Creating a Blog (Part I): Where and How to Begin

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If you’re just starting a blog and don’t know where or how to begin, I suggest you take your time and read this article. In this post I will point out the basics you need to pay attention to when starting a blog. I will make this post really short and simple for you.

Niche or Topic

First thing you need to do, is decide what you want to blog about. Find a niche or topic that you’re comfortable with, something you know a lot about or that interests you.

Find a topic that will keep you inspired to write a blog.

Domain and Name

Ideally your blog name and domain name should be the same, while also telling the topic of your blog. Most of the time this is not possible, because many domains are already taken. When choosing a name for your blog and domain, I suggest it at least resembles the topic or niche that your blog will be about. It will help ranking higher on search engine results.

And if I didn’t make it clear enough – you should get a domain name.

Don’t have your blog hosted on Blogger or something. More on that in some future post.

Blog Hosting

As I mentioned above, don’t host your blog on free hosting a la Blogger or any other free host. Not that I have anything against Blogger, but having yourname.blogger.com just doesn’t look very serious.

From my own experience I can guarantee you that you get what you pay for.

That being said, I can recommend you Inmotion hosting. This is where all my blogs are hosted.

Blogging Platform and Theme

This is probably personal preference. I use Wordpress blogging platform. It is extremely easy to use, the community offers thousands of additional plugins to improve your blog and there are literally thousands of free and premium themes.

I use Thesis theme on all my blogs, because it’s simple and efficient right out of the box, and it offers infinite customization possibilities.

But whether you go for free or paid Theme, here’s a tip. Forget about custom design for now. You can change that later on. Rather focus on content.

Stay tuned for Part II, where I will go into more detail.

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McKnight

Nice little guide you've got setup there. Maybe you should have mentioned how newbie bloggers should think about what kind of hosting they need. Not to overkill on the bandwidth for example, throw away money. It's better to start cheap then upgrade your way up to bigger hosting plans, in my opinion. There is no company that will refuse a client going from cheap hosting to a bit more expensive, even if they don't offer the feature directly. Cheers!
Marko

Excellent point, Gordon. I will have to cover this in "Part II", I guess. :)