How To Start A Blog On WordPress – And Why

This post was most recently updated on August 1st, 2016

I’ll show you how to start a blog on WordPress – and why.

If you’re a total newbie to blogging, you may think you already know why you want to start a blog.

If you’re already blogging, even if you’ve been blogging a long time… you’d be wrong to think this is just for beginners.

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There’s a reason for experienced bloggers to start a blog on WordPress, too.

It’s all about the “why.”

Why Do Newbies Want To Know How To Start A Blog On WordPress?

If you’ve never blogged before, here are some great reasons to get started.

• You’ll get to meet and connect with people who share your topic, your niche, and most of all, your passion.
• You have an opportunity to post blog articles that showcase your expertise in your field.
• You can broadcast to your readers, and indeed, to the whole world, that you are an authority in your field.
• You are able to demonstrate your leadership through the content you post on your blog.

Now everyone has a different reason for wanting to blog.

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Here are some typical ones.

• Build a business through your blog.
• Make contacts with prospects and attract clients and customers.
• Sell both digital and physical products on your blog. Just put links to the sales pages, and give people a reason to click to learn more, or to buy.
• Offer your own services. Maybe you’re a writer, a realtor, a therapist or anything else. Write blog posts that demonstrate your special skills, or show your professionalism. Give people good reason to hire you.

Some people use their blog to get a job, or build their career. They write articles that demonstrate their special talents and skills to attract potential employers, or to link to on employment applications.

Many people start blogging simply to connect with people who share similar interests, and to socialize with them, even.

Others blog to be part of a professional or specialize community from which they can learn more. They get to communicate with leaders in their field or niche, and to build relationships with them.

So, if you’re just starting to blog, you need to spend some time considering “why” you want to blog in the first place.

Now, I know that newbie bloggers usually rush past the “why” because they’re so anxious to get to the “how” of blogging.

Trust me, though, as someone who coaches bloggers… a great many of them spend 6 months and more going in the wrong direction with their blog, all because they never answered the “why” question.

Then, come find out, they either have to restructure their whole blog, or they’re ready to just start a new one altogether.

So, address the issue of “why” you want to start a blog sooner rather than later.

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It will help you get off on the right foot, and keep moving in the right direction.

If you skip this step now, you’ll have to work a lot harder later on to get things on track.

Why Do Experienced Bloggers And Marketers Want To Know How To Start A Blog On WordPress?

There are lots of good reasons for experienced, even highly successful bloggers to want to start a new blog.

One of the common reasons is something I alluded to above.

A good many bloggers don’t really know why they’re blogging when they first start out, then later, they finally come to terms with it.

But it’s often too late to salvage their blog as it is, so they decide to abandon it and just start a new one altogether.

Their new blog is created to be more in line with what they finally figured out is their purpose for blogging.

They use it to reinvent themselves.

One blogger, for instance, might have built her blog around SEO (search engine optimization) techniques, but now decides to create an entirely new blog that focuses on social media, instead.

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So, not only does she want to start a new blog, she has decided to use it as a launchpad for an entirely new personal brand.

She no longer wants to be viewed as an SEO expert (using this example), but now she has decided to become a social media expert.

So, it’s time to start a new blog, a new identity, a new personal brand, and essentially… a whole new business.

There are other reasons for starting a new blog, too.

Here are some of them.

Broaden your brand… specialize

Sometimes, a blogger might want to expand their personal brand into new areas.

So, maybe you’ve been blogging about video marketing. Now, you want to show people how to actually produce their videos. That’s a topic that’s related to video marketing, but creating and producing videos are really two different topics.

You might do both things on your main blog.

But you might prefer to start a new blog that is specifically about video production.

That gives you an opportunity to broaden your brand from a video marketing expert, to a production and marketing expert.

While you have two different blogs, you could cross promote them, driving traffic from one to another.

By having two different blogs instead of one, you can drive more clearly targeted traffic to each one.

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Introduce your business or service

Sometimes, a blogger wants to introduce a new business or service aspect of their blog by opening a new blog.

Using the example I just gave you, it might be a good idea to start a new blog to offer your video production services or specialized training.

It’s not always the best idea to build your commercial brand on a blog that is mainly educational or informative.

You could set up a different blog for that purpose, yet, as I said, you can cross reference each blog on the other.

Become more personal

Sometimes people want to set up a new blog in order to have a personal connection with content of their main blog.their readers.
I know some very expert and successful bloggers, who don’t want to talk about their family dog, or the vacation they just took on their professional blog.

They set up a separate blog that features their personal life, adventures, opinions and rantings. Then they invite readers on their “professional” blog, to go to their personal blog. That helps them build closer relations with their readers, without detracting from the professionalism of their main blog.

Build a “Money Blog”

One of the big reasons I’ve seen experienced bloggers start a new blog is because they want to create a “money blog” separate from their educational, informational or personally branded blog.

So, you might have been blogging about video marketing.

Now, you want to start promoting products and services related to video marketing. But you don’t want to turn your branded blog into a commercial site.

So, you need to create a new blog.

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Most commonly, you’d probably want to create a blog that serves as…

…an affiliate site. You might write reviews about products, and offer them for sale on an affiliate site.

…a membership site. You could turn a new blog into a membership site where you charge people for information you give them on an ongoing basis. For instance, you might have a membership site to show people advanced video marketing methods. This could be a natural outgrowth of your main informational blog about video marketing.

… a services site. Using the same example, you might want to produce videos for people, or coach them to produce their own videos. You could offer these services to targeted traffic on a special site that promotes them.

How To Start A Blog On WordPress

So, the hard part is knowing “why” you want to start your first blog, or a new additional blog.

The easy part is “how” which, ironically, is what a lot of folks think is the hard part… and it’s why they don’t do it.

But the “how to start a blog” part is really a very simple process.

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Here it is:

Get a hosting plan. I like Blue Host best.

Buy a domain name for your blog. I always buy my domains from my blog host.

Call your host and ask them to install WordPress on your new blog.

When I create a new domain, instead of doing the WordPress installation myself, I just call Hostgator and ask them to do it. They’re very easy to work with, and they do it with no hassles. A few minutes later, I have my WordPress blog!

Choose a theme and start designing your blog.

Honestly, I rarely do this part myself. But it’s easy enough to just go on Fiverr (https://www.fiverr.com/) and search for someone who designs WordPress blogs. It won’t cost much at all, and you can find very competent web designers there.

You can also go to Elance (https://www.elance.com/) or elsewhere find a WordPress designer, but they usually charge more to do the same thing.

There are other places to go for designers, of course, but I’ve always had good results with Fiverr, so that’s my suggestion.

Select the best plugins.

If you tell your designer what you want to achieve with your blog, he/she will undoubtedly be able to set your blog up with some basic plugins that will work for you.

Or you can figure it out yourself by just doing a Google search for top WordPress plugins, and putting some research time into it.

Add great content.

Now you’re set, you are at the fun part.

This is what you’ve been waiting for, right?

I mean, you have to decide “why” you want to start a new blog, but it all gets down to this part.

So dig in and have fun with it!

Start adding valuable content for your readers, and you’ve got your new blog!

There are many blogging platforms, but I believe that WordPress is definitely the best to use. It’s certainly the most user friendly.

Once you get the hang of it, you’ll find that you can set up new blogs pretty easily, and as often as often as you find the need to.

So that’s my shorthand version of how to start a blog on WordPress – and why.

Are you starting a blog for the first time?

If you’re an experienced blogger, have you thought of setting up a new blog?

Are you clear on “why” you want to start a blog on WordPress at this time?

Please take a moment to shoot me a comment below.

I’d love to hear what you think about this, and don’t forget to share this on your social sites so all your friends can learn how to start a blog on WordPress – and why.

-Donna

• Bio
• Blogging Magic

Donna Merrill

Donna is a well known blogger and creator of "Blogging Magic" - an intensive guide to blogging. "Blogging Magic" is for beginners who are trying to figure out how to bring their blogs to life with tons of visits, comments and social media interaction. It's even for advanced bloggers looking to reach new levels of authority and engagement with their audience.