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A little bit about me.
I have always wanted to be a writer. No matter what I was doing at the time, there was always this nagging voice in the back of my head of what blog I would have, what book I would write, or what it would be like to write for a magazine or newspaper one day.
I have also always had a corporate career (and still do), a toddler to entertain, unfolded laundry in the dryer, and seemingly no time to pursue something like this.
Once Covid hit, and my commute time ceased, and that nagging voice started to whine at me again. Suddenly I found myself on a wild google-hunt: “how to start a blog”, “is blogging worth it”, “everything you need to know about blogging”, “10 things I wished I had known before I started blogging”, and the list goes on.
Long story short, I decided to jump. I told myself (and am still telling myself) that I am going to try blogging for one calendar year and see what happens. Fun fact: when you buy a domain, you buy it for one year. So, June 1, 2021 starts my one-year attempt at blogging. This is how I did it:
The Bare Minimum: Hosting & Domain
In order to start a blog… you need to have a website.
I spent a lot of time researching the best services to use in order to create a blog. I looked at Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, Blogger, and then finally settled on Bluehost (for hosting) which ultimately uses WordPress for the website builder.
I ended up picking Bluehost. There were two main reasons I picked Bluehost, one because it was literally the cheapest option (roughly $3.00 a month) and secondly because it seems that every professional blogger I could find, uses and recommends bluehost.
Now that I have been live for a couple of weeks, I am honestly so glad that I went this route. During my setup, and as I was learning the tool, I had a couple of mishaps and their 24/7 chat support was like a godsend, every issue was resolved in just one chat, with no wait time, and in less than 5 minutes.
If this seems like the way you might want to go, I highly recommend it. If not, Wix and Weebly were runner ups for me.
Domain Name & a Logo
It took me a couple of days to come up with a domain name because I wanted it to be simple, with common words, and mean something to me for potential future branding purposes.
I also knew that I wanted it to be a “.com”… not a “.net” or any of the “.somethings” that are starting to become available, both for search purposes and for legitimacy purposes. The problem is that a lot of .coms are taken, even if they arent being used. And even more “.coms” have been taken by hosting services like godaddy and sold for thousands of dollars to own (if you don’t know… any net new domain name costs ~$8/year)
Once I thought up Messy Eating, saw that it was completely net new and cheap, that was when I purchased my hosting and domain together, rather than purchasing the domain separate and having to transfer it to my hosting service later.
Once that was done I set up a logo, using Canva.com (free), and loaded it up into the website builder.
Theme (IE: The way your website looks)
There are a ton of 100% free themes that you can get with wordpress, and even more free themes that Bluehost provides as well. Clicking through all of them and gut-checking what I wanted my site to look like was the most fun thing ever.
I started with a free theme food lite, but when I started building it out I decided it wasn’t quite as minimalistic that I like. I ended up looking through a lot of theme walk-throughs on youtube and “top best” lists but honestly settled on one that I found off-hand on themeforest / envanto market.
I ended up picking my theme (Soledad) because it had a really extensive preview so I knew exactly what I was getting, and it came with 24/7 support for the first year, and has a ton of different configurations.
Content
I knew I didn’t want to launch my website with nothing on it, so I tried to set a goal of writing up and publishing 5 recipes before “going live”. I settled with starting my blog some recipes that are just tried and true and famous amongst friends and family: with my pea salad, a single-serving molten lava chocolate cake, skillet african peanut chicken, a warm mayo-free potato salad, and a single-serving white chocolate pound cake.
Every piece of advice I read only about having a successful blog includes “finding your niche” and optimizing SEO. Honestly, I don’t think I’m there yet (being… just about 2 weeks live as I write this) but I’m trying to relax and just enjoy the recipe making.
Though, Looking back I do think I want to rewrite some of the posted recipes and templatize them so that they all of the same general sections.
Social Media
I’ve talked a lot about how I am giving myself a year of blogging before I call this attempt “successful” or not. For me, success means that I’m able to make the blog pay for itself in terms of the annual cost (for hosting, the domain name, equipment for cooking and taking pictures, etc.) Because I don’t sell anything or have any products, monetizing primarily means ad money or affiliate marketing… both of which requires sizable amounts of traffic in order to generate any income.
Social media, such as pinterest and facebook, is free to use and can help direct traffic, so I went ahead and set up a blog account/page on those platforms. My plan is to post anytime a recipe comes out and hope I get some “shares” and interest in the recipes.
Email Collection
Email is another free tool that increases repeat traffic. Right now I use Mailchimp, which is a free plugin that helps collect email addresses and manage email campaigns. I don’t plan on starting to use email marketing until I have a heftier amount of emails to actually send to, but I imagine it will end up being a monthly recap of what I previously posted.
Note: make sure if you are collecting email addresses that you have a fleshed out privacy policy… that is a legal requirement.
Legaleze
I knew that if I collected any data (like email addresses) I’d need a privacy policy from previous work experience. Luckily, there are a ton of great resources out there that I leveraged, in combination with the free template that blue host provided, to make my privacy policy. It is a best practice to link the privacy policy to the footer of the website.
Troubleshooting
I ran across a couple of issues along the way, these might seem like really simple issues but I figured if anyone has these issues then it might be helpful:
- (Mail Chimp) When testing my subscribe forms, the submission would receive a “must select list” error. This was ultimately resolved by connecting my plugin to the MailChimp website, creating a list from the website, and then going back to WordPress to manually select a list underneath the settings tab.
- When viewing my site live, Google would alert me that “beware” this site is “not secure”. This was resolved by contacting Bluehosts customer service via their 24/7 chat support. They were able to find the issue in 5 minutes flat (they found a different plugin that was incompatible with the free included SSL certificate that they provided, it was fixed before my coffee was even done reheating in the microwave.
- My application for Google Adsense was rejected due to uncopied html in the <header>. I’m probably just dumb for not being able to figure this out… but I did end up figuring out on my theme’s free guide/support that there was a theme specific section to copy/paste the html in, that would automatically add it to the header code of my site. So… a theme specific issue 🙂
- My pinterest pins previewed the entire recipe, which is great for users to have right away but doesn’t give any incentive for them to open up my website. After looking into it I discovered that pinterest defaults to using “rich pins”, which essentially pull all the fun stuff out of your website and puts it directly into the pin description. Pinterest does have instructions on how to turn rich pins off, which include inserting custom html into your website, but it took a bit of digging to find. If this is something you are having issues with this article was helpful.
My First Month of Traffic
I don’t know why I thought that the traffic would just start flowing in. It isn’t; I’m getting less than a handful of viewers per day right now. So, not much to see here in terms of stats except that it is incredibly lackluster. I’m going to be doing some SEO work on my blog posts, try to increase the amount content so that google thinks I’m a real website instead of a scam prop, and double check the quality of content so that people might want to visit again.
I’ve also joined a couple of first-time-blogger facebook groups to get feedback and tips on SEO and boosting traffic (for free).
Summary
- Pick a domain name. You can check availabilities at namecheap.com or via your hosting provider.
- Buy hosting and a domain name, bluehost is best for customization, price, speed, and profitability. Wix and Weebly are good (and pretty) out of box options if you plan on having something super simple and don’t plan on changing appearances later.
- Customize the site with a color palette, theme, and logo. You can make a logo for free on canva.com.
- Write & upload content.
- Create a form to receive an email list. If using wordpress, mailchimp is a good, free, scalable plugin for this.
- (optional) Apply for any monetization programs you might want ie: amazon affiliates, google adsense, etc.
- Make it legal – you will need a privacy policy if you collect any personal data (like email addresses). If you plan on using affiliate marketing, then that will need to be disclosed in every post that uses them.
- Set up and use social media for boosting traffic.
- Be patient – it takes time.
This post may include affiliate links, which means I earn a small commission recommending products and services that I actually love, at no cost to you.