Running a successful blog website is a dream of millions, and There might be any reason for running a blog: a hobby of writing, brand awareness, sharing skills, or something else,
By running a blog, we have the power to stand out and share our voices with others, just like I’m writing this blog to share my skills or create a successful blog.
Table of Contents
Let’s start
To run a blog, we need two things.
- Domain: Domain is like a website’s name, just like Google has www.google.com and Facebook has www.facebook.com domains. The pricing is not high; you can get it for $9.99 annually.
- Hosting: Hosting is where your website will exist. If you write an article, you must put it somewhere users can find it and read it. Hosting is usually available for $2.99 a month.
Check out my recommended hosting plans at discounted plans.
Install WordPress on hosting.
WordPress is free software that we can use to manage our websites. It makes managing the website so easy. Once you’ve bought a domain and hosting and set them up, you need to install WordPress on that. I’m not sharing this process because it is different for every website. You might ask your hosting provider to help you with this or contact our expert.
Access the dashboard
Once you’ve installed WordPress on the hosting, we need to access the admin dashboard, from which we will control our website and post blog posts.
To access the dashboard, enter your domain name in the search bar, add/wp-admin at the end, and hit the enter button.
Once you do that, you will see a login page for the admin where you can enter the login username and password that you chose at the time of installing WordPress.
Once you’re login, you will see this dashboard with a menu of options on the left side,
Let’s choose a theme for our blog.
You might have visited hundreds of blogs. All have blog posts but look different on every website because of the theme. A theme defines how our blog website will look like
There are thousands of themes available in the market for free and paid. For the long term, I recommend a paid theme that offers updates for a long period of time, free themes might not receive updates after a couple of years, and that might be a problem, but you can still start with a free theme and upgrade to a paid one in the future,
You can go to Dashboard -> Appearance -> Themes, and you will see an option Add New button. Click on that to install a new theme,
WordPress has many free themes available. You can search for the one you like and click on install. Once it’s installed, you will see the button to activate it.
For now, I will use a free theme Davin Blog, but you have the freedom of choice.
Once the theme is installed and activated, you will see some more options in the Appearance menu, depending on the theme you choose.
Let’s do Some settings before we start writing.
Our blog is ready to post blog posts, but we will do some customization to make it look better and function well,
1. Permalinks
Permalinks are a structure of our website links that define how our blog post’s link will be.
Go to Settings -> Permalinks.
For now, as we are just creating a blog website, I suggest you choose the Post Name option and save it by clicking the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page.
2. Blog Logo, Name, and tagline
To add a blog logo, Name, and tagline, go to Appearance -> Customize. Here, you will see an option for Site Identity. Click on that, and there you can upload your logo and enter your website name and tagline.
Site icone is a small logo that appears in the browser tabs. It should be the square.
Once you click the select logo, a window will open with two options: Upload and Media Library. It will open every time you need to use an image or video. The Upload option is to upload an image or video file from your computer, and the Media Library contains all the files you’ve already uploaded.
For now, I will upload a new logo and icon. I will also uncheck the Display Site Title and Tagline Option because we will display the logo instead, and then click the publish button.
3. Categories
Categories are created to organize posts with different topics. For example, if I’m creating a travel blog, I will create categories.
- North Pakistan
- Bloshtan
- Hmalias, India
And I can write blog posts that are related to that particular destination. To create blog posts categories, go to Dashboard -> Posts -> Categories.
Here you will see the list of all of your categories and also you can create new categories.
By default, there is one category, Uncategorized.
The category name is required. Other things, like the slug and description, can be skipped, but I highly recommend writing a description for your category.
4. Menu
The menu is the most important element of a website; it helps users navigate through the website. I will create a menu with my categories and one Contact Us page.
To create a Menu, go to Appearance -> Menus.
For the first time, as we don’t have a menu WordPress suggested us a menu with two Items Home and Sample page, Sample page is just a demp page by default, so we will delete it,
I will keep the home button and click the Create Menu button. We can remove any item from the menu by clicking the arrow on the right and then clicking remove.
Once the menu is created, it shows posts, pages, and categories on the left side that we can add to our menu. From here, I will add three categories I created and one Contact Us page.
Remember, we have to create pages and categories first. Then, they will show up here, and you can change the order of menu items by dragging them.
Make sure to check the Primary option for location so the menu will be at the top of our website’s header, and then click save menu to save it.
WOW, Our Header is ready 😉
5. Copyrights credits
By default, every theme mentions its name in the footer as copyright credits. You can update that by going to Aprearance -> Customize. Here, you need to find the footer credits option to update the credits.
I’m not giving you a process because every theme has different options, but you can easily find them in the menu.
How to Create a Page
Making pages in wordpress website much easier go to Pages in left menu, There might be already a couple of page created by wordpress you can delete them by hoving over them and click Trash button.
To create a new page, click the Add Page button at the top.
Here, you are required to enter the title, and then you can add paragraphs, images, videos, or whatever you want to add to the page by clicking the black plus ( + ) button.
Once you’re done, click the publish button, and your page will be live. Alternatively, you can save a draft that will be saved to your website but not visible to visitors, which you can then edit and publish later.
How to Create a blog post
Now, Let’s come to the most important thing, which is obviously blog posts. Just like pages, we also create blog posts, but we need to add a little more to them.
To create posts, click on Posts in the left menu and then Add New.
Just like the page, enter the Title of your blog post and enter your content in the form of text, images, videos, or whatever you want.
Once you’re done writing posts, we have to add a small description of the blog post, such as what the user will get in that blog post, Add the post to a category, and also add a featured image.
You will see all these options in the right-side menu. Click the page button. Once you have filled out all of them, click the publish button, and your post will be live, or you can save it as a draft.
Website is ready
Congrats, now your website is ready. Keep publishing your blog posts.
Grow Blog
Now, let’s find out how to get the audience to our blog.
There are two ways to get the audience: Paid and Free. We will use the free one because we want to earn, not spend. Free ways to gain traffic include,
SEO
SEO is most important thing in a post, SEO includes the best prectices to follow so the content is more useful for the user and search engines will display our website. It’s like a must-thing.
Learn how to do SEO or Contact our SEO Expert
Social Media Sharing
This is a method where we share our post link on social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., so users can find it and visit our blog post.
Email Sharing
It’s called email marketing, where we share these articles to the people on their email.
Setup Google Search Console
Google search console is a website where we submit our website so Google can see it and display it in the search results; we submit a sitemap to google, which includes the links of all of our posts and pages.
By default, WordPress generates a sitemap for your website, which you can access at your-dmain.com/wp-sitemap.xml, and you can submit this sitemap to Google,
To setup the search console, we will need to setup a plugin, which we can add by going to Plugins -> Add New
Just like themes, we can also search for plugins and then install and activate them. To set up the search console, we will install and activate the Site Kit plugin by Google. It’s an official Google plugin.
Once activated, you will see it in the left menu. Open it and sign in with your Google account. It includes some easy steps, like next, next, next ;-).
Once completed the process of signing in, Go to searh console website to submit the sitemap.
To submit the sitemap. follow these steps in Google search Cosole, Click on sitemaps in left menu and enter just end part of your sitemap like if your sitemap is example.com/wp-sitemap.xml just enter wp-sitemap.xml and click submit button.
And that’s it. Your blog posts are now accessible to Google, and you’re ready to shine.
Start Earning with AdSense
There are multiple ways ti earn through blog the most important method is AdSense ads, To setup adsense go to Site Kit -> Dashboard -> Monetization and there click connect now button.
Follow the on-screen sign-in process that will require you to allow Site Kit to access AdSense with your Google account, and you will be back to the Site Kit page after that, Now Click Add Site to AdSense.
It will take you to the Adsense website and show this popup, which you can see in the screenshot below. Click on the save button.
Here, you will see the option to verify the website’s ownership. AdSense wants to verify if you really own this website, so It gives you a code to paste into the website homepage file. Click the copy code, leave this tab open, and come back to the Website dashboard.
Now we need a plugin to manage ads on our website. As you might not familiar with code we will use a plugin Advanced Ads, Install and activate this plugin by going to Plugins -> Add New.
Once the Plugin is activated navigate to Advanced Ads in the left menu, and click Ads,
You will see a screen here. You have to choose the Adsense Option and paste the code we copied from the Adsense website into the box below.
Go Back to Adsense and then click on the Check box that says I have pasted the code, and then click the the verify button.
You will see this scring that says Your Site is verified click next and press request review button, Now Site is submit for review adsense will take 1-3 weeks to review website.
That’s all you’re ready to shine. Share your experience about this post in the review section, and I would love to read them and follow your feedback.
Important: Make sure you do On-Page SEO of your blog posts that is crucial to rank higher on Google, Check out our SEO Related blog posts or hire and SEO expert.
