BLOG SETUP GUIDE[HOW TO SETUP A BLOG STEP-BY-STEP 2023]

Setting up your blog as a beginner may look like rocket science especially if you are not too technically inclined.

But trust me when I tell you that you can set up your blog easily and start making money. How? Just keep reading to find out how.

Hello my dear readers, In today’s post, I will walk you through the step-by-step process of setting up your blog the right way and getting it up and running properly.

But before we get started, you must know that having a professional good looking blog will cost you some money.

This is the part some people don’t like to hear, but one thing they fail to realize is that anything that makes you earn money is a business. And you need money to start and run a business.

I see some newbies who really want to make money from blogging businesses looking for free alternatives to use like blogger.com or the free WordPress.com platform.

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t say using a blogger or free WordPress blog is a bad idea. But if you are really serious about blogging, you need to understand that first impressions matter a lot.

You don’t need people visiting your blog for the first time and seeing your blog looking so unprofessional or looking amateur. They will exit immediately and you’ll never see them ever again.

If you are considering using a free blogger platform to start your blogging business, then just know that you are not fully ready to get started on the right path just yet.

Because you will have to use the Blogger Blogspot extension as your domain name.  For example, let’s say your blog name is Petcarezone. When using the blogger.com platform, it will look like Petcarezone.blogspot.com instead of Petcarezone.com, Petcarezone.net, etc if you invest money to get your own custom domain name to self-host your blog.

You can also buy a domain name (Address to your website or blog people type on the web browser to visit your blog or website) and have it linked to blogger.com  and also a custom theme design will also make your blog look professional.

With this option, you won’t have to pay for hosting forever. But you will have to be careful and observe Google’s policy for bloggers using their free platform before you will wake up one morning and see that your blog has been deleted without any prior notice. 

So in other to avoid that, I will advise you to buy your own domain name and hosting plan. 

You can get a .com domain extension for like $9.58 for a year. And a hosting plan which goes for $1.98/month which you’ll have to pay for either 6 months or 1 year with namecheap.com or namesilo.

This is the only investment you will have to make, and before a whole year runs out, you should have made a lot of money from your blog if you take it very seriously and put in the work. 

Namecheap and namesilo are the domain and hosting service provider I use because of many reasons like 99.9% uptime ensuring your blog don’t go offline unnecessarily, good storage space, good support, etc. 

So if you are ready to invest some money to set up a professional blog, let’s dive straight into it and get started. 

ALSO, READ ===>> HOW TO GET APPROVED BY GOOGLE ADSENSE 100% WORKING GUIDE

Step 1: Get A Domain Name and hosting plan from your favorite hosting service provider. 

Me, I use Namecheap and namesilo because of their quality and affordable domain name and hosting plan. 

Before you go creating and register a domain name, you first need to figure out the niche (A field or area of focus) you want to blog about. 

I always advise newbies to figure out the niches they have passion about and can write good content on.  Because blogging is all about giving out value to your readers. 

If you are passionate about business, technology, health, weight loss, etc. Then creating a domain name that reflects what your niche is all about, which makes it more focused and easy for you to run in the long term. 

Let’s say the niche you’re passionate about is health. Your domain name can be something like livehealthywise.com which is currently available to register as of when this post was written.

To buy a domain name just either visit Namecheap, namesilo, or any other hosting provider of your choice. Click on the domain, search the domain box, and type in your preferred domain name.

If the domain you typed in the search box is available to be registered, you will see it with different extensions which you can add to the cart. if it’s taken, it will be indicated and you’ll need to slightly change the name.

 

 

After adding your selected domain name to the cart, the next thing to do is to go over to the hosting tap. Click on it and screw down to shared hosting on Namecheap.

You can start with the starter plan which is more than enough to run your blog smoothly. Once you click on “Get Started” you will see the section where you need to select an already existing domain name or select a new one.

With NameCheap, they will automatically sum up the fee for both the new domain you added to the cart and the hosting plan for one year which looks like this in the images below.

Click on “Confirm Order” and make payment. You’ll have a lot of payment options like paying with your debit and credit card, Paypal, bitcoin, etc. If you are from the USA and may have payment limitations, I’ll advise you to make use of either PayPal or Bitcoin to complete your payment.

 

 

Once payment is done, you have to wait for a little so your hosting and domain will propagate fully and you will receive all your hosting and domain credentials you can make use of in signing into your Cpanel and doing some installation.

Step 2: Install WordPress Into Your Cpanel.

After you’ve successfully placed an order for your domain name and a hosting plan, you should receive your hosting details and Cpanel login details from the hosting providers you bought from.

So the next step is to login into your hosting Cpanel and install WordPress. Someone once asked me what WordPress and Cpanel were. If you also don’t know what WordPress is, then I’ll tell you what WordPress is right now.

 What Is WordPress?

WordPress is a content management system (CMS) software used to build different kinds of websites and weblogs which don’t require any technical know-how or coding.

With WordPress CMS Software, you don’t even need to know anything about coding in other to be able to use it to build your own websites and blogs. All the coding aspect has been done for you. All you need is just to install the software to your hosting Cpanel and customize it to your test.

While a Cpanel is just the backend of your hosting account where all the admin activities are administered. Now that you know what WordPress and Cpanel are, let’s forge ahead.

This is what the backend of your Cpanel looks like. Screw down to the software section where you will see an installer called softaculous installer or in some other hosting providers you may see “installation application” whichever comes first.

 

Click on it and select WordPress from the options provided. On the next page, your domain name will pop out. Under the setting, choose administration USERNAME, PASSWORD, EMAIL, WEBSITE TITLE, AND WEBSITE TAGLINE Make sure you write them down before you click on install.

Once you’ve clicked on install, WordPress will be installed in your hosting Cpanel and the login credentials will be generated automatically which should look like this 👇👇

www.livehealthywise.com/==>>>>> The frontend of your blog people will see when they visit your blog
www.livehealthywise.com/wp-admin/ ==>>>> Your admin panel where you do all your backend activities
wordpress.org/support ===>> WordPress support. You don’t really need this.

To log into your WordPress back office, just visit here www.livehealthywise.com/wp-admin/ and enter the username and password you wrote down during the WordPress installation. This is what your WordPress self-hosted blog will look like.

 

Step 3: Install Theme And Plugins.

At This point, your blog is almost 65% ready to be launched. What you need to do now is to install some important plugins and themes that will make your blog run effectively, and look cool, appealing, and professional.

What Are Plugins And Themes?

Plugins are those extra tools installed into WordPress that perform different various functions so your blog can run smoothly without any hitch, while a theme is just like what brings out the design of your blog and make it look cool and professional to your blog visitors.

Actually, there are both free and paid plugins and themes out there. But as a newbie who is low on budget, you can get started with free themes.

Here is the list of free Plugins and Theme you can install on your blog👇👇

• Contact Form 7
• LuckyWP Table of Contents
• Rank Math SEO
• Real-Time Find and Replace
• Sassy Social Share
• Site Kit by Google
• SmartCrawl
• Smush

Recommended Theme To Install For Your Blog ===>>> Bam By ThemezHut

I won’t be able to start explaining what each of those plugins listed above is meant for. So I’ll leave that for you as an assignment to go research what function each of those plugins does. And let me know if you have any questions to ask.

I will show you how to install WordPress plugins and themes properly.

To install a plugin, all you have to do is login into your WordPress back office and find the plugins section below. See the image below.

 

 

Click on “PLUGINS” and click on Add “New Plugins” Then you can search for the plugins you need either by their exact names or using a keyword and click on the install button and activate it.

 

It’s that simple. You can follow this same process to install all the plugins listed above even with other plugins you may need to install in the future.

Installing your theme, it’s also very simple. Just follow these steps.

on your WordPress backend,  just locate “APPEARANCE” Once you point your cursor on it, you will see a drop-down with the theme section and others. Click on the theme which will take you to a page where you can search for any theme of your choice, install, and activate. See the screenshot below.

 

 

 

Now that your theme and plugins have been installed and activated, you can visit your blog front end to see the progress you have made. Click here the blog URL www.livehealthywise.com and you will see that changes have been applied and you are making progress.

 

Step 4: Customize Your WordPress Blog.

This is the final of setting up your blog. At this stage, all you need is to customize your blog like adding a logo, adding categories, adding pages like the about us page, contact us page, privacy policy page, etc.

I will not be able to go over the whole customization process, but basically, all the rest customization can be done in the Appearance section under Customize.

All you need is to take your time and go over each feature there under Customize to make your blog look exactly the way you want it to be.

 

Conclusion.

As you can see, setting up your own self-hosted WordPress blog is not as difficult as you may think. In fact, if you follow this my step by step guide properly, you will surely have your own blog setup properly.

If you have any issues along the way while setting up your blog, just send me an email or join our telegram channel so you can send me a message for assistance.

We have come to the end of this tutorial. Do you find his post helpful to you? if you do, kindly drop me a comment below to let me know how your experience was, also don’t forget to share this post with your family and friend using the share button above and at the sidebar.

Thanks for reading.