Last updated on July 18th, 2024
Blogs quickly solidify their spot on the internet due to their many advantages. You can quickly start a blog with little money and publish content easily to your audience. WordPress is arguably the best blog engine out there, and it comes with tons of great and easy-to-install plugins that you can add to your site.
Below, we will go over the basics of how to start your blog, and in the following weeks, we will cover more advanced topics. Let’s get your blog up and running so you can start making posts!
Benefits of Blogs
- Providing valuable and helpful content on your blog will generate traffic that you can direct toward your portfolio or other websites
- It’s usually easier to get traffic to your blog than to get traffic to a standard website because of all the resources available to bloggers and because search engines reward sites that post quality content regularly.
- Using the WordPress blog engine will grant you access to many great free plugins, which will help enhance your website and improve your readers’ experience
- You can use WordPress as a content management system for your portfolio site instead of a standard blog. This means you would use the WordPress system to make posts that would add work to your portfolio instead of having to open up files in Dreamweaver to hand code new pieces into your website.
How to Start Your Blog
- I highly recommend getting your web hosting and domain name from the start and not using any free services or web hosting.
- Once you set up your web hosting and domain name, you must install WordPress on your server. Installing WordPress yourself can be tricky if you have a dedicated server. You may want to find a freelance coder or see if your web host can install it for you.
- Following the WordPress installation instructions should get you to the point where your blog is live and use the default theme.
- Now, you can design your custom theme if you know how to code, or you can download a free theme from one of the many WordPress theme sites and modify the graphics.
- Install some useful plugins to enhance your website.
- Get situated with your new blog and learn your way around WordPress so you can start making posts!
- Write about ten posts before launching your blog, and keep a regular posting schedule. I would start with one post weekly and increase the amount as you get bigger and more comfortable running your blog.
- Ensure you have many bookmarks of related sites and tons of ideas for posts and content to include on your blog. Sometimes, thinking of posts is difficult, so you must actively seek new content ideas.
- Give your blog a once over, and if your theme looks good, your plugins are installed, and you have content ready, you should be ready to publish your first post!
- Develop a content pillar or create blogs centered around your service. For example, a blog about the liberation of Paris can delve deeper into the history and significance of the event, providing valuable information for a travel agency specializing in WWII tours.
Other Useful tips
- As mentioned, I highly recommend getting your domain name and web hosting, and I can’t stress this point enough!
- You can create your blog as a subdomain, for example, blog.yourwebsiteurl.com, or give it its domain, such as www.yourwebsiteurl.com. Both options are fine, but if you are using the blog to promote your main site, you may want to create it as a subdomain, and if you want to keep them as two separate entities, you should register a new separate domain for your blog. This way, you could sell off your blog in the future if you need something of that nature.
- Figure out the purpose of your blog and establish goals. Is your primary purpose just to drive traffic to your portfolio, or do you want to have sponsors and generate revenue from the blog? Maybe you just want to share your thoughts with the world or help others!
- Make sure you deactivate and delete old plugins you don’t use; they can slow down your blog.
- Comb through your blog for dead links once in a while.
- Be careful who you link with; try only to exchange links with other quality websites.
- Investing in a search engine optimization book will help you drive a lot of natural traffic to your blog, and it’s well worth the price.
Great Blogging Resources
ProBlogger
ProBlogger is probably the best blog about blogging out there, with tons of great tips for new and pro bloggers alike.
Search Engine Land
Search Engine Land’s name speaks for itself. It covers all the major search engines and provides excellent info on the topic of search engine optimization.
Movie Maker Online – VEED.IO
Look no further than VEED’s online and free movie maker. It is a fully browser-based video editing tool that helps you create high-quality videos quickly and easily, with no experience necessary at all. VEED has the best movie-maker tools like filters, special effects, stickers, and even a background noise remover! Veed is completely free to use, and no software or hardware is required!
Colorcinch
Colorcinch is a simple and intuitive photo editing and design tool that lets you craft beautiful images for your blog with just a few clicks. You can play around with its library of creative assets and AI-powered photo effects and filters, make collages, overlay images, and add watermarks. You can also crop, resize, and compress your images to be blog post-ready. Having customized images for your blog can help you connect better with your readers, and Colorcinch can be your go-to tool for that.
Breadnbeyond
Breadnbeyond is an award-winning explainer video company specializing in producing animated explainer videos since 2008. They create engaging animated explainer videos that help you introduce your brand, product, or service to the world – from scratch, with no template.
More to Come!
I will discuss blogging in future articles and cover more advanced topics in detail, such as WordPress plugins, marketing strategies, search engine optimization, and much more! I will also show you examples of graphic design portfolio sites that use WordPress as a content management system.
Feel free to ask any questions in the comments and share your blogs with us once they are done or if you have a live blog already!