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How to start a blog with WordPress

How to Start a Blog with WordPress

Learn how to start a blog using WordPress by following this super easy step-by-step guide that covers both hosted and self-hosted blogs.

WordPress is the world's most popular blogging platform and powers approximately one third of all websites on the Internet.

WordPress Pricing

WordPress has a completely free Web hosting plan and a range of cost-effective paid plans to suit your blogging needs.

  • Personal

    Best for Personal Use

    $4/month

    Add some personality to your website with a custom domain and access to 24/7 support.

  • Premium

    Best for Freelancers

    $8/month

    Build a unique site with advanced design tools, custom CSS, and Google Analytics support.

  • Business

    Best for Small Business

    $25/month

    Power your business with custom plugins & themes, 200 GB storage, and live support.

  • Commerce

    Best for Online Stores

    $45/month

    Open your online store with a powerful, flexible platform designed to grow with you.

WordPress offers refunds on all plan purchases and renewals (for example, Personal, Premium, Business, Ecommerce) within 30 days of payments. Similarly, you can get a refund on domain registrations and renewals within 96 hours from purchase.

From a business perspective, it is important to keep blog or website design and development times short so that you can focus on getting traffic and making money.

WordPress Quick Start

Start a WordPress website right now.

This guide will highlight the different ways to build a website with WordPress, help identify the right option for your website, list some of the best theme design services, and provide further reading for blogging, marketing and SEO.

Hosted vs. Self-Hosted Blogs

The first decision you need to make is whether or not you want to host your own blog, or use the hosted version. Here's what you need to know about each...

Hosted (Easy, Most Popular)

Hosted WordPress sites are free, quick and easy to set up at WordPress.com.

WordPress is the most popular blogging platform

Hosted sites have limitations that may not be suitable if you want to customize and improve the performance and SEO of the default platform.

However, tens of millions of bloggers use hosted WordPress sites for their blogs.

It's important to note that you can purchase a domain name for a hosted site, so that your blog builds up SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and starts driving traffic.

Self Hosted WordPress

Self hosted sites (available for free from WordPress.org) require you to find a Web server, domain and hosting. This makes it slightly more difficult to get up and running. However, there are many excellent hosting services that cater for WordPress (discussed later), so don't be put off by the slightly steeper learning curve.

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Self hosted sites give you complete Web design and development control, making it far more flexible and powerful option.

Self hosted sites can be customized using HTML, CSS, PHP, as well as various SEO techniques. Many millions of bloggers use self hosted WordPress.

How to Create a WordPress Blog

To set up WordPress on your own PC (so that you can design and develop it before deploying to the Web host's servers), you will need to follow these steps:

  1. Download and install a Web server package (with PHP and MySQL). I recommend XAMPP
  2. Download and extract a copy of WordPress to the Web server root document (most likely in C:\xampp\htdocs).
  3. Rename the extracted folder to the name of your new blog or website (i.e. C:xampp\htdocs\myblog)
  4. Browse to http://localhost/phpmyadmin in your favorite browser
  5. Create a database with the same name as your new blog
  6. Click on the Privileges tab and Add a new User to the database you just created - with all permissions. Make sure you remember the username and password of the database user (you'll need it in the next step)
  7. Browse to http://localhost/myblog in your browser (be sure to change myblog to the name of the folder)
  8. Follow the installation instructions and supply the database, user and password as requested

If all goes well, you will be able to log in to your new website. You can create as many blogs and sites by repeating this process (just change the folder, database, user and password each time).

To install WordPress to a Web server, simply repeat steps 2 - 8 in the list above (step 1 isn't required since your Web host should already be a PHP, Apache, MySQL Web server).

WordPress Domains & Hosting

Buying a domain name for a hosted blog is easy. Go to Add a domain under the Store tab in the admin dashboard and follow the checkout procedure.

With a self hosted site the process is slightly different because you can pick and choose the best hosting service. Most hosting services also come with domain registration facilities, so you can do everything in one place.

Check out The best Web hosting services to find a high quality hosting service. You might want to start with WP Engine - a specialist WordPress hosting service.

Design, Themes & Templates

Having a bit of CSS (Cascading StyleSheets), HTML, PHP and other Web related skills and experience is a big plus when it comes to customizing and designing beautiful themes.

From a blogging perspective, a theme can help set the tone, look and feel of a website.

A professional, easy-to-understand, clean and lightweight theme can help convince readers to convert (buy stuff, sign up to a newsletter, etc).

The temptation is to go overboard with all the bells and whistles. Be careful not to overload your site or slow it down too much.

Google takes page load time into consideration when calculating where pages appear in search results, so fast pages are good pages.

The good news is that there are many great WordPress design services that can help you get exactly the look and feel you want without having to spend time fighting with code (good news if you're allergic to programming and Web development).

Start blogging

Blogging works! It doesn't matter if you are a college student thinking about making extra pocket money, or a entrepreneur looking to promote your brand.

It also doesn't matter what topic you decide to write about, provided it is a relevant to your niche and something you are passionate about and interested in.

Starting a blog is exciting, but it is also a medium to long term commitment (if you want to derive any real benefit from it), but if you have the drive to succeed there's no better time to start.

Almost all businesses that have researched Internet marketing strategies are aware that high quality, engaging and relevant content is one of the best ways to drive valuable organic Web traffic.

The problem is that many people don't have the time or patience to build up a good base of content via blogging.

So what's the alternative?

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Learning how to blog is an important business skill that can increase page rankings in Google and bring plenty of traffic to your website.

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If you're blogging regularly, using SEO, sharing content socially, sending out newsletters, marketing, and doing everything right without success, then I've

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Well researched, planned and implemented sales funnels can simultaneously boost traffic and increase conversions and revenue to make more money for blogs and

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Genuine bloggers and businesses use high quality articles to build high page rankings in Google and generate plenty of valuable organic search traffic.

The problem is that the better the content, the more likely it is that others will duplicate, copy, or spin those articles and publish them on their own sites (without permission or attribution).

Most of the time this is not an issue because low quality, article spinning sites generally tend not to rank well in Google search results.

Convincing bloggers to promote your company

Blogger outreach and PR is difficult - I've read a lot of How to articles and guides that say stuff like "Get bloggers to review your site or product", or, "Get as many backlinks from other bloggers as possible".

So everyone knows what to do, but no-one's talking about how to do it. In fact, gathering backlinks is often time consuming, ineffective and infuriating.

Hands up anyone who has spent several hours emailing other bloggers asking them to take a second to look over your new [blog/site/product/service/article/video] and gotten almost no response. It happens all the time.

Learn how to make money from each and every blog post

Learn how to research, plan and create awesome blog content designed to amaze readers and turn them into avid fans, allowing you to make money online.

A breakdown of organic search traffic costs

Google recently ruined our startup launch with a 'false positive' phishing warning that coincided perfectly with our launch announcement to 4500 existing customers.

The article I wrote about that hugely damaging mistake attracted the attention of John Mueller, who responded sympathetically and said he would 'let the team know' about the problem.

Good to his word, I noted a few hits from Mountain view, California on the affected site and at the article, and a few hours later the erroneous phishing message was removed.

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Content syndication (sharing stuff with permission) can be a great way for small businesses to get more website traffic.

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