you subscribe for multiple years.

I would also recommend getting a custom email account from your web host, it just looks more professional on your site than a regular Hotmail or other email account,  again, the more you get …. the cheaper it gets per email address but you can buy more later so one is fine for a new blog. I paid £10 for Rich@netyourempire.com for the year at godaddy.com.

Step 4 Install WordPress

The next step is as easy as pie , depending on who you picked as your websites host. If you picked godaddy or another well known host, then they already have an option that just involves a click of the button to download and set up WordPress (it’s free).! If you decided to host with someone else then its a little more complicated. You need to point your web browser to wordpress.org and download the file to your computer. Then, download a file transfer program, such as filezilla ( it’s also free) and upload the files onto your web hosting account. I can’t really do a step by step of this because each host will be different, but there will no doubt be a guide on their sites. If you’d rather not go through all this technical mumbo jumbo , then i’d advise sticking to main web host that allows the easy install.

Step 5 Choose and Tweak your WordPress theme

Now it gets more fun (finally), this is your first chance to inject your creativity into your site and choose a theme form the hordes that are available on wordpress. Start by typing your domain URL , Followed by /wp-admin/   e.g myblog.com/wp-admin/ . You will then be asked to enter your login information, once completed, this will take you to you dashboard. Your new control center for your blog! If you look to the left, you will see a tab labelled appearance, click this, then themes, and we then find the option to ‘install themes’ . Now all thats left is to choose your theme, download it and boom, were in business!  Try and choose a theme that suits your blog, think back to step 1, when you thought about who your market is. What would you want to see if you were them? There’s plenty of free themes to choose from and you can switch your theme whenever you wish, so don’t spend forever choosing ….. we got fantastic blog posts to create!

So that’s it, congratulations, you now have a website and a great looking one at that ! You are now free to explore your dashboard, create pages and categories and start blogging!

Thanks for taking the time to read this post, I hope it was helpful, please leave a comment with any feedback , both good and constructive that i can use to improve this post for future readers.Also, if you have any questions or ideas for future blogs I’d love to hear them.