How To Start a Blog And Best Way To Make Money Online Blogging

Blogging is one of the best ways to share your view. It help one to expand one's business online presence. With this you can actually promote your personal brand or business to target audience. 

Currently, creating a blog is easier than ever.
I’ll guide you through everything with pictorial illustrations , so you get your blog started today.
a lot of people have already used uchehub
instructions to create a website , so I’ve probably answered every question you might have here.

But if find any difficulties  feel free to contact me , I’ll help! 

Here are three commonly questions people do ask me.

1. How much time does blogging take?
Following these instructions it will likely take less than 20 minutes to have your site live on internet. However, choosing a domain name and the blog’s theme (which determines how it looks) could take a while if you don’t  know what you want them to be.
Lastly, creating quality content that your potential readers will love can take even more time. For instance , it took me more than  3 days to put this piece of content together.
Overall, blogging doesn't have to take much time. It’s completely up to you to decide how seriously you want to take it.

2. What do it cost to have a blog?  I will confidently say that one can actually create a blog free if one want to, although there are limitations. Because there are a couple of things you should pay for; some includes
A domain name (www.YourBlogAddress.com) will cost
around N4000. Another thing that will require you to spend is Hosting.
Web hosting is usually around N300-500/month or more.

Note : If you want to start a serious blog, you’ll need to spend some money to get a domain name and web hosting.

3. Can I make money online blogging?’
Yes. Some successful bloggers make insane amounts of money, do you know how much Linda ikeja, and others makes online? they makes $50k plus monthly
There are enormous ways to earn money with your blog, some are makes money online by offering services, some using Google Adsense program, some are monetizing their blogs with Amazon and some are just selling physical/digital products. 

STEPS TO OPEN A NEW BLOG

1. Choose Your Blogging Platform
When starting your blog, there are several platforms to choose from (tumblr, blogger etc..).
However, one that really stands out from the pack is WordPress. It’s FREE, user friendly, and perfect for people who've never built a blog before.
Why People Use & Recommend WordPress?
It’s FREE (you only need a web host & domain name)
There are 5,000+ free & paid WordPress themes available to make your design look professional.
They have super helpful support forum .
It offers 45,000+ free plugins to help your blog run more smoothly and efficiently.
91% of all blogs are running on WordPress, and WordPress is also used by 62%
of the top 100 company blogs.

P.S. DON’T DOWNLOAD/INSTALL
WORDPRESS YET, YOU’LL NEED TO Install IT IN STEP 4.

   Step 2
2. Choose a Domain Name
(www.YourBlog.com)
Before you go any further, you need to choose a domain NAME. Your domain name is important because:
It’s your “first impression” to website visitors. It affects your rankings in search engines. It defines your brand. With that in mind, you should put some thought into your domain name, but not too much.
If you come up with something you like within 5 minutes, give it a go. (You can change it later). But here are a few domain tips to get you started:

I. Choose brandable over generic . A brandable domain name is unique and stands out from the competition, while a generic domain name is usually stuffed with keywords and unmemorable. (For example, www.LisasRocks.com is more brandable than www.RockCollectingBlog.com .)
Keep it concise. According to research from
Gaebler.com, a magazine for entrepreneurs, the top-100
websites have approximately 6 characters in their domain name.

ii. Easy to type and pronounce . Your domain name should roll off the tips of your fingers and the tips of your
tongue without any problem.
P.S. DON’T BUY A DOMAIN NAME YET,
I’LL SHOW YOU HOW TO GET ONE FOR
FREE IN STEP 3 (below).
Step 3
3. Sign Up With Web Host and Install WordPress.
What is Web Hosting and Why Do You Need it?
Web Hosting is the service that keeps your blog accessible for everyone. It stores all the files, images and content that your blog has and displays it to the visitors. If you don’t have a web host, you won’t be able to set up a blog for others to see nor will you be able to use your own domain name.

There Are Good & Bad Hosting Companies
Choosing your host is one of the most important aspect of creating your blog .
Bad web hosts cause most of the issues people have related  their blog. For example, unhelpful customer
service and hidden fees are quit common…
Many cheap hosts also overuse servers to cut their costs—and that leads to your site potentially not working just because many people are visiting some other site. Only
some cheaper hosts control the resources well, so that your
website always works right.
I highly recommend www.whogohost.com

WhoGoHost offers various plans suitable for anybody, ranging from plan with very little space to very huge plans. You can also upgrade your plan at any time, if you think the current hosting package you have is too small.

All their plans come standard with the
following features Guaranteed:

99.9% Network Uptime

Unlimited Emails

FTP Accounts

PHP 5.4 - 7.0

MySQL Databases

CPanel and PHPMyAdmin

CGI, Ruby(RoR)

Extensions,Perl Extensions,

CRON Jobs

SMS & Email Notifications

Automated Installation for Wordpress, Joomla, SMF etc. 

Unlimited SQL Databases

Parked and Addon Domains
Supported

Free SSL Certificate

Follow this  steps to buy a new domain and set up your WordPress blog.

Step 1

Visit whogohost website

• Step 2
• Enter your domain name(the name of your website) and click register domain.
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• 
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• Step 3
• Select your preferred transaction currency either Nigerian naira (NGN) or United States dollar (USD) –
• > Step 4
• Insert your domain name and choose an extension .com. com. ng .org. info and many more
• Step 5
• Then Click on ‘No hosting, click to add’ to add a host for your domain name. You need to host the domain name so you would be able to login and input data in the website perfectly
• Step 6
• If you are a Beginners you can select (1GB) and upgrade when ever they like. Click ‘order now’
• Step 7
• Select your preferred billing cycle >> select ‘checkout’
• Step 8
• Input the details and your domain name owner details
• Step 9
• Make sure you accept the terms and conditions before you
• proceed. Click on ‘complete order’.
• Step 10
• Your payment details would come up. All you need to do is copy them out, make your payment. You can pay instantly using online transactions options available.
• You would receive an email with details about your new blog when the payments have been confirmed.

INSTALL WORDPRESS
Step 1

• After you have purchased your domain name and hosting package you will get access to ‘cpanel’.

• This link to this cpanel will be given in the email sent to you along with you cpanel username and password.
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• 
  

• 

• Step 2

• Click on the cpanel link and type in your username and password given to you in your email.

• Step 3

• Log in, scroll down until you see the WordPress logo (under scripts) and click on it.

• Step 4
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• 
  

• 
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• Now click ‘install’ and you should see the software setup area.

• Step 5

• Now Fill in your Site name, site description, admin user name,vadmin password, admin email, choose a preferred language

• and don’t forget to insert your email so your installation details would be sent to you. Finally click ‘install’.

• Step 6

• After the installation is done it would give you a confirmation screening showing you your unique WordPress login URL that would look like this: http://new domain.com/ wp-admin

• Step 7

• Copy this and write down your username and password. The URL is where you go when you want to write posts or edit your new WordPress blog.

• After logging in, you’ll see the welcome page of the admin panel. It should be fairly intuitive after browsing around for a few minutes, with all of your major options helpfully located in the sidebar panel.
• 
  

• 4. Customizing and Choosing a Blog Theme: Once you’re inside WordPress dashboard, you can start customizing your blog. We’ll go through everything you need to do to get your blog ready and your first post published today. You should get familiar with the look and items of the WordPress admin menu.

 Here are the various admin menu items:

Dashboard – This is the page you see right after logging in.
Posts – Here you can write and publish new blog posts
and view and edit old ones. We’ll go through this once
we’ve set up the blog otherwise.
Media – This is your media library with all the images,
PDFs, videos, etc. you’ve uploaded.
Links – Many blogs don’t use this at all. You can skip it for now.
Pages – Here you can write and publish new pages and view and edit old ones. We’ll look at this after choosing your blog design.
Comments – Everything related to comments. You can get familiar with this when you’ve published your first
post and readers leave the first comments.
Appearance – Here you can change what your blog looks like. We’ll go through this in detail below.
Plugins – Here you can add and remove plugins, which
add functionality to your blog. We’ll go through this after
selecting the theme.
Plugins – If you create your content with others, you can add them as users here, so they can edit posts.
Otherwise, you can skip this for now.
Tools– Here are some additional tools you can use for publishing posts. You can skip this for now.
Settings – Here you can edit your blog’s settings.

Choose a FREE Theme for Your Blog
I think choosing your new WordPress blog design is the
most fun step. The good news:

You can do it all on your own. You can get a FREE WordPress theme that makes your blog look great.
You can change it later (just don’t change it so often that your readers can’t keep up).
The bad news:
You can spend a LONG time looking for the perfect theme.
A WordPress theme is responsible for how your blog looks, so it’s an important decision.
In other words, a WordPress theme is like your car’s frame. It changes how the car looks, but doesn’t impact the features or performance too much.
Luckily for you, WordPress has thousands of great-looking themes already optimized to fit any brand, niche, or industry.
Here’s what to look for in a WordPress theme:

Simplicity: Unclear design makes it difficult for readers to navigate your blog.

Responsiveness: The theme needs to adjust its layout across different screen sizes and devices. In the highly mobile world we live in, responsiveness is a necessity.

Speed: Although most themes don’t slow down your blog significantly, it’s still good to test it. To test a theme’s speed, use the Pingdom Website Speed Test, enter the URL of the theme’s demo, and see how long
the page takes to load. If the load time is longer than three seconds, you might want to find a different theme
(ideally, the load time is below two seconds).

Ease of customization : It should be easy to customize the theme—otherwise, you’ll struggle every time you want to tweak something. Fortunately, many themes
offer plenty of easy customization options.

SEO readiness: The theme shouldn’t make a huge difference to search engines. But it’s still better to choose a theme that’s designed with SEO in mind.
(Look for “SEO Optimized” or “SEO ready” in the theme
description.)

Security : Themes don’t generally create security issues.bBut it’s anyway good to check some user reviews and
comments—and while doing that, check if people have
had security problems with the theme.
Keep these factors in mind when choosing a theme. But most importantly, pick something you love and want your readers to see.

Step 5
5. Adding Posts and Pages
Okay, now you should be all set up with WordPress. So, now
for the fun part – it’s time to create your first blog post! I’ll
take you through each step of this process to make it easy
for you.
Go back to your WordPress admin panel (http://
your_domain.com/wp-admin/) and then to “Posts » Add
New” (or “Pages » Add New) from the left sidebar.
What you’ll see is a very friendly editor screen that should remind you of MS Word or Pages on Mac:
Let’s break down what you’re seeing here:
1. Title Area : This is where you write the title of your post.
2. Content Area : This is where the body text of your post
goes. The whole area works just like text editing in Word
or Pages. You can also add images and other media to your post by clicking the “Add Media” button.
3. Standard Editing Tools : Here are options like bold, italic, lists, paragraphs, and headlines.
4. Publishing Tools : This is where you get your post shown to the world; chief among them is the big blue “Publish” button. You can also set a publication date to schedule your post in the future or save the post as a draft for more editing.
5. Additional Fine-tuning Tools : Update your blog post and categorize it (you can learn more about WordPress
categories and tags here).
Here are a few things to keep in mind:
Adding links to your posts: You should use outbound links to other websites when needed to back up your claims. For
example, if you’re writing an article about meditation, you can link to a study that showed that meditation helped
people feel calmer. To add links to your posts, highlight the desired text, then scroll up to the blog menu.
Click the paperclip-looking item to the right of the “Align
right” item (above the “Add BWS Shortcode”).
From there, add the URL you want to link to:
Then, click the Settings icon on the right (the wheel-looking
item above, next to the arrow).
Click the “Open in link a new tab” box. This is important—you don’t want people to leave your site when they click on
a link!
Adding Images to your posts: I touched on this briefly before, but I’ll explain it more here. Start by scrolling up to the top of the blog menu and click “Add Media”.
From here, select the files you’d like to upload. You can find previously uploaded files from the “Media Library” at the
top-left corner next to “Upload Files”.
Once you’ve uploaded an image, you can choose its size and placement.
To add a featured image (the image that will be at the top of your post and in the thumbnails of your article), scroll to
the right sidebar of your blog menu. You’ll see an option titled “Set featured image”. Click that, then go through the same uploading process to add in a featured image here.
Adding videos from YouTube: Adding in a video can spice up your post. This process used to be a bit complicated, but
after some recent WordPress updates, it’s easy.
All you have to do is copy the YouTube video URL into the content area. Make sure that the URL is on its own line and not clickable. When you publish the post, the video will appear.

Creating the slug: Your slug is the URL of the post. You want to make this slug clear and concise. This will make it easier for people to share it on social media, and overall it will just look better. You can find the slug underneath the post title. It will say
“Permalink: http://yourdomain.com/post_title”.
Sometimes, the title of your blog post will make the perfect slug. But usually, it will be too long, and you should change it, so that it’s no longer than 2-4 words.
Here are some tips for optimizing your WordPress slugs:
Target SEO keywords. Think of what people would type to Google when they search for the information you share in the post—those are SEO keywords.
Avoid duplicates (make sure it’s not the same as another slug on your website).
Don’t change the slug after publishing the post (unless you absolutely have to) as this will result in lost traffic.
Adding headings: Headings help you structure your content and make it easier for people to read. Consider adding headings for each of your main points.
To add a heading, scroll up to “Paragraph” drop-down menu. Select the heading you’d like to use. Note that the “Heading 1” is usually reserved for the post’s title, so stick to the smaller headings (with larger numbers) inside the post.
Publish Your Post (or Page)
When you’re done working with your post, click the “Publish” button and then the “View post” link that’s going to appear at the top of the page (you’ll see your post live on the site).

Congratulations! You just published your first blog post.
Before you share it with others (which is the next step), let's add a simple tracking system to your site, so you’ll see
exactly how many people you’ve reached.

6. Get Traffic and Monetize Your
Blog
No blog is complete without compelling content. To start, you should figure out the topic(s) that your blog will focus on. Then, come up with 10-15 ideas for new posts. Make these posts a mix of informative and entertaining.
You’ll also want to err on the side of creating evergreen content (content that doesn’t become dated/is always
relevant) versus news/current affairs content (which becomes dated and irrelevant). Evergreen content will
continue to generate traffic overtime, while other content will run its course and become irrelevant.
Here are some tips for creating strong blog content that
your audience will love:
Start by creating a lead-generating content marketing strategy.
Follow this guide for creating strong blog posts .
Develop a reading habit, so you can internalize how great writers write.
Make your content scannable with headings, short paragraphs, and high quality images.

headlines (if your headlines aren’t compelling, people won’t read the content!).
Promoting your blog:
If you want more blog readers as well as the opportunity to monetize your blog, you need to promote your blog.
Turning a blog into a profitable business is doable if there's enough traffic.
Traffic = customers and money.
How to make a blog with sustainable traffic? All you need is:
A content plan (i.e., what will be your blog’s main topic)
A game plan for social media (i.e., which social media sites you’ll use and what content you’ll share)
Some basic knowledge of SEO (traffic from Google

For now, here are some tips to get started promoting your blog:
Start collecting your blog visitors emails by setting up an email marketing services.

 SEO, usability, and Google guidelines.

Don’t be spammy on social media. Instead, aim for a good mix of social media content—share blog posts and videos, as well as content from other influences, and also share other interesting and value-adding
statuses.
Answer questions on Quora.com and link back to your blog.
Post and promote on relevant Subreddits on Reddit.
Use republishing to get featured on large websites.
Next steps to start your blog today
Now that you know exactly how to start a blog, it’s over to you. So, I hope you’re ready to take action!
If you want to share your ideas or expertise with the world,
build an audience or community, or make money with a blog, start now by getting it set up. It only takes a moment,
but still many people get stuck with it thinking, “I’ll do it a bit later.”
So, here are the steps to take:
1. Go to whogohost now to get your blog setup (you even get
a free domain).
2. Choose a theme that makes your blog look the way you want.
3. Add the few important pages.
Write your first post (for example, write a short post about why you’re interested in your topic and what you’ll be writing about, so all your readers can see right away
what your blog is about.