Thinking about starting a blog and got no idea where to start from? Do not worry as we are here to ease your tension. The first and foremost way to start up a blog is to get yourself a domain and hosting. For some beginners, you might be confused as to what these two terms mean. To clear your confusion, a domain is actually the location of your website or blog. You might know something as “google.com”. For Google, that is its site location. A domain basically represents your website and points the internet user to its IP address. A web hosting stores your blog or website on the internet. Web hosting companies provide space on their server and internet connectivity in their data centers.
For blogging, most people may recommend WordPress hosting in Pakistan as WordPress is known for holding over 30% of websites on the internet today. This is because of it’s friendly interface and easy to use dashboard. The point is that setting up a blog with WordPress is not difficult anymore as you can find various video tutorials now to help you out. Even more now, you can easily get WordPress hosting in Pakistan from almost any Web host company. Let us now get into details of how exactly to start a successful blog in 2021.
Decide the niche of your blog
To start your blog, you need to be clear as to what kind of content you will be running on it. This depends on your area of interest for example sports, health, lifestyle, travel, music, food/cooking, personal, everyday news, entertainment etc. Your blog needs to stay in one direction of your interest. This is known as the Niche; your area of interest. You might not want your blog to look unorganized with posting a health article after a news one. Certainly this will not appeal to the people therefore considering this step is important.
Get a domain and hosting from a suitable platform
Next step is to find yourself a suitable platform to get a domain and web hosting. This is the most important step of all as without it, you cannot create the foundation of your blog. Your domain name must be catchy and unique but at the same time easy to read and pronounce as you would want the people to memorize it as soon as they read it. The web hosting is required to store your website under its unique address and then connect the people to it on the internet. There are a number of hosting websites you can visit today that offer different types of hosting plans including WordPress hosting (that is if you want to build your blog on WordPress). Examples of these web host companies are SilkHost, BlueHost, DreamHost, HostGator. These are a few well known ones.
When choosing your hosting plan, do consider the following factors: 99.9% uptime, good bandwidth and customer support. You can always get a few add-ons like free website builder, SSL certification and even a free domain for the initial first year. After a few steps and a few clicks, you will register your hosting and domain in no time.
Setting up your blog
Setting up your blog is the next exciting step. You will be required to download a software platform where you are going to start developing your blog. You can simply do this through one click installation on almost all web host providers, for example if you choose WordPress as your website developer, then you will find an option of one click WordPress installer on your web host company’s page. After this step comes the easy part where you choose a suitable template for your blog and then further customize it according to your preferences. Change colours, add plugins to make it look more attractive. Decide accordingly what pages you are going to include. Having a blog page, contact page and about page will give your blog more legitimacy so do consider adding them.
Get your blog indexed on search engines if you want to pop up in people’s search results. So make sure you get indexed on Google by simply submitting your blog sitemap to Google Search Console. This will also play an important role in updating you with the statistics on the traffic your blog generates.
You might as well spend some time on creating your blog logo and then start brainstorming your blog topics. Use trendy topics and keywords in your articles or content to get more views and generate traffic. Add pictures and don’t forget SEO optimization. This may also help you in monetizing your blog sooner or later.