Listicles seem to be popular and I read somewhere that they get a lot of clicks. My SEO tool tells me I should have the title of the page in the first paragraph, so hopefully how to start a blog in 9 steps will change your life!
* This is an affiliate link. If you purchase a product or service using this link, I get a commission at no cost to you.
I am not a lawyer or accountant. Nothing in this article should be considered legal, tax, or financial advice.
Get Rich!
If you don’t plan on using your blog to make money, skip this section.
I am not an accountant or tax attorney. This is not financial, tax, or legal advice. I do know that the way you make money can have tax and legal consequences. Do your own research and get advice from a professional in your locality regarding your chosen method(s) of monetizing your site.
Making money from a website isn’t a get rich quick scheme. I’m not trying to discourage you from trying, I am telling you it is harder than blogs about blogs would have you believe. It’s certainly possible to make big bucks blogging, but according to this Lifehacker article, 70% of blogs bring in less than $500 per month.
There are several approaches to making money from a website.
Advertising. There are a few different payment models. Payment per view or per click. There are a few ways to do this. You can find sponsors that pay you to run ads for them or you can sign up for an ad network that acts as a middle man. With an ad network, you place some code on your site and the ad network handles the rest. The more reputable ad networks have approval processes. Getting approval boils down to having a trustworthy and useful site. They have rules too. Breaking their rules can get you permanently banned.
Commission. This is usually from affiliate programs. You sign up for an affiliate program and then place an ads or links on your site to theirs. If someone clicks on your link and buys something from them, you get a small commission. They don’t have to buy right away. If they go back to it within a certain amount of time, you will still get a commission. If you go this route, you have to disclose it. If you are in the US, the FTC requires it.
Sell stuff. This can be subscriptions where subscribers won’t see ads, consulting services, digital downloads, books, etc.
Begging. You ask for donations and post a link or form that makes it easy for people to do so.
Choose a Domain Name
Your domain is what someone would type into their browser’s address bar to get to your site. I.e. https://tylersguides.com
If you don’t care about having a subdomain, this won’t cost you anything. A subdomain is where you would be something.example.com instead of example.com. If you are planning on making any money, I would get your own domain. It doesn’t cost much, gives you more flexibility, and leaves a more business like impression.
Expect to pay around $15 per year for domain registration, and another $15 per year for a privacy service. You probably want the privacy. Once you register the domain, anyone can look up your phone number and address in the Internet Corperation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) whois database. Privacy services offered by most hosting providers and registrars provide their information for the database and will contact you on the behalf of people trying to contact you about your domain.
If you aren’t sure if a domain is available, I recommend using the ICANN whois tool to check domain availability.
Take Care of Business
I am not a corporate attorney, so this is not legal advice. I am merely sharing observations based on personal experience.
In my locality, I had to get a business license. There are different types of business structures. A few options in the US are Sole Proprietorship, LLC, Partnership, C Corporation, and S Corporation. The structure you choose will have different up front costs, tax consequences, and legal consequences. Do your research and choose carefully.
The exact process varies by locality and type. In my locality, I had to do three things.
- Since I run this site out of my home, I had to obtain a home business zoning permit.
- I had to register a fictitious name. Unless your domain name is going to be firstname-lastname.com, it sounds like you have to do this. I found this post about blog names by Rachel Brenke, who is an attorney, to be helpful. In my area, operating a business under a fictitious name that hasn’t been registered has some hefty penalties. It was a cheap and simple way to make sure I don’t end up in criminal court.
- Register my business.
Registering as a business was more time consuming than expensive. The whole process cost about $120. I had to go to four local government offices and fill out a form or two at each one. The forms were pretty straightforward. Filling out the forms and going to the offices only took about half a day. The most time consuming part was researching what I needed to do.
Choose a Platform
You have three options here.
- A Content Management System (CMS)
- Hand Code
- A service provider such as Blogger or Wix.
A CMS is software that allows you to manage common types of websites, such as blogs, with little technical expertise.
Popular CMSs:
Wikipedia has a great list of CMSs.
This site runs on WordPress.
If you choose a CMS, I recommend learning a little bit of HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Even with a CMS that handles most things for you, understanding the basics will help. The theme this site uses, Iconic One, requires CSS for customizations. W3Schools has some great tutorials and references.
Choose a Hosting Service
Hosting can be free, but you will probably end up with a subdomain. If you want free hosting, you might be interested in wordpress.com or blogger.com. If you want your own domain instead of a subdomain, you will still have to pay for domain registration. I have seen free domain registration offered by some services if you sign up for a year of their non-free hosting services. You are also limited to the application provided by the service.
Another option is shared hosting. Shared hosting is where your site is on the same server as other sites. Computer hardware is powerful enough that this shouldn’t cause performance problems. Most hosting services offer an introductory rate and require longer commitments for lower rates. After the introductory rate expires, expect to pay $7-$20 per month depending on what kind of service you need. With shared hosting, you will have more flexibility. You will be able do things like create a wiki site, message boards, and create hand coded pages. Shared hosting services often provide email hosting as well, so you will be able setup email accounts on your custom domain.
There are other options such as virtual private servers and dedicated servers. These are by far the most flexible options and will give you the best performance. These tend to cost more and require significant skill.
There are tons of hosting providers that provide various types of services. Shop around and find something that meets your needs. Hosting services tend to have well paying affiliate marketing programs. If you sign up through someone’s affiliate link, they get a commission at no cost to you. Keep this in mind when reading reviews for hosting providers. If you search the web for the name of a hosting provider followed by sucks, you are likely to find complaints about all of them. I just read a blog post slamming one hosting service while promoting others with affiliate links.
This site uses shared hosting on Bluehost*. I took my time and read lots of reviews, negative and positive about various providers. I wasn’t sure where I would end up going with this site, so I wanted a hosting service that would be flexible. I chose Bluehost because at the time the overall package I chose was the best value for me at the time. I haven’t had any problems with them for the 2 years this site has been running. Other than saving a few bucks to get the introductory rates from a different service, I have no reason to switch.
I think low cost shared hosting is the best bet for a new site. It isn’t prohibitively expensive, it requires little technical expertise, and it gives you a lot of options.
Write Policies
I am not a lawyer, so this is not legal advice.
If you haven’t heard of it, search the web for the GDPR and how it would apply to your site. It is a privacy law that has stiff penalties for violators. If you need help, consult with an attorney.
In order to get approved for any sort of advertising or affiliate network, you are going to need a disclaimer page and privacy policy. To write mine, I used a variety of sources.
I did three things.
- I read the respective pages of other sites of various sizes.
- I used a privacy policy generator.
- I read the template on gdpr.eu
Design Your Site
I don’t have the expertise to say much here. Your options are fumble through it like I did or hire a designer. If your design is bad, you will have a hard time getting approved by ad networks and users will avoid your site.
Before doing what everyone else is doing, read this article by a former Apple employee and author of Design of Everyday Things*. I agree with the author. From my experience, user interfaces were the best in the mid to late 2000’s. I don’t see why it isn’t possible to have aesthetically pleasing, fast, and usable designs.
If you use a CMS, this will be a lot easier than hand coding. WordPress has tons of themes you can install through an easy to use interface that will do most of the work for you. Some themes, such as the one I use, require modifying CSS to customize them.
If you need help, consider hiring a designer. If I were to hire one, I would start my search on Upwork. If you click on one of the designer profiles, the page will show you the cost of some of their projects.
Create Great Content
If only it were easy. This advice is very common on blogs about blogging.
I don’t feel I have the expertise to give actionable advice, but I can recommend a few books that I have found helpful.
Steven King’s On Writing* is a book telling the story of how he became a famous author with loads of practical advice along the way. It is both informative and entertaining. I can’t recommend it enough.
Elements of Style by William Strunk* is a concise book with guidelines and examples that will drastically improve your writing.
Get Traffic
There are multiple ways to get traffic, but search engine traffic, in my opinion, is the most important.
There are tons of guides out there covering search engine optimization (SEO). The way search engines rank results seems to change every few years. I advise you to read up on this every few months or so.
If you are using a CMS, make sure you have a way to use meta tags. Meta tags are part of a web page that are invisible to the user that search engines use to understand it. With WordPress, SEO plugins can handle this.
Sign your site up for Bing’s and Google’s webmaster consoles. Both provide useful data. You can see what search terms your pages show up on, where they rank on those searches, and how often people click on them. They will also allow you to submit pages for indexing so your pages show up in their search results sooner.
Getting ranked high in search results seems to be a popularity contest. Besides your meta tags, search engines use the number of links on other sites to rank your page. Search the web for an SEO guide if you want to go down a rabbit hole about search rankings.
You can also use various types of social media. This isn’t limited to the big players. Becoming active on forums relating to your topic is a good way to build your reputation. Most will allow you to post links to your site if it is relevant to the discussion. Be careful with this. If you start a bunch of threads advertising yourself, they will probably delete the threads and ban you.
Summary
Hopefully this article helps point any aspiring website operators in the right direction. I would have loved this when I was starting out. Depending on which services you use and licensure requirements, expect to spend $100-$500 at minimum. If you hire a designer, accountant, or attorney, expect to spend much more.
The 9 steps are:
- Get Rich!
- Choose a Domain Name
- Take Care of Business
- Choose a Platform
- Choose a Hosting Service
- Write Policies
- Design Your Site
- Write Great Content
- Get Traffic
* This is an affiliate link. If you purchase a product or service using this link, I get a commission at no cost to you.