How To Start A Blog In 10 Minutes

Starting writing a Blog is easy ….

So, you want to start a blog huh? Great idea!

But…how the heck do you get started? There’s so much info out there on the web, and everyone’s telling you to do different things. Who do you listen to? Where’s the starting point?

Damnit, maybe you should just forget it – it’s too confusing!

Well, hold up. I used to be a blogging newbie too. I had the same problems. I started my blog (BloggingBasics101.com) back in 2006, and I knew less than nothing about blogging. In fact it was only the week before I’d learnt what a blog was.

Now I know a ton about them, and my blog’s doing pretty well – I receive more than 200,000 unique visitors per month which makes me consider myself someone you could listen to and learn from when it comes to building your own blog. I’m not some sort ofGuru, but I certainly do know the basics.

I promise it’ll be simple, relatively easy, and definitely easy to understand (no stupid jargon). Sound good? Awesome, let’s move on.

Why you should create a blog and join the blogging community

So below, I’m going to outline exactly what you need to do to get started and set up your own personal blog. Before we dive in though, I really want to talk about WHY you should build a blog.

Note: If you already have a solid idea of the whys, then skip this and go right ahead with the guide.

1. Blogging has quickly become one of the most popular ways of communicating and spreading information and news. There are literally millions of blogs online (don’t worry, you can make yours stand out and get noticed!).
2. It’s a great way to express yourself and also a fantastic way to share information with others.
3. You become a better person and a better writer.
4. The best reason? You can make money doing it!

I bet you already knew all of that, but it’s nice to be reminded.

One very last thing before we get started:

Creating your own blog can take a little while, probably up to 30 minutes. So grab yourself a coffee or juice (whatever you fancy) and let’s get stuck in. If you need any help during the set-up process, get in touch with me here and I’ll help as best I can and answer any questions you might have).

The Steps Covered In This Blogging Guide

There’s five main steps you need to go through in order to set up a blog. If you follow this guide and the five steps, you’ll have your own blog set up in 30 minutes or less. It’s nowhere near as difficult as setting up a website from scratch (there’s very little technical ability needed here). In fact, there’s no coding required by you. Good news, huh?

The Five Steps to Starting a Blog:

• Choose your preferred blogging platform
• Choose whether you want to self-host and a paid domain, or get a free blog
• Setting up a blog on your own domain (if you choose self-hosting and a custom domain)
• Designing your blog (the fun bit!)
• Useful resources for blogging

So, we made it. Phew. Better late than never! So, without further ado, let’s jump into step 1.

Step 1 – Choose your preferred blogging platform

Choosing where you want to build blog is pretty much the first thing you have to do. I’m going to take a leap and assume you’ve heard of WordPress, and this is the platform I advocate. It’s massive. It’s by far one of the biggest blogging platforms in the world, with countless plugins and add-ons and almost infinite ways to design and layout your blog.

There are more than 82 million active users using WordPress = a lot, basically.

There are other alternatives however, and they are listed below:

• Blogger – Definitely the next best thing to WordPress.
• Tumblr – Half social network, half blog. Interesting, and very simple to use.

Even though WordPress is bigger (and probably better) than those two, here are my reasons why you should still go with WordPress:

1. Super easy set-up.
2. Tons of free themes and layouts (I’m not kidding, there’s gazillions).
3. There’s a massive support forum in case you get stuck (you won’t, but it’s nice to have it there if you need it).
4. Your blog will be insanely fast and it’ll also look Functionality and form – perfect!
5. People can interact with you easily. Your content can be shared, commented on, and so on.

Here’s an article about different blogging platforms (including WordPress), give it a read: How to Choose a Blogging Platform – (updated 2015)

Now, Step 2 (see, we’re moving fast now!)

Step 2 – Self-hosting or a free alternative?

Whoa, slow down there! This is the biggest decision you’ll have to make before we go any further. You need to decide whether to pay for your blog or grab a free one.

WordPress, Tumblr and Blogger all offer free blogs for anyone. Awesome, right? It’s perfect for those of us who aren’t super serious about blogging. But it does have downsides:

1) You won’t be able to get your OWN domain name

On a free blog, your blog’s web address (your URL) will be butt-ugly. Like, really ugly. In short, create a free blog with any other the above free blog services and it’ll look like this:

• yourblog.wordpress.com
• yourblog.blogspot.com
• yourblog.tumblr.com

I know, ugly right?

2) Limits and more limits

There are some limits to free blogs. You can’t fully monetize it, and you don’t have the possibility to upload all those videos and images you want to show everyone – it’s all limited. Worse still, you won’t even have access to the free themes offered by WordPress.

3) You DON’T OWN your blog

It might sound silly at first, but you don’t actually own your blog. It’s hosted on someone else’s web property and they can delete it if they want so. They have done so in the past, and keep doing it in the future. Which means all your hard work on your blog, all those countless hours of writing blog posts might be vanished within seconds. Sad…

On the other hand, with a self-hosted blog on your own domain name – you are the REAL owner of your blog. You’ll be able to name your blog whatever you want, for example “YourName.com” or “YourAwesomeBlog.com. You can end it with .com, .co.uk, .net, .org, or virtually any other web suffix. Add to that unlimited bandwidth for videos, images and content plus the free themes and you have a winning combo.

So how much is hosting and a domain name? Not as much as you’re thinking, fortunately. It usually works out to about $4 per month, depending on your hosting provider. Any more than that, and you’re getting robbed.

If you still have questions, here’s some further information for you to look at:

• Should I Choose a Hosted or Non-hosted Blogging Platform?

Step 3 – Start a blog on your own domain (if you chose self-hosting and a custom domain)

I’m going to push ahead based on the premise you’ve chosen WordPress, and if you haven’t, you should. Seriously, it’s the best.

If you’re still a little confused by what a self-hosted blog is, allow me to explain and how you can go about setting one up for yourself.

You’ll need to come up with a domain name you like and also choose a hosting company that can host your blog.

• Domain: The domain is basically the URL of your website. Examples: google.com (Google.com is the domain), Facebook.com (Facebook.com is the domain). See? Simple!
• Hosting: Hosting is basically the company that puts your website up on the internet so everyone else can see it. Everything will be saved on there. Think of it as a computer hard-drive on the internet where your blog will be saved.

Personally, I use iPage (for my blog domain and hosting), and I’ve got nothing but good things to say about it. It’s probably one of the cheapest (less than $3.50 a month) hosting providers out there. A domain name will cost around $14 a year, but with iPage they throw that in for free :). Big smiles for that! They’re the providers I use for all of my blogs, including the one you’re reading right now.

For any odd reason you don’t want to go with iPage, feel free to choose your own hosting company. Most, if not all of them, should have “one-click” WordPress install on the admin panel.

That button will automatically install WordPress on your blog. Did I say it was simple or what?

All you need to do is sign up with iPage (or your chosen provider), choose your hosting plan and a domain name and look for the one-click WordPress install button on the admin panel.

Website essentials aren’t often needed, but I’d recommend whois privacy (that will keep all your personal details private) and definitely automated backups (this’ll save your website just in case anything fails or disappears, so you won’t lose any or very little of your blog).

Once WordPress is installed on your website, all you have to do to start blogging is go to your WP-Admin page usuallywww.yourblognamehere.com/wp-admin and start writing by adding a new post.

At the start, the layout looks confusing, but it gets very understandable quickly. Don’t worry!

Step 4 – Designing your WordPress blog

Now, the fun bit. Let’s make your blog look exactly how you want it to. To choose a new theme, you can either head to Appearance > Themes or you can head to a premium theme website like ThemeForest.net.

I usually choose something that looks professional and pretty easy to customise. WordPress also has this awesome feature that allows you to change themes with just a few clicks. So if you start getting tired of your current blog template, you can just switch to another one without losing any precious content or images.

Remember, your blog’s design should reflect both you and your personality, but also what the blog is about. There’s no point having a football-orientated theme if your blog is about tennis, understand?

On top of that, it should be easy to navigate if you want people to stick around. If it’s tricky and difficult to move around it, people won’t stay. Design is a subjective art; meaning everyone likes different things.

But no one likes ugly websites, and they especially hate websites that need a university degree to navigate. Make it easy for them.

For more reading, I’ve put together 3 blog posts about designing your blog. Feel free to check them through.

• Blog Design: Keep It Clutter Free and User Friendly
• Advice for Blog Design and Blog Goals
• Is there any software I can use to make my own graphics, button, and banner?

Last step! Woo!

Step 5 – Useful Resources For Beginner Bloggers

Bloggers come to blogging arena with varying degrees of online and social media experience, but we’ve all made more than a few newbie mistakes – there’s always room for more learning and improvement, whether you’re a beginner or you’ve been blogging for years.

These articles may help you avoid some of the growing pains when it comes to your first blog – enjoy!:

• 5 Beginning Blogging Mistakes You Can Fix
• Choosing a Blogging Niche
• How We Communicate: FAQs for Beginning Bloggers
• 7 Ways to Boost your success as a Blogger

And that’s it! I’m more than confident that your initial blog set up should now be finished and ready to go, and all that should have been really damn easy (unlike my first time, lucky you!). If you are having any problems installing WordPress on iPage thenthis guide may help.

If by some unfortunate circumstance you get stuck or have any questions for me about how to create a blog, just get in touch with me or leave a comment below. I’ll help you out with any problems.

Enjoy your new blog!

http://www.bloggingbasics101.com/how-do-i-start-a-blog/

3 Things You Should Never Say In A Presentation

22 Essential Elements of a Successful Internet Marketing Mindset

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by blogging?
It seems as you have too many things to do, and your time is never enough.

Have you ever felt as your internet marketing efforts are being wasted?
When you don’t see good results it’s hard to go on.

Have you ever wondered if you’ll ever find the answers you need to succeed with your online business?
So many times your questions were unanswered.

These are just few of the problems that affect who has a blog, you know it.
Let me tell you that you can solve all those problems almost overnight.

Don’t believe me?

The Problem (and the Solution) is Your Mindset

You may have traffic problems, conversion problems, engagement problems and many more, but the solution is always the same.
It’s the same solution for the problems that I described at the beginning of this post.

It’s the closest thing to the famous magic pill.

You could speak with thousands of successful people, and you will notice that most of them reached the success in a different way, but all of them have something in common: the mindset.

Your mindset is the key to your success…or to your failure.
It’s your choice: you can adopt a successful mindset and succeed, or you can stick to an unsuccessful mindset.

Let’s be honest: adopting a successful mindset requires huge efforts and concentration, but it’s the only way to long-lasting success.

Adopting a successful mindset it’s hard if you don’t know what to do, but I can help you with this 

1. Ask the Right Questions

When you ask a poor question, you get a poor answer.
When you ask a great question, you get a great answer.

If you could just take one idea from this post, let it be this one.

You’ll find many problems in your life, and you’ll get many solutions as well. Better questions will make you find better solutions.

For example, you may ask yourself “Why can’t I get the traffic that I want?”without getting any good answer – and feeling quite demotivated – or you can ask yourself “How can I get more traffic than I’m currently getting?”, and you’ll find some interesting answers.

You can ask “Why can’t I reach the success?” or you can ask “How can I reach the success?”. This time even the second question is a bad one: it won’t really bring to specific and actionable answers.
You can change it in “How can I reach the success efficiently using my current resources?”, and this question will lead you to better answers.

Here are the takeaways:

• High quality questions lead to high quality answers
• More specific questions bring to more specific and actionable answers.
• When you can’t find the solutions, it’s because you are not asking the right questions

2. Find Your “WHY”

Why are you doing it? Why are you working hard on your blog while having another job?

Give these questions your true answers, be honest with yourself.
There’s nothing bad in desiring to have a lot of free time to spend with your dears.

It’s important that you find your real reasons and visualize them in your mind. Make vivid pictures.

Do you know why is this so important?

This is the only thing that will make you go on when you feel the pain, when you are in your darkest moment, when your fears come out, when others don’t help you, when results don’t come and when you feel like you are running after an impossible dream.

The only way to go on in those moments is to have a solid, strong motivation. You won’t be motivated enough if your aren’t running after your real dreams.

3. Do it NOW

Of course, you can work on your next post tomorrow, but only if you don’t want to reach your goals.
The success is owned by people who act now.

There’s no tomorrow, no next week, no next year, just now.

Take action now, no matter how little is the step. It’s important that you go toward your goals now.
If you don’t try to do something now, probably you won’t try to do it tomorrow.
I know, sometimes it’s hard to do something, but at least try to do it now.

Actions, not ideas, change the world.

4. Be Focused

It’s easy to spread your energies on too many things when you run a blog.
You may start writing blog posts, but as soon as you notice that no one comments or shares them you may jump on Facebook to get traffic; after 2 weeks on Facebook you notice that you aren’t getting traffic from it so you may build an account on Twitter.
Unluckily Twitter doesn’t send you traffic and you try something else.

Having that approach is a complete waste of time.

Instead, to achieve your goals you should focus on one thing and master it before you move on something else.

Find your priorities and focus on them: first things first.
Leave out all the other tasks.
No matter how many things you want to accomplish, focus on your first priority first. Only after your first priority is gone, focus on the second priority and so on.

5. Failures are Feedbacks

Are you afraid to fail?

You shouldn’t.
Are you afraid to make one thing right? No way.
Well, failure and success are two faces of the same medal: feedback.

Both failures and successes are feedbacks. The first one means that you did something that didn’t work, the second one make you know that you did something in the right way.

Now, let me ask you this: how fast do you want to succeed?
If you want to succeed fast, you need to fail fast.

Failures are wonderful tools for learning, you can’t go on without them!
If you had not fallen from your bike many times, you wouldn’t have learned to go on a bike.

If you don’t fail online again and again and again, you won’t run a successful blog.

6. Be Prepared to Problems

You’ll encounter many difficulties on your road to success.
No matter how smart or resourceful you are, difficulties will appear.
It’s the life.

The average person encounters a difficulty, and he thinks: “What the hell! I was doing so great, why this happened to me?”.
A successful person encounters a difficulty, and he thinks: “Oh, there’s a difficulty! What a surprise! Let’s see how I can deal with it”.

Which of the two do you think works better?
Of course the second one.

If you know that you’ll encounter difficulties, you will be prepared and you will deal with them at your best.
Expect difficulties on your road.

7. Fight to Reach Your Goals

Given that you’ll have many difficulties, you’ll have to fight to overcome them.

The problems that you encounter on your road are there just to test you.
They are there to show that you really want something – or vice versa.

When you really want something, you aren’t scared to fight for it.
I guess that you already fought for one of your dears or for your values more than once.

It’s the same with your blog. Do you really want to succeed online?
In that case you’ll fight until you make it.

Show yourself that you are a lion and go take what you want.

8. If Something Doesn’t Work, It Doesn’t Matter

Other than learning from your mistakes, you can understand that failures don’t matter.
Why should you stress over something that doesn’t work.

There are tens, if not hundreds, of other ways to achieve something, you don’t need to think about the ones that don’t work.

If you can’t make great interviews to grow your blog, who cares? You can make guest posts.
Guest posts don’t work for you?
Try videos, or slideshows, or podcast, or forum talks, or building relationships, or social networks, or hundreds of other solutions…

Focus on what works, don’t waste your energy complaining yourself “I can’t do videos”.

9. Work Hard or Work Smart…but Work

Many people say that you have to work hard to succeed.
There are other people who say that you don’t need to work hard, but you have to work smart to succeed.

Here’s the truth: it doesn’t matter.

Work hard or work smart, or do both, but work.
If you do nothing, you’ll get nothing.
Please work.

If you want to reach your goals, the only thing that will get you there is the work.
Of course, some ways to reach the success are faster than others, but if you don’t know how to (or can’t) take those, take the longer ones.
Without working you won’t go toward your goals, so it’s better to reach them slowly than not reaching them at all.

10. Read Less, Do More

There are many great advice out there, but the truth is that there are too many of them: you couldn’t read them all.
In a world overloaded with information, it’s easy to read too much and do too few.
Don’t fall in this trap.

It’s way more effective to read one useful thing and translate it into practice than it’s reading many awesome tips and doing nothing.

As said before, to get results you need to take action and work consistently.
Reading should just support your actions, not taking their place.

11. One Step at a Time

Don’t overdo, you’re human.

Especially when you are really passionate about something, you try to do as much as you can.
Pay attention because working online it’s really like a snowball that rolls down from the side of a mountain: it starts small, but it suddenly becomes big.

It happens that you start working on your email marketing campaign, but you also start writing posts on your blog, making guests posts, tweeting, being on Facebook and so on.
At the beginning you can do all of these things, but as soon as the things grow you find hard to pay attention to all of them.

You may also try to accomplish too complex or too hard tasks. For example, if you haven’t ever made a guest post, it’s an excessive move to try guest posting on Copyblogger.

Take doable steps and do them one at a time.
Before you run, you need to learn to walk.

12. There’s No Finish

Once I believed that when you reach the success things start to become easy, you have lots of free time, you don’t have problems anymore and bullets bounce on your chest.
This is what most of the people believe too.

Whit the course of the time I understood how fool that idea was.
As you become more and more successful, you have to face bigger challenges, you may not find the time to eat a sandwich and you have to keep your success.

Of course, with a successful blog you may take your pc and go around the world, and you don’t have to wake up at 8 am, but this doesn’t mean that you would have an easy life – just a better one.

13. Learn to Take Lots of Decisions

Most of the time you have many options to choose from.
This means that you shouldn’t worry if one of them doesn’t work, but it also means that you need to take decisions. Lots of decisions.

You take lots of decisions in your every day life, but when you run a blog (especially if you run a successful one) you have to take 3X that number of decisions. Many of them are small decisions, some other are big ones, but all of them are important.

You want to be comfortable in the decision making process as soon as you can. This means that you have to embrace mistakes as well – among all your decisions, mistakes will be a constant presence.

Notice that even when you don’t decide, you are taking a decision: you are deciding to be inactive.
Learn to take the decisions that make you move toward your goals.

14. Learn From Others

You can make your own mistakes and learn from them, or you can read about others’ mistakes and shortcut your learning process.

Having a mentor or following a successful person is a great way to learn fast, take advantage of it.

If you hadn’t learned from others, you would have needed hundreds of years to learn what you currently know.
The same applies to internet marketing: you are following many blogs to learn how to succeed online because you know that otherwise you would need much more time just to learn the simplest things.

The problem here is that you may follow too many people or you may follow the wrong (for your business) ones.
My advice is to follow no more than 3 people regularly. Choose those people based on your business needs, on how you do feel with them and on how helpful they are.

15. Set Realistic Measurable Goals

Do you want to become a millionaire?
Me too, but it’s not my current goal. The reason for that is simple: currently it seems like an unrealistic goal.

Many people set unrealistic goals so when they realize that they are too far from them, they get discouraged and give up.
It’s ok to set a big goal, but you should be able to reach it or set a smaller goal.

It’s extremely important that you can measure your goals otherwise you can’t see how you are doing.
If your goal is “reach the success online”, you can’t know if you are coming close to it, and you won’t know when this is going to happen.

Instead set measurable goals like “having 1,000 subscribers” or “getting 1,000$ per month”. In these cases you know when you are getting close to them.

Give yourself a time to reach your goals.
This is extremely helpful to see also if you are doing good or if you should change your strategies.

For example if you want to reach 1,000 email subscribers in the next six months, you know that you are doing something wrong if in your first month you just get 10 subscribers. This gives you the chance to improve your strategy.

16. You Can Always Do Better

Your results in the last month were amazing?
Well, you can do better than it therefore try to push your limits.

Anytime you accomplish something, think that you can get even something more.
It’s the way excellence is made: you always try to get things further.

Notice that when you don’t move on, usually you move back – another good reason to push your limits and your business ones.

17. Add Value

Always add value to people.
Add value with your products, with your posts, with your emails, with your comments.
People are addicted to value.

Try to figure out how you can add value to people, because it’s the best way to build a successful business (both online and offline).
If you want to stand out online, this is a great way to do it.

Try also to learn how to add more value to people even with your existing works.

An example comes from my 14-part course Online Income from A to Z. Once it was made by 12 parts, but then I decided to add more value to my email subscribers so I added two more pieces of content to it.

18. Quality Over Quantity

Should I write many normal posts or should I write few quality posts?
Should I write long posts or short ones?
Should I give people lots of advice or few great ones?

To answer all these questions, keep in mind that quality it’s always more important than quantity.
Do you prefer to receive a life-changing advice or many unuseful ones?

Of course, you prefer the first one (it’s because you get more value from the first).

If you look around the blogosphere, you’ll notice that most of the people are giving many little advice. You don’t follow their blogs, you follow the blogs where you can find high quality posts.
It’s a great reason to write epic post, isn’t it?

It’s because of the value: you get more value from a high quality post than you may get from many normal posts.

Quality rules.

19. It’s All About People

For sure, you know the myth of the self-made man.
It’s a myth because no one can go far without other people.

You need other people to learn fast, to get practical help, to get support when you are in bad moment, to sell (you can’t sell if people don’t buy), to make join venture and hundreds of other things.

You can’t skip dealing with people and building relationships with them.
Remember that all of your works are for people.

This answers the question “Should I write for people or search engines?” and a dozen of other questions.

20. Be Passionate

Are you passionate about your stuff?

If you are working on a blog, but you are not passionate about the topics you treat, maybe it’s not a good fit for you.

Your passion is crucial to make you work when you are tired, better communicate with people, teach well, put your soul in your writing and so on…

When you are passionate about something it’s as you have a secret weapon with you.
You’ll keep going despite your failures and you’ll believe in your stuff even when you are dealing with difficulties.

You don’t want to quit your daily job to have another job that you don’t like, you want to work with your passions.

21. You Have to Invest Either Time or Money

It makes me laugh a lot when I see that many people search for keywords like “make money fast for free” or “easily make money for free”.

We are not talking about a video game, we are talking about the real life. In real life you have to commit yourself to achieve something.
It means that you to invest either money or time to reach your goals.

Nowadays we are really lucky to have internet. Once, the only way to start your own activity was to invest a huge amount of money – between thousands dollars and hundreds of thousands dollars.
Now you can start your own business with 100$, or a little more if you want to take the shortcuts.

Many people argue “But I don’t want to spend money online”. Ok, don’t do it, but know that you’ll need to spend an enormous amount of time…probably years before you get something worth talking about.

Easy and free success doesn’t exist.
Rapid success costs you money, free success costs you time.

22. There are No Excuses

Take your responsibility for your results.
Ok, sometimes you may be lucky or unlucky, but in the long term it’s only your fault if you fail and your merit if you succeed.

Stop telling you excuses and do what you need to do to reach your goals.
“I can’t” or “I don’t know how do it” or “I’m not goo at…” are just excuses.
You can keep telling you this bulls**ts or you can show that you are different from the mass and go towards your goals.

http://www.blog-growth.com/22-essential-elements-of-a-successful-internet-marketing-mindset/

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