How to start blogging

How to start blogging

Ok, I know this has nothing to do with home education but I have had so many of you beautiful people contacting me and asking me about,  how to start your own blog, and numerous other questions around blogging.

So, I thought I will answer all your questions within this blog post.

About my blog:

Firstly, the platform I use for my blog is WordPress. I find it easier to navigate than other platforms I have tried out previously, so this is what I stick with. They also have lot’s of support with learning how to use WordPress and build your blog. 

Theme:

The theme that I have chosen for my blog is called: BC business consulting.

Colors:

You can customize your site for the colors you wish by going into your dashboard, click on appearances and then onto colors. 

Blog style:

You can create whichever style you like really by using widgets and plugins. 

HTML:

On the right hand side of my website, you can see adverts, these are where I have subscribed to an affiliate site and entered their coding into the sidebar HTML.

In other blog posts, you will also see banners, these are also affiliate links that you just copy and paste into the HTML of the blog post. 

To enable these ads, I have also added a plugin called Ad Inserter.

Adding more:

I have not created a front page to my website as yet but I have had several of you suggest that I add maybe a picture and a bit of blurb, so I will add this in due course. Right now though, it is simply my blog posts that are shown on the website. 

The main menu, these are pages that I have created and added them as a primary menu.

SEO:

For my SEO, I use Yoast. This is a plugin that you can download under the dashboard-plugins. I love this plugin as it guides you with a traffic light system for each of you posts and pages. This is the only plugin I need and use for my SEO at the moment. What I am currently learning though, through Yoast Academy

Learning:

WordPress have their own tutorials to get you started and you can also subscribe to their email to get regular blog posts that include other tutorials.

WordPress courses  are great, they will help you to level up your knowledge around WordPress, I am continually using these to gain more around knowledge around building your own website, I only use the free options at the moment, so you don’t need to spend money to learn how to create your own blog. There is lot’s of free information out there for you to consume.

Yoast academy   is a great platform to learn all about SEO for your website, this is what I use and am still learning with. 

Hosting:

For hosting, I use 34sp.com. This hosting platform, I don’t think I will ever change from! There is a cost to it, which is £9.95 per month

• Optimized For WordPress
• Free Migrations
• Free Staging Sites
• Free SSL Certificate
• Free Daily Backups
• Free Email & Webmail

  There are also 2 other plans you can choose from:

Website builder:

• Drag & Drop Interface
• Beautiful Templates
• Easy to customize
• E-commerce Stores
• Free SSL Certificate
• Mobile Friendly Websites

Professional hosting:

• Cost Effective
• Free Website Statistics
• Free SSL Certificate
• Free Weekly Backups
• Optional Daily Backups
• Free Email & Webmail

*Always make sure you have your SSL certificate for your website, otherwise your site will show up as not secure and put people off staying on your site.*

Hackers:

Several of you have asked if I am worried about my site being hacked and loosing all my work. That would certainly be devastating, so be sure to make a copy of all your work and save them in Google drive, Word or any other platform that you use, so that if this does occur, you haven’t lost everything completely.

I have a plugin that I use, created by WordPress experts called Jetpack. This helps with Security, performance, and marketing tools.

Also, WP fingerprint – WP Fingerprint adds an additional layer of security to your WordPress website, working to check your plugins for signs of hack or exploit.

Plugins:

Below are a list of plugins that I have installed into my website currently.

• Ad Inserter – Insert ads to your website
• Addtoany share buttons– Social media/sharing buttons
• Akismet anti-spam – However, I still have to filter through the comments as spam still comes through, so still figuring this one out really.
• Auto Amazon links – Formerly, Amazon Auto Links. The plugin generates links of Amazon products just coming out today. You just pick categories and they appear even in JavaScript disabled browsers.
• Broken link checker -Checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.

Security Plugins:

• Jetpack – Security, performance, and marketing tools made by WordPress experts. Jetpack keeps your site protected so you can focus on more important things.
• Jetpack boost – Boost your WordPress site’s performance, from the creators of Jetpack.
• Meta tag manager – A simple plugin to manage meta tags and other meta data that appear on aread of your site or individual posts. This can be used for verifiying google adding open graph tags, SEO meta and more.
• rtMedia for WordPress, BuddyPress and bbPress – This plugin adds missing media rich features like photos, videos and audio uploading to BuddyPress which are essential if you are building social network, seriously!
• Site Kit by Google – Site Kit is a one-stop solution for WordPress users to use everything Google has to offer to make them successful on the web.
• Table of Contents – Improve readability and navigation of your websites with the Table of Contents Block.

WordPress Plugins:

• The simplest and fastest WP Cache system – WP fastest cache 
• WP fingerprint – WP Fingerprint adds an additional layer of security to your WordPress website, working to check your plugins for signs of hack or exploit.
• Very fast caching plugin for WordPress.- WordPress Super Cache 
• Easily add code snippets in WordPress. Insert scripts to the header and footer, add PHP code snippets with conditional logic, insert ads pixel, custom content, and more.WPCode – Insert Headers, Footers, and Code Snippets.
• WP-Optimize makes your site fast and efficient. It cleans the database, compresses images and caches pages. Fast sites attract more traffic and users. – WordPress-Optimize – Clean, Compress, Cache.
•  Check spelling and grammar on your site automatically with multilingual WProofreader plugin. – WProofreader.
• Yoast SEO – The first true all-in-one SEO solution for WordPress, including on-page content analysis, XML sitemaps and much more.
• Yoast 

I think I have answered all of your questions but if I find I haven’t, I will update my post. If there are any other question’s you have on blogging, send me a message: ingramfreedomjourney@gmail.com.

I will also add extra information to it as time goes by and I learn more on blogging myself. To start off though, I would suggest that you signed up to the WordPress and Yoast courses! They are great.

Thank you to all those that have commented on my blog and given me tips to improve upon my blog. I appreciate you all!

Thank you 🙂

Speak again soon!

Best wishes

Hayley