Starting a WordPress blog looks somewhat daunting but that will not be the case once you read this comprehensive guide on how to start a WordPress blog to start making money online today.

WordPress is undoubtedly the best platform to set up your blogging journey or even a fully functional website. We will talk about WordPress.org, not WordPress.com. Both are different. WordPress.org is best for you in every aspect. Let’s start without wasting a second. If you think you are familiar with a point, you can navigate to the next one. 

(Affiliate Disclosure: This blogpost contains some affiliate links, we will get a small commission when you sign up using the links. This won’t cost anything extra from your side. Everything here in this guide is tested and it is the best and simplest guide to start a WordPress blog with minimum cost.)

Choose a niche – Critical while starting a WordPress Blog

In simple words, a niche is a segment of the market or audience you are going to target. It’s necessary to define a market segment to target so that your audience and search engines both find it easy to find the targeted keywords. You should choose niche after having known the following things:

Your interests

You should have enough interest in the niche to persist with it. It’s also important that you can collect data and write on a consistent basis. 

Competition

A lot of people are going for the same niche you are stepping into. So, check the search volume and competition in your niche.

Revenue Potential & Monetization options

You should know how and how much you will earn money from your blog once it is set to do so. Either you will do it through adsense, or you have to go for affiliate marketing, or you’ve got other options?

In this regard, we have written a complete four-step guide to choose a niche for your website or blog. 

Name your business

The next big thing is the name of your business. There is a bit of science in choosing the name of your business. The name should be chosen after keeping these in mind:

• The name should present the business in a good way. 
• Search the domains for your business name and make sure it’s available. If not available, choose the domain that relates best. Try to choose a dot com domain if you want your website at international level. You can choose local domains like .au, uk, .pk, .in etc. 
• If it contains the keyword of your target niche, that’s bonus, and will help in your SEO.

Get a domain

A domain is the address of a website that points to a specific IP to the server where your website is located. You can buy it from a domain provider like GoDaddy, Bluehost (Free Domain with hosting), NameCheap or any provider of your choice. Get a domain that matches your business name and is not too long. The domain name having anything less than 12 characters and easy to remember will work greatly.

Get a hosting for WordPress

Hosting means you have to host your content or data at some third party server like Bluehost, Siteground, Hostgator or any other. WordPress only provides you a platform to manage your content nicely. As a beginner, you can start with Bluehost that provides you cheap wordpress hosting with a starting cost of $3.95 per month (billed annually). It’s our recommendation for hosting if you are a beginner. They provide you a free domain that you can opt for, or can use your own custom one. 

How to Start Setting up the WordPress blog using Bluehost

After getting your WordPress hosting, you’re all set to launch a basic brand new website or blog. You’ll have to install WordPress on Bluehost easily. It’s a matter of clicks. After this, you will get to the Dashboard of your wordpress site. 

Here’s how to start wordpress blog with the help of Bluehost:

Go to Bluehost

Visit Bluehost and login-it won’t ask for any payment or credit card at this stage. You’ll have to pay only when it’s needed. So, start your process with ease and go ahead when you are ready.

Choose your plan. 

Choose the plan that suits your needs. These plans are billed annually and if you want to get a plan for more than a year, you’ll get even more discount. With choice plus, you can get many many extra advantages like unlimited websites, unlimited SSD storage and more. So, I $2 extra, you get many advantages over the basic plan. We’ll recommend that Choice Plus plan that comes with domain privacy.

Choose the domain (Bluehost offers one for free)

Here comes the free domain by Bluehost. if you haven’t registered a domain yet, you can get it here for free. Search your domain and check availability, or set up an already registered domain. It’s as easiest as it can be. After that, if you want to add some extra you like, you can add and proceed to payment.

Choose your theme

Choose your favourite theme out of the given options, You can always change these later and once you have chosen the theme, you are done! The next step is installing the WordPress on Bluehost.

Tip: Choose a theme that is superfast and good for SEO. Some great options are Astra, OceanWP, and Neve.

Start Installing WordPress. 

Now install WordPress on your Bluehost and it as simple and easy as this line says! Congratulations on your WordPress website.

Launching site

You’ll be redirected to your WordPress dashboard where your website is waiting for you. You may see a highlighted button reading “Coming Soon Active”. It’s because you might not want to go website live before it’s ready. So, you can keep your website on Coming soon mode until you want it live. You can activate it later in Bluehost home by clicking “Launch your site”. Before that, you can install plugins, set pages and homepage.

How to Set up your WordPress blog Homepage & other site pages

The next step is setting up your pages like Homepage, About Page, Contact Us page and other necessary pages you like to have on your blog website. This is not a difficult task when a Page builders like Elementor are there to build drag and drop pages. Astra and OceanWP and many other themes offer importing a whole site template for free. All you need is changing the dummy content to your own content. Every function will need a plugin.

To install plugins, go to “Plugins” in the sidebar, click “Add New”, and add plugins. Some plugins will already be there by default. And some will be in recommendations to install. Install all the plugins that your theme recommends (not all, but some themes like Astra, WP ocean recommend some plugins to build website easily). These will include a theme builder, and a website importer if you have chosen a theme like Astra.

Install Necessary Plugins

Plugins add to the functionality of your website. You need to install plugins to add functionality to your blog. For instance, you might want to add contact forms, install WP Forms plugin. Your theme might also demand some plugins to function properly. If you are starting an e-commerce platform, you might like to install WooCommerce. 

Elementor

Elementor is a handy page builder to start wordpress blog building. For a smooth website building, use Elementor. It has many many great options in its free version.

WP Forms

It helps you adding custom forms like contact form in your website.

Smush

A fast website is everyone’s dream and many images slow down the websites. This is where Smush comes in to help you with optimizing images without compromising quality.

Add Content

Congratulations. You are all set. You have set a basic decent looking blog and all you need is start creating content for your WordPress blog website. Create longer and meaningful content that provides value to your targeted audience. Don’t create random-topic content otherwise you will find it hard to rank your blog on search engines. 

Final thoughts on how to start a WordPress blog

In this brief guide on starting a WordPress blog, We’ve tried to keep everything as simple as possible for beginners. The motive was to start much more with very less amount as one simply doesn’t want to invest pennies on a dead rubber. Once you start your WordPress Blog as beginner, grow your blog’s traffic, monetize it and until then, you’ll be good enough to decide whether you want to stay with the same options or you need some changes.

Tell us your views about this guide in the comment section.