How to Install a WordPress Blog (Quick Setup Guide for 2020)

Are you ready to install your WordPress blog? The people who start a blog, treat it like a business and fall in love with the process seem to make more money blogging than the ones who just “chase the money”.

Let's make money blogging around processes you love while treating blogging as your business. Click To Tweet

Starting your own WordPress blog (and then, monetizing it with affiliate marketing, paid advertising, sponsorship deals & your own products) takes a very methodical approach but setting up systems, creating joint ventures and working with your writers can help shortcut the process.

I want to kickoff this “how to make money blogging” training series to help you get your website up and running without wasting time and without spending a bunch of money.

You will learn how to:

If you’re new to the website, let me just tell you a little about me. I am a former 6th grade Science teacher who broke free from my job by making money blogging and monetizing blogs with affiliate marketing.

I’ve built 100’s of “niche” WordPress blogs over the last 15 years and I’ve been surprised at what I’ve discovered. Some of my “great” ideas had failed and some of the “stupid” ideas were instant 6 and 7-figure winners.

I noticed a pattern of the ones that were instant home-runs.

• They were simple.
• They solved a problem fast.
• The market was hungry to solve this problem.
• People linked to my best content (boosting backlink SEO)
• Check out the top money-making blogs
  

Lucky for you and me, these websites can be started for less than $20 and you can have a blog up within about 15 minutes.

If you’re ready to start a blog, let’s get started.

What are the parts to a money-making blog?

There are three components you need to get your blog working right now.

1. Your Domain Name – The URL that people will visit to view your blog.
2. Hosting Company – The server that stores and displays your website.
3. WordPress Content Manager – The free software that manages your posts and images.

Today, we’ll register a domain name, connect it to your “hosting” company, & install WordPress and a page builder to start building your new blog. The page builder will instantly give any page a professional look.

What are the costs involved in starting a blog?

When you register your own domain name, you’re looking at about $1 per month for the domain name. Most hosting companies will run a first-time buyer promotion, and then, a yearly fee kicks in for that hosting.

• Domain Name: $1 per month average See Our Bluehost Review
• Hosting: $5.95 per month average (as your site gets popular, the price increases)
• Page Builder and Manage Content: Free

Domain Name versus Blogging Platform

When you use a free website platform or a blog platform, you are outsourcing your content hosting & promoting that platform BEFORE your own brand. That puts limitations on what you can do in the future.

1. Owning your own domain name allows you to grow your brand while connecting with your audience.
2. Your domain name is now your brand and that allows you to position yourself as someone passionate about your topic.
3. You get total ownership and complete control which gives you greater visibility and flexibility.

Step 1: Get Your Own Domain Name for Your New Money-Making Blog

For this step, we’re going to use Bluehost to manage our domain name & our hosting. That way, it’s all in one & saves us serious setup time, and let me show you how to save money on your domain – hosting platform.

You’ll need to click the link below two times for the savings to appear.

Click this link to register your domain name

The first time you click this link, you will see a “website peace of mind from your trusted hosting partner.” During the coronavirus, Bluehost now has extended their 30 day money-back guarantee to 60 days and you can get started for $3.95.

It looks like this:

Click This Link Again & Then, Click the Get Started to See Lower Pricing Options...

Now, you should see these options. You can get started for as little as $3.95. The difference between these plans are “performance”.

If you’re on a budget, I would pick the PLUS hosting plan and start at $5.95 per month. If you can afford a little more, go with the PRO hosting plan to get a higher performance hosting plan. (see hosting packages below).

Choose Your Hosting Package Here

Once you pick your hosting plan, the “create a new domain” options appear. Now, this is where you put your domain name.

There are two boxes here. On the left, you can select a new domain name. On the right, you can use an existing domain name. It looks like this:

How to Save Money on Your Domain and Hosting

Once you enter your domain name, you’ll reach the “create your account” page so you can setup your hosting account & pay for the plan.

Now, I missed this drop-down SAVE MONEY box when I first signed up. So I ended up paying $181 more. You can save $181 when you use this hosting trick.

Click the drop-down & select the 36 month pro plan. It will show you how much money you’re saving on the hosting plan. When you select 36 months, you save $181.44 and that gives you three years to build your website.

Save Money on Hosting: You can uncheck the “package extras” since we’re going to install a few “free” plugins that work better than these paid upsells.

Step 2: Buy Hosting & Connect Your Domain to Activate Your Blog

Once you purchase your hosting package & then, select your domain name – you’re ready for step 3. That’s why I recommend combining the hosting & domain all-in-one.

In the next step, we’ll install your CMS or Content Management System. We use WordPress to create and manage all of our content.

Pro Tips to Selecting Your Domain and Saving Money on Your Website Hosting Plan

1. Your domain ending in .com will run about $1 per month or $11.99 per year. That’s a great price for your own brandable domain name. When you start to make money blogging, having the dot com is important for your brand & rankings.
2. I want to make sure you use the radio rule when selecting your domain name. The radio rule is if you’re on a radio show and they give you ten seconds for a shoutout, will the listeners be able to remember it easily and easily spell it when typing it in?
3. Get a domain name ending in .com because it’s worth more. I recently sold a random .com name for $26,000 because it was a common phrase that people use: The Bellagio.
4. Then, make sure you click on this link TWO times to get the “cheaper” prices locked in. Bluehost pays us an affiliate commission (which we use to monetize this website). That locks you in the lowest price for hosting. Choose Your Hosting Package Here

I personally like saving a lot of money when I purchase anything that I’m going to use long-term. I’ve tested out hosting companies for the last 16 years and want to get the fastest & most reliable hosting company while saving money. This is the one I recommend for just starting out.

You will save money on hosting when you pay in full for the longer duration (1 year, 2 years, 3 years).

So let’s recap what we’ve done so far:

1. Click Here Twice to Get Lower Pricing
2. Click on the Basic or Pro Package.
3. Enter Your Domain Name or Register New One
4. Select Drop Down to Save Money on Full Payment
5. Create a New Password for Your Login.

You’ll use your email and password to login to your hosting dashboard here.

Step 3: Install WordPress to Create and Manage Your Website Content

Once you submit payment, Bluehost will walk you through to get your content management system in place. We use WordPress to create & manage our content. And it’s free.

Get Started with WordPress & How to Start a Blog

Once you walk through the Bluehost steps to install WordPress, you can pick a website theme. We will change this eventually, but you can pick one that you like then click on “START BUILDING”.

That’s it. You should be able to pull up your blog on your domain right now. Congratulations. YOUR VERY FIRST WEBSITE ON YOUR OWN DOMAIN NAME! That’s a big deal.

You can create your first blog post by clicking on Posts > Add New Post in the left-hand side of your WordPress dashboard.

If you want to add any image or video to your blog post, click enter to create a new section within your blog post. Then, click the plus sign and click the image.

If you’re looking for a beautiful theme, click Appearance > Themes > Add New in the left side of your WordPress dashboard and you can search for free themes.

Congrats! Your audience is ready to hear from you. My advice to you is to create a blog around big problem areas and focus on solving people’s problems.

The biggest money-making blogs help people within these three niches: Health, Wealth, and Relationships.

1. Pick a niche that people are desperate to solve their problems and willing to pay you to solve that problem.
2. The biggest niches with the biggest audience are solving health problems, helping people make money online, or helping people fix their relationship.
3. Create content solving your niche’s biggest pain points.
4. Create joint ventures with every one of your offers and create a back-linking strategy to help boost your search engine rankings. The backlinks are the most important strategy to getting number one rankings.

When you follow the steps above, you are now ready to make money blogging.

If you have any problems or need any help, leave a comment below. I’ll create additional content and update this “how to start a blog” post to link to it.