How To Start A Blog In 2023 From Scratch [Updated]

It’s good that you made the decision to learn blogging to start a blog in 2023.

With this article, you are going to learn about how to start a blog in 2020 from scratch or if you already have a blog then you will get to know about many other things related to blogging (like must-have plugins, themes, etc).

But before you read the definitive blogging guide, let me clear some doubts that every new blogger has in his/her mind.

Doubts related to starting a blog in 2023

Doubt 1: Nowadays blogging is highly competitive?

Yes, there is no doubt that blogging is highly competitive but it is if you try to compete in board niche with high authority blogs.

There is less competition in a micro-niche but it is not the case that can scale your blog overnight.

You have to work consistently on your blog with patience to get success in blogging.

Doubt 2: Should I purchase a paid course to learn how to start a blog in 2023?

If I speak straightforwardly then my answer is yes you should buy a paid course.

If you purchase a paid course for a professional blogger then definitely you are going to learn some working strategies which they have gained after a lot of experience and experiments.

But, if you do not have enough money to buy a paid course even then you can learn it free of cost.

But in that case, what you have to do is that you have to invest a lot in time instead of money.

If you want to learn blogging for free then you can learn it by reading a lot of articles and watching youtube videos.

This freeway is going to take you a lot of time to learn even the basics of blogging.

Personally, I recommend you buy a paid course because you will get a lot of value from a paid course.

Doubt 3:Is it profitable to start a blog in 2023?

Yes, blogging is still profitable not for only big players in the market but also for newbies.

There are many micro-blogging niches that have less competition and are easy to rank.

What you have to do is to start a micro niche blog instead of going into a broad and highly competitive niche.

Doubt, 4:How much money do a blogger, can make with blogging?

There is no range or limit to how much money you can make with blogging?.

But I can tell you that the minimum money that you can make is zero and the maximum limit is infinite.

Yes, you have read it right. The minimum money you can make with the help of blogging is zero and the maximum is infinite.

There is a hell lot of money in a blogging career.

What you only need to have is the right knowledge of blogging and a profitable and easy-to-rank keyword.

Doubt 5:Why you should start a blog in 2023?

Everyone wants to know the benefits of doing something before doing it.

It is obvious that you also want to know about the positive side of blogging before going to invest your precious money and time in it.

So here it is,

Some of the benefits of blogging.

Global reach

With the help of a blog, you are going to have a global reach.

You cannot even imagine in which corner of this world your article is going to be read.

Global reach is going to offer you many other benefits like exposure to foreign readers, higher revenue potential, etc.

Earning potential

As I have said earlier that there is no limit to the money that you can make with the help of blogging.

Once you come you know the working strategies then trust me you can make limitless money in blogging.

Knowledge sharing

Blogging is going to offer you a platform by which you can share your knowledge with your readers.

By which you are going to help your readers in their decision-making or solving their problems.

Real freedom

Blogging offers you time, money, and places freedom because when you are a blogger then you become your own boss.

You can work whenever you feel to do it.

There is no one who gives you an order.

There is no one who is going to deduct a part of your salary if you do not work.

There is no chance of getting fired from the job.

There is no foundation for you to work from a particular place. You can work from any corner of this world if you have your laptop and internet connection.

You are going to earn money while sleeping which is not possible in any other job or career.

Thatswhy, it is one of the best career options which offers you every type of freedom.

Global Recognition

Blogging offers you global recognition when you have a reader from every country.

You will become a well-known personality in the blogging industry.

You will get offers to attend many blogging conferences or submits where you will get a chance to meet other professional bloggers by which you can enhance your blogging knowledge.

But, it’s a long way to go, firstly you have to grow blogs to that level to get an invitation for those conferences.

There are many other benefits that you will come to know when you will become a successful blogger.

I think that now your all doubts may have been cleared.

If you have any other doubts or queries then feel free and let me know in the comment section.

Choosing A Niche To Start A Blog

You can say that niche selection is one of the most important and difficult tasks for a newbie in blogging.

Every newbie struggles a lot to select his/her first niche, but don’t worry here I have explained everything in detail so that you can select your niche easily.

Firstly, let’s understand

what is a niche?

Basically, you can say that niche is a category of your website about which you are going to write articles on your blog.

For example, if you want to start a cooking blog then, cooking is the niche of your blog and you are going to write all your articles about cooking. For example – how to make barbeque at home, how to make a chocolate cake at home etc.

Now. I think that it is clear to you what is a niche?

So, let’s go and understand how to select a profitable and easy-to-scale niche?

There are three things that should be kept in mind while selecting a niche

Easy to scalability
Profitability
Your passion

Let me explain these three things one by one to you

Easy to scalability –

It means that your niche should not be very highly competitive that you can’t scale or rank your blog.

Because if you entered into a very highly competitive niche then you can’t rank your website very easily.

I am not saying that you can never be able to rank your blog in that niche. You can rank your blog in a highly competitive niche but, it will take a very long time and a lot of effort.

And if you put those efforts into a less competitive niche then you will see results in a short span of time.

So, that's why you should go for a less competitive niche rather than a highly competitive niche.

Profitability-

Profitability means that your niche should have an opportunity to monetize it.

If there is no competition or less competition in a niche but there is no chance of profitability, then, you are going to put your efforts in the wrong direction.

Let me tell you one important thing,

If there is no competition in a niche then there may be a chance that it is not a profitable niche which is why people are not targeting that niche.

If there is high competition in a niche, then definitely it will be a highly profitable niche (like a technology niche).

But, being a newbie I will recommend you go into a profitable and less competitive niche.

Now, let’s talk about how to check the profitability of a niche?

For this purpose, you have to check the number of things

How much traffic is there on the top website?

Is there any advertisement displayed on that blog?

Is there any affiliate product promoted on that website?

If there is decent traffic and any affiliate product is promoted on that blog then you can say that it is a profitable niche to start a blog around it.

Passion-

It means that the niche you have selected must be passionate about that niche.

Because, being a newbie you are going to do everything (like content writing, SEO, promotion, and other things) on your own.

So, that is why it is important that you must be passionate about your niche to write about it consistently for a long time.

Now, Let’s understand

How to check that you are passionate about a niche?

To find out the answer to this question, you have to ask a few questions yourself and those questions are as follows:

Can I write articles around ____ niche consistently without getting bored?

Can I write around 50 articles in that niche?

Can I write on ____niche without expecting anything for some time?

The last question may look strange to you.

I have said that you should put your efforts into blogging without expecting anything for some time when you are going to start blogging to earn money.

Now, let me tell you the truth.

It’s not going to be a piece of cake to get success in blogging.

If you start your blog today and you expect that your website will start ranking within a month.

It’s not possible that your website starts ranking within a month.

You have to work hard for it for at least three months to see results because Google will not rank your website in a very short span of time. It will take time to get ranked.

Sorry for being rude but it is true.

That's why? I have said that you have to put in your continuous efforts for some time without expecting anything.

Now, let’s understand the importance of scalability, profitability, and passion in a niche with the help of examples.

For example

If you have chosen a profitable and easy-to-scale niche but you are not passionate about that niche then, definitely you are going to lose your interest in that niche after some time and you will quit blogging.

Let’s take another example.

If your niche is easy to scale and you are really passionate about the same but, it is not a profitable niche then you will be putting your efforts in vain because in the end you not going to make money in that niche even if you will get your blog ranked in top search results.

Let’s take another example.

If your niche is highly profitable and you are really passionate about that niche but, it is not easy to get ranked in that niche then, in that case, it will take a year or even more to taste even a small success in that niche.

Now, I think that it has been clear to you what is the importance of scalability, profitability, and passion in a niche.

So, all these three things must be there in your niche to get success in a blogging career.

Selection Of A Brandable Domain Name

A domain name is the name of your blog.

There is a number of things that should be kept in mind while buying a domain name for your blog.

Firstly, let’s talk about which qualities should be there in your domain name.

Simple :

Whatever domain you choose, it must be simple to read and easy to memorize

Short:

It must be short because if your domain name is very long, then there might be chances that your reader can not memorize it properly.

Your domain name should be one or two words and a maximum of three.

And, if your readers enter the wrong domain name, then they can not find your blog again.

If this will happen then you will not be able to have regular readers for your blog.

Keyword in a domain name :

The keyword in your domain name tells the niche of your blog

This will show, that you are an expert in that niche that’s why you are writing about a particular niche.

For example: If a reader came across two websites one which has and other which does not have a keyword in the domain name then he/she will be more likely to click on the blog which has a keyword in its domain name because the reader will directly get an indication that the blog with a keyword in the domain name is specifically writing articles related to the search term.

Brandable :

Your domain name should be brandable so that you can build up your loyal audience/readers.

Broad range (if you want to start an Amazon affiliate website)

Your name should have a broad range if you are going to create an Amazon affiliate blog.

Range means that you can easily add more content related to another micro-niche in your blog once your blog starts ranking.

For example, if you are thinking to start a blog in 2023 related laptops.

Then you should not add “laptop” in your domain name you can add a word like “tech” in your domain name because in that case, you are writing about a micro-niche (laptops) of macro-niche (technology).

A broad scope of your domain name helps you to expand the reach of your blog in the future by witting about other micro-niches.

I am not saying that If your domain name has a narrow range and if you will start writing articles on your blog related to other niches in the future then you will be get penalized.

No, that’s not the case there is no online policy that is going to penalize you for writing a niche not related to your blog’s domain name.

If you do that the only thing that is going to happen is that you will look unprofessional in the eyes of your readers.

Now let’s understand how to buy a brandable domain name.

If you want to choose a brandable domain name but do not have an idea of how to find it,

Now, let’s understand how to buy a domain name?

Firstly, go to the website named GoDaddy

Then, click on, “domains”.

Now, enter your domain name and click the search button.

Now, you will come to know about the availability of your domain name.

You can also see a lot of suggestions if you scroll down

Once you finalized your domain name click on add to cart.

Now, click on Continue to cart.

Click on Proceed to payment.

Congratulations, you have learned how to purchase a domain name?

Hosting

As you need the plot to build your shop, similarly you also need a place to keep your data in case of online business.

In online business, hosting is where you can keep all of your blog’s data.

There are different types of hosting, let’s understand them one by one.

Shared hosting:

It is very cheap hosting because all the domains in this type of hosting are hosted on the same server and they share resources(like RAM, Storage, etc) with each other.

Being a newbie I will recommend you use shared hosting because it’s economical and handle a decent amount of traffic. Once you start making money and your blog starts getting a high amount of traffic then you can upgrade your hosting.

Virtual Private Server (VPX) hosting:

This hosting is the upgraded version of shared hosting. This hosting can handle much more traffic than shared hosting. In this hosting, you get separate space but you same the same server with other websites. With this hosting, you get more customization features.

This web hosting is suitable for those whose blog is driving high traffic and he/she want to upgrade from shared hosting but he/she does not need dedicated hosting.

Dedicated hosting:

With dedicated hosting, you get control of the server on which your website is hosted. The service provides gives you the server on rent. You get more access like you can control from operating systems to the security of your website but all this comes with a very high price. This is a very expensive web hosting.

There are also some other types of hosting like Cloud hosting, and VPX hosting.

There is a number of hosting providers but I will recommend you Bluehost.

This hosting provider offers you hosting at a more economical price and with a wonderful feature as compared with other hosting providers.

Choose The Best Theme For Your Blog

The theme refers to the appearance of your website.

WordPress offers you a lot of free themes but those themes are very heavy and reduce the loading speed of your website.

Loading speed is one of the main factors which helps to rank your website on Google.

Free themes reduce the loading speed of your website that's why I would recommend you go for a paid theme.

Paid themes are lightweight and help to boost the loading speed of your website.

I personally recommend you use Studiopress or Generate Press because these are the best themes due to their lightweight feature.

Plugins

Plugins are like software that you install on your website to get some additional features.

There is a number of plugins for WordPress.

It’s not possible to cover all the plugins in a single blog post and all the plugins are not important for everyone, but there are a few plugins that are a must for every website.

So, here I am going to cover all those plugins which I am using right now on my own website.

Thrive Architect

Thrive Architect is a page builder plugin.

It will help to make your website look more attractive and professional.

You can design the page of your website just by dragging and dropping.

This is a very easy-to-use plugin.

Wprocket

This is a plugin that helps to boost the loading speed of your website.

Loading speed is one of the main ranking factors to rank on Google.

So, that's why I strongly recommend you this plugin if you want to enhance the loading speed of your website.

Rank Mathe SEO

This is an SEO-boosting plugin. This is a free plugin.

It is the SEO with which your blog posts get ranked on Google.

So, it becomes very crucial for you to have this plugin on your website.

This is a very popular plugin nowadays.

It has taken place of the Yoast SEO plugin.

Wordfence Security

As the name of this plugin suggests by itself it’s working, this is a security plugin for your blog.

Security is a very important factor for a blog because if you work hard, you will not want a hacker to come one day and waste all your hard work.

Security is a must for your blog, so I will strongly recommend you install this security plugin on your blog.

MonsterInsights

This plugin helps you to see your blogs through google analytics.

This is a very useful plugin because this plugin will tell you how people are reaching your blog and how they are responding to your blog.

By seeing the stats provided by this plugin, you can optimize your blog to increase the earning potential of your blog because once you get to know that which blog post is driving a major portion of traffic on your blog then you can work on that blog post to make it a cash cow.

This is an amazing plugin.

It has a free version, but you will get its real strength when you upgrade it to the pro version.

UpdraftPlus

This is a plugin to take the backup of your blog.

With the help of this plugin, you can take automatic backups.

It is very easy to restore your blog from a backup.

It has a free version but the paid version offers you a lot of extra features.

Shared Counts

Shared Counts is the best WordPress social media plugin by which you can easily add social sharing buttons on your blog. This is a free plugin.

It shows the number of times your blog post has been shared,

It will tell the readers that this is a quality article which is why people are sharing it.

Writing an Article On Your Blog

As you have installed the necessary plugins on your blog.

Now it's time to start writing on your blog.

If you do not want to write an article on your own then you can hire writers for your blog.

Suggestion for hiring witters

If you are going to hire a writer then do not go for anybody who says that he can write about anything or on any niche. Make sure that you hire a professional and experienced writer in your niche so that you can get a high-quality article worth your money.

If you do not have enough budget to hire writers in the initial days of your blogging carrier then don’t worry you can start writing on your own.

If you think that your writing skills and English is not good enough to write a good quality article, then there is no need to lose hope that you can not do blogging.

Believe me, if you start writing today on your blog that then within a short span of time, you will learn good witting skills and your English will also improve day by day.

To quickly learn the writing skill I recommend you to read other blogs in your niche.

Trust me, you will learn a lot by reading other articles.

Few basic writing tips

Use conversational language (the word “I” and “you” ) in your blog, so that the reader feels that he is talking to someone not just reading something.
Keep your paragraphs short ( maximum three lines).
Make sure that you use a good-looking font style (it plays a good role in the reader’s reading experience).
Add images to your blog post.
Use the Grammarly tool and Chrome extension to check your grammar mistakes(it is going to help you a lot if your grammar is weak).
Write a long and deep article (try to explain everything in detailed and a comprehensive way).

Go for hit and start writing your articles from today.

Traffic

Traffic means the number of visitors/readers visiting your website.

There are different sources to drive traffic on your blog like organic traffic, social media traffic(Facebook, Quora, etc), and paid traffic.

Let me explain one by one every source of traffic

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is the traffic that Google automatically sends to your blog whenever a person searches for a term related to your blog post.

If your article is SEO(search engine optimized) optimized then Google will rank your article in the top results according to the targeted keyword.

This is the free source of traffic and a major portion of traffic on almost all blogs comes from this source.

Social Media Traffic

There are further two types of traffic that you can drive on your blog from social media.

One is free traffic and the second is paid traffic.

You can drive free traffic to your blog by sharing your blog post link in the different forms in your niche on different social media platforms.

So, How to do it smartly?

I recommend you not insert your blog’s link while answering all the queries.

You can answer some queries with and some without your blog’s link.

This is the right way to do it.

So, this was the free source of driving traffic on your blog from social media.

To drive paid traffic from social media you have to run ads on social media.

It is a costlier method and it's not an easy task.

You have a target right keyword to drive quality traffic to your blog.

If by mistake you targeted the wrong keyword, then a lot of visitors come to your blog but because of the wrong targeted traffic, most of the visitors immediately click the back button and leave your blog.

This will increase the bounce rate of your blog and it will badly affect your blog’s ranking.

So, being a newbie I would not recommend you use the paid source of social media traffic because there are chances that you will end up losing a lot of money on paid traffic.

You can try the paid source once your blog starts making money.

In the initial days of your blogging career, you should only try to make your blog SEO optimized and drive organic traffic from Google.

Paid Traffic From Google

You can also drive paid traffic even from Google itself.

You may have seen that whenever you have searched for a term on Google.

There one or more articles on the top search results have the word written ”ads” on the left side of the article heading.

Those are not ranking on Google because of their SEO(search engine optimization) optimized content, but they have paid Google to show their article on the top.

As I have said earlier, being a newbie your only focus should be on making your blog SEO (search engine optimized) and driving organic traffic.

Monetization Of Blog

There are different ways to monetize your blog but here I am going to tell you only two ways that you should try in the starting days of your blogging career.

One is Google AdSense and the second is affiliate marketing.

Google Adsense

This is one of the most popular ways of monetization that every newbie thinks to use on his blog before starting a blog.

In this source of monetization, you allow Google to show advertisements on your blog.

And whenever a visitor clicks on those ads, Google pays you for those clicks.

But, this is an old method, the second method is the one which nowadays everyone prefers rather than Google Adsense.

Final Words On Step-By-Step Guide To Start A Blog

So, now you have learned how to start a blog in 2020.

Without wasting your time start your blog as soon as possible.

Competition is increasing day by day.

So, stop making excuses like I don’t know how to write an article, or how to set up a blog, and take your first step today to start a blog.

You will start learning automatically with your experience if you take your first step by buying a domain name and hosting.

Theoretical knowledge is of no use until you start applying it.

Take your first step now if you take your first step then you will outrank millions of those people who are just waiting for the right time to come to take their first step.

Ticker

How To Start A Blog In 2023 From Scratch [Updated]

Choosing A Niche To Start A Blog

Selection Of A Brandable Domain Name

Hosting

Choose The Best Theme For Your Blog