in this blog, I'm going to teach you howto start a blog of your own. (upbeat music) Learning how to start a blog really does have thepotential to change your life. Some people start a blog as a hobby. It's something fun to do outside of work. Well, others start a blog as a side hustle to bring in a little extra income. And for some, blogging hasturned into a full-time business, one so profitable, that they're able toactually quit their job, travel the world, and livelife on their own terms. All just because they started. The great thing about blogging is that it is a low cost and zerorisk way to open the doors to opportunity that weren't there before. So in today's video, I'm going to be walking you through how to start a blog ofyour own with WordPress, with a step by step tutorial. And I'll also be sharing fiveblogging tips and advice, so be sure to stay tothe end of this video. I'll be showing you how tostart a blog with HostGator. HostGator is a website hosting company, and they are great for new bloggers in terms of performance and costs. And they have the infrastructureto accommodate your blog as it grows, which is really important. You can check out our link to HostGator in the description box down below. And the great news is thatwe have special pricing with HostGator. And with our link, you'll getthe best possible pricing. So be sure to check it out. If you came into this video, hesitant on actually starting a blog, let me tell you why other people blog. People have very unique reasonsfor wanting to start a blog. Some are compassionate in nature. Perhaps they want to educateothers on a rare form of a disease, they or a familymember are struggling with. Others are more informative where they wanna chroniclea weight loss journey and inspire others to do the same. And some blogs are entertaininglike a fashion blog. No matter your reasonfor wanting to start, with the right strategies, your blog can connect youto millions of people, get your ideas out into the world and can make you more moneythan you ever could make at your nine to five. If you don't think it canhappen to you think again, just a few years ago, my friends, Jeff and Ben started the DollarSprout blog with absolutely no experience. They had no idea how toactually start a blog and didn't know what to even write about. But since then they now both run the DollarSprout blog full-time and DollarSprout makesover $1 million a year. There are a lot ofother bloggers out there who make over $100,000 a month, like Michelle from Making Sense of Cents, which is another personal finance blog. She took her a little hobbyas a side hustle blog, and now makes over amillion dollars a year. Melyssa Griffin runs a blog to help others grow their businesses. And she's shared how shemakes over $100,000 a month as well. Bobby from Millennial Money Man has a blog where he sharesabout money and side hustles and makes over six figures amonth from his blog as well. Now it takes a lot of work to reach the status of thesesix figure monthly bloggers, but that shouldn't stop you from trying. It's definitely feasible tostart making a few hundred, or even a few thousand dollars per month within just a few months of starting. So how do bloggers make money? The cool thing about blogging is that there is a near limitlessnumber of ways to make money. You can use display ads,doing sponsored posts, affiliate marketing,selling courses, eBooks, or trainings, consulting, or providing another servicelike coaching or mentoring. To get your blog started, you want to decide on a niche and a name. You wanna pick a nichethat is specific enough, but also allows you tobe able to talk about different subjects inrelation to that niche. The DollarSprout blogis in the finance niche and contains topics rangingfrom side hustles, budgeting, investing, and more. Other niches that peopleblog about are things like fashion, travel or even parenting. It's good to have onegeneral niche to focus on so that your readers knowthat you're the expert in that niche. Like it would kind of bestrange if your blog is about car modifications,fashion, and also money. So it's best to pick oneoverall niche for your blog, then choose a name. It's great to choose a blog name that helps you explain what your niche is, like when you go to DollarSprout, you expect to learn about money. And when you go to Millennial Money Man, you expect to learn aboutmoney tips for millennials. So choose a name that helpsyou reflect your overall niche. Now let's get into that tutorial to show you how to setup a blog or website. Don't forget to use the link to HostGator located down in the description box to get the lowest pricing available and follow along with this tutorial. So I've clicked on DollarSprout'slink for HostGator. And as you can see, there's a Hatchling Plan, aBaby Plan and a Business Plan. And each one comes with different things. So obviously pick the planthat's going to be best for you and the things that you're looking for in starting a blog or a website. But for the purpose of this video, I'm just going to go with aHatchling Plan and hit Buy Now! Next, we get to search for a domain. So we get to choose a domain name. So I'm just going to comeup with a domain here. Let's see, budgeting is fun. And there you go. This domain is available. So this is going to be myfree domain, which is great. We'll scroll down here. I'm not going to add ondomain privacy protection for the purpose of just this video. But if that's something that you wanna do, then you can go aheadand click that button. And now you are going to select your plan, which we decided on the Hatchling Plan and then also the billing cycle. So as you can see, if you sign up for a24-month or a 36-month plan, that's obviously going togive you the best discount. A 36 month plan is goingto be only $2.75 a month. So the more months you choose, the less it's going to cost each month. But for the purpose of this video, I'm just going to do one month to show you how to walk through it all. And then you're going toset up a username and a pin. And the next section just has you entering personal and billing information. And then section four, has you add on additionalservices if you want them. So you can read through allof the different options that they have and decide if you want to addany of these to your purchase. But again, for the purposes of this video, I'm just going to go pretty basic, just to walk you through it. But there's many optionsfor you to choose from if you wanna add any of these. And then there's a sectionfor the coupon code, which has already entered in for you because you followedthe DollarSprout link. Another thing about HostGator is that you get a 45-daymoney back guarantee. So they had this also shown up when you're reviewing your order details. And then scroll down and you can see here, all of these special pricing that we have. So the amount due is going to be 12.34. You wanna click the box thing that you have read and agreedto the terms of service. Obviously, if you wannaread the terms of service, go ahead and read it. And now we will hit checkout. And then you get to this next screen when HostGator's doingall the work for you and preparing to set up your account. Now that our account is all set up, we are going to buildour site with WordPress. WordPress is the volume framework that so many other websites use, and so we definitely we'll wanna get started with WordPress. There's so many waysthat you can customize it and build your website, and also tons of thingsthat you can choose from. So we're going to click, Get Started with setting up WordPress. And here we are just going toclick the button install now. So we're going to choose the version that we want to install. So I'm going to choosethe most recent version. And then here it shows mywebsite, budgetingisfun.com, then we'll choose the site name. So I'm gonna say budgeting is fun. In description, a budgeting blog. Then you can set up your admin,username and password here, and an admin email. So I'll say marissa@budgetingisfun.com. Next, you can select the language. And then you can also select if there are any additional plugins that you wanna have installed. Next, there are advanced options, but I'm just going to goahead and leave that alone and then select a theme. There are tons ofdifferent themes available. And so you can kind of view them and see which one is goingto represent your style and your branding for your blog. All of these themes thatthey have here are free, but there are someadditional paid for themes that you can view if you want. But there are tons of freethemes that you can look through and you can just click on Demo to be able to see what theentire website will look like with this theme. So this one, okay, I'm liking it. I think that it looks good. So I am going to go aheadand choose this theme. I'll just hit select, and then just hit theInstall button at the bottom. Now this is going totake a little bit of time to get everything up andrunning for the website. And then we get thislovely message showing that the software was installed successfully. So we're ready to go. So once you've set up WordPress, now you can go and startcreating blog posts and also edit your site with WordPress. So you can open up a newtab and type in your domain and then slash admin. And then this takes you to WordPress. And then you can just enterin that username and password that you selected, and then walk into your account. So I wanted to show you how you can make a couple ofcustomization of your theme. So how you do that isyou go into appearance and then go to themes. And here it shows the websitetheme that we selected when we were downloading WordPress, but there are also some otherones that are available, we can choose from if we want. But you can then click thisbutton that just says customize. So let's say you wanna changethe tagline of your website. You can go over here to site identity, and then you can show the sitetitle and also the tagline. So we can say a budgeting blog,we can change that and say, because budgeting should be fun. And then hit Publish. And as you can see, it shows here, becausebudgeting should be fun. So here on the banner, it showshospital that you can trust. This has just been thetheming that I copied over. So to change that, Ican go to Header Banner and then go to Banner Content, and then you can updatethe title and the subtitle and everything thatyou're looking for here. So here we can justsay, budgeting is easy, if I spell it right. Help, budgeting is easy. And there we have itupdated on our website. And then just hit the Publish button to make sure that you save it. So if we exit out of this, it takes us back to our WordPress editor, and then you can get startedon creating blog posts. So you can go up to thislittle pin versus posts, click that, and thenyou can click Add New. This little popup will show you how you can create a blog post, so you can walk through that to get some guidance if you need. And then you can just start typing away on your very first blog post. So "Why I Think Budgetingis Fun" is my title. And then here, we're going to start a blog and I'm just going to start typing away for my first blog post. And when your blog post is complete, you can make sure you saveit, which is very important. And then you can even preview. So here's what my blog postlooks like on my website. And then when you are ready, you can hit that Publish button and have your first blog post published and ready for the world to see. Now that you have your blog set up, here are five blogging tipsand advice as you get started. Tip number one, create a logo. This will add some sort ofprofessionalism to your website, and add an element of branding. You can use a website likeCanva to design a logo or other graphics for your blog. Canva is a free website with tools for you to create your own graphics. They have templates, or youcan just start from scratch. Or if you don't have an eye for design and want a more professionallogo, check out Fiverr. On Fiverr, you can hire a graphic designer to make you a onetime logo. And it's also pretty affordable. Tip number two, get on social media. Using social media is agreat way to drive traffic to your website. Whether that's fromFacebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, or more. There are many differentsocial media platforms to choose from. And that can probablyseem pretty overwhelming. My advice is to chooseone or two platforms that you can really master and build up a couple platforms before moving to another. By using social media,you can build up followers and then share links to your blog when the post goes live. Tip number three, use Yoast SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO is important to have your post show up and be seen in results when people search for a certain topic on a search engine like Google. Yoast SEO is a plugin for your blog that will help you withkeyword optimization and post-writing to make sure your posts have the best possibilityof getting found in search. There is a paid version of Yoast SEO, but if you're on a budget,there's a free version as well. Tip number four, sign up for some affiliate programs. With affiliate marketing,you receive a commission if someone uses yourblanket to make a purchase or sign up for something. There are many differentaffiliate marketing programs out there, but one of theeasiest and best is with Amazon. You can visit Amazon's website and sign up for their affiliate program. From there, you can getyour special affiliate link for anything on Amazon's website. And when you share thatlink in a blog post you'll get paid if someoneuses it to make a purchase. Writing a post on Christmasgifts for your kids, link those items throughAmazon's affiliate program. Tip number five, searchYouTube for website help. Obviously you're watchingthis video as a tutorial to set up a blog, but if you are gettinggoing and are wondering how to set up somethingelse on your website, search YouTube for another tutorial. I mean, you can alwayspay a website designer to make changes for you,but that can be expensive. Or you can learn for freewith other YouTube tutorials. So now you know how tostart a blog of your own. Don't forget to use the linkin the description box below to HostGator and get thebest hosting price available. And if you have anyquestions about blogging, we are here to help. So drop your questionsin the comments below. And of course, don't forget to subscribe to the DollarSprout YouTubechannel for more videos. And I will look forward toseeing you in the next one. Bye. (upbeat music)
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