How to start a blog – 7 steps how to get started
I was pretty blue-eyed when my friend Julie and I decided to start a blog about us and our Midlife. Ha, who actually is interested in our story, who cares about us? We thought we had the greatest things to say about our midlife and women would need this information without doubt.
Nope, not really. We had to learn that if you decide to start a blog it is not about you, it is about what you can give your readers, what they are looking for, what information they need and are searching for on the Internet.
How to start a blog – 7 steps how to get started:
So if you decide to start a blog, brainstorm the following:
- the name of your blog
- what it is all about
- what are people searching for in your niche
- decide on a topic where you can sell, promote, give something
- how you want to make money with it like affiliate sales, sell your own products, courses, books, guides, inspiration…

So ok, but now that we made the decision what our blog was all about, we needed to know how to do this, how do you actually start a blog? Luckily Julie’s friend Debbie had some kind of experience and shared her tips with us
- Where to buy a domain name = she told us go with GoDaddy.com and that is what we did.
- Where to buy a blog theme = Pretty Darn Cute Design (but you can have it so much easier).
And then she said, just start making your blog and fill it with life. Ha, that was easier said than done.
Yes, we bought our domaine name (MidLifeWunder.com) and then bought our blog theme (Pretty Travel).
And now what? Now we actually had to add widgets and plugins and then they told me to change CSS files, php. files and all kinds of stuff I had never heard of in my whole life before.
But I wanted to get this going and activated my husband to help me. It wasn’t funny, because neither he nor me knew what we were doing. It was so frustrating that I wanted to give up – but well, somehow we made it through. It took us a long time to figure it out, it was exhausting.
How to start a blog the easier way
How to start a blog – 7 steps how to start the easier way
If you are considering starting a blog and making money with it, you have to know the following steps.
First – don’t make it about you! Make it about what people are searching for on Google, make sure you have an audience you can talk to for a long time. Don’t think Lifestyle covers everything, no, get yourself a niche where you are good at. The smaller the niche the better. If you want to blog about sports in general because you know a lot about it, go smaller. Decide on a niche, i.e. Volleyball, then Volleyball for girls – Volleyball for teenage girls.
You can go as small as possible if you know people are searching for certain terms, certain information about Volleyball for teenage girls, this right here is your audience.
Or do you know how to make a special craft item, can you share how to draw, how to make something special, can you share your Mom hacks, teach knitting, sewing….. Anything you are good at and passionate about.
Second thought should be, how can you monetize your blog? Can you sell patterns, maybe an Ebook, a course, a video, anything about how to do something. Can you become an affiliate for something valuable?
Third – You need to know what your big goal is, what to do with your blog, otherwise you are struggling a lot and wasting a lot of time. I did. It took me over a year to figure out what I actually wanted to do. It will take a lot of your time too if you don’t brainstorm all of these questions before you actually start blogging.
Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. When you click these links I may get a small commission. It won’t cost you anything, but it helps me to run this site. I only promote products and services that I think are great and helpful. Also, read my disclosure policy.
What can happen if you don’t do the first 3 steps?
My friend Julie dropped out after a short time blogging, I was on my own. I didn’t had a lot to say about midlife, I was the interior designer. So the name didn’t work for me anymore with what I had to say. I changed my name to ‘colorful designer’ and had to redirect all of my blog posts I had already written to the new blog domaine.
Well I didn’t know how to do that, I had somebody do it for me. That means you have costs and hassle to do this. Plus you have to buy a new domaine name.
So be sure you know what you want to talk about in your blog, it should reflect your name, it should fit to what you are offering.
Something like frugal-living, or mom-hacks, or home-decorating with (your name) …
- Make sure your name reflects what you are doing or has some kind of connection what you are talking about and is easy to remember.
- Make sure you pick a theme for your blog which is easy to navigate and has fast loading speed.
- Make sure, your blog reflects you, your passion, your colors and you don’t copy anyone else.
How to start a blog – A step by step guide:
Here are the tips you should consider when starting a blog with these 7 steps:
Domain Name
Check out GoDaddy or Namecheap for your domaine name.
Hosting
I switched from Bluehost to Siteground for faster speed and it is cheaper than Bluehost. So pick the right host from the beginning then there is no stress with switching hosts which can add a lot of stress to your daily tasks.
Chelsea is the owner of Her Paper Route and is awesome. She actually makes you your blog using a great theme for under $ 100.
Outsourcing this job is really worth the money especially if you have no clue what you are doing. Like me, when I started trying to set up my theme. Oh I was so frustrated and stressed out, but I didn’t know at the time that Chelsea existed. I would have gladly paid her doing this for me.
Check out what she has to offer, use it, because it will save you so much time and headaches.
And this is the link for you if you want to get your website going under $ 100 and get a lot of advice with it. Seriously, a no brainer if you want to get this going fast.
Website in a Box, Website Install, Premium Theme and more
Here are all of her courses you want to look at. A lot of great information and knowledge.
Search Engine Optimization
After you have your blog set up, got your name, decided on a logo and a tag line and you have some kind of an idea what you want to write about, learn SEO, which means Search Engine Optimization. You need to know how to do this in order to find your audience.
The easiest way to start knowing how to write blog posts with SEO (because you want traffic from Google going to your blog) is by educating yourself about SEO.
There are many free courses out there. Just search for SEO courses. Neil Patel /ubersuggest teaches you SEO, Income School teaches you SEO and also has a youtube channel if you prefer video, Stupid Simple SEO has a free class. Many Ebooks, courses, classes you will find when you search for SEO.
After you figured out how to write to your audience and you have some blog posts published, you need traffic going to your blog. You need people to read about what you have to say. So how do you market your blog? There are a couple of ways.
- SEO for organic searches from Google
- Pinterest search engine for visuals and so good for a lot of organic traffic
I bought Jennifer Makers course, applied all her tips and tricks and reached over 6 Million views in about 6 months.
If you do consistently what she teaches, you can reach over 1 Million views in a short amount of time. And with the views come the clicks to your blog, and this is what you are aiming for.
Pinterest Launch Plan Jennifer Maker
Start with Jennifer Makers Pinterest Course to get the idea about Pinterest.
Email subscribers
As soon as you have your blog set up and you are writing blog posts, you want your readers to subscribe to your email list. This is what you should start from the beginning. Collecting email addresses from your fans.
But how to do that?
Jennifer has over 500,000 subscribers! She teaches you how to get there with easy to follow steps. Her courses are very affordable and you need to invest in some basic courses to be able to know what you are doing and how to get subscribers.
Jennifer Maker list love quick start is where you start.
And Jennifer has another course which is called list love introduction to list building
Don’t miss this step, it is crucial to collect subscribers if you want to sell anything to your audience.
Flodesk email subscriber forms
In order to get subscribers you need forms on you blog your readers can subscribe to. As soon as you have collected their email address you can send a freebie, an offer, your newsletters and start offering your products, or send them to your blog post.
It will be automated. The best deal is Flodesk. Flodesk is very affordable, also after you hit the magic number of 1,000 subscribers. This is when it start getting expensive. Flodesk keeps the cost of $ 19 monthly, no matter how many subscribers you have.
If you want to start for free, you can check out MailChimp or Mailerlite. They are free of charge until you hit 1,000 subscribers, then the game changes. Also Convertkit is a great email marketing deal, until you hit 1,000 subscriber. And this can go pretty fast if you know what you are doing and you have taken Jennifers List Love course.
Mediavine and Monumetric are almost out of reach for beginners (to apply for Mediavine you need 50,000 sessions a month). Monumetric charges $ 100 to start and it takes them a long time to get back to you when you apply. Adsense is the platform most beginner bloggers start with, but it is not good advice to do so. First Adsense slows your site down, second, the ads are completely irrelevant to your blog post, and third, you will make Pennies.
Therefore I recommend aiming for Ezoic.
You can make a decent amount of money without slowing your site down. Their customer service is amazing, they supply a Dashboard where you can control the number of your ads and the placement of the ads. You have full control over your site, how you want it to look. This was a very important point for me.
I started with 8 ads on mobile and slowed it down to 4 ads, which I think is fine for the word count of my articles which is around 1,500.
Easy to install and great customer support from Ezoic makes it easy to decide.
In my first month I made around $300 with 40,000 page views. This is the first steady revenue I am making next to affiliate marketing and selling my own products. If you are interested, here is my link for more information:
Here is my link if you want to check it out> EZOIC
More great tips on how to start a blog – 7 steps how to get started
Cate Rosales has a free course on How to start blogging, which gives you much more insights about what you should know.
Learn how to do affiliate marketing as soon as you can suggest products or write a review about a product.
Learn how to make Pinterest images really cute, so people will actually click on your pins to check them out and go to your blog.
Learn how to write a blog post the right way. How should you space paragraphs, how to spread your keywords, where to put images, how many images, how many words should a blog post have, where to link at, …
So take as many free courses as possible to learn as much as possible and to find out if you are on the right path.
But don’t forget, it will not happen overnight, blogging takes consistency until you build some domaine authority, until Google actually shows you in the searches. Your ultimate goal is to get on Page 1 – this is when it gets exciting.
Summary of ‘how to start a blog – 7 steps how to get started
These are your first essential steps if you are considering starting a blog. Read as much as you can and educate yourself what you want to do and how to do it. But these tips are the first ones you really should concentrate on if you want to get somewhere.
There are many more steps to come, but first you have to nail these steps.
Don’t get overwhelmed, you can do it if you stay focused and work every day for at least 1 to 2 hours. Don’t let yourself fool you with titles like “How I made $5,000 in the first month” – this is not the rule, but would be like a lottery win.
If you want to check out how my blog is categorized and looks by using the Pretty Travel Theme from Pretty Darn Cute Design, you can see it here at colorfuldesigner.com.
Want to remember this post “How to start a blog – 7 steps how to get started”? Pin this image to your favorite Pinterest board:

I wish I would have know about outsourcing before I got started! I’m a historian, so techie stuff is NOT my niche. I’ve made it so much harder than it needed to be, haha!
Morgan, yes the same for me. I wish I would have known this before I started setting up my blog. I wasted so much time doing this.