What do you need to create a blog?

Creating a blog is the dream of many people. Maybe you have certain experiences you want to share about your favorite hobby, work, life or travels. There are many reasons to start a blog. You can set it up without any experience and maintain it for a small annual fee. In this blog post, we'll take a look at how to start a blog and what all you need. Let's get started.

Come up with a name for your blog

The first step before starting your blog is to come up with a name, since you can already use that name on the blog itself. And, more importantly, for the domain name. In other words, the address through which people can find you on the Internet. A domain name is what is entered in the navigation bar of an internet browser. Since we have MijnHostingPartner.nl as our domain name, your domain name can be registered. This is per year and is a contract you enter into and cannot be changed easily. So think it over carefully and try to tell someone on the phone. And whether it is easy to remember. These days, it's not as important to match the name to the topic you want to create content about. However, it's often easier to identify what the site is about if you include that in the domain name. If you can't think of a name, you can also use your own name for it.

Would you like some advice on this? Then you can always come to us in the chat. With our years of experience, we can help you choose a domain name. And maybe give you a few suggestions.

Creating a blog site

After you have thought about a domain name, you can enter it on our website. The real-time domain name configurator will then immediately check if it is still available. Then you can decide on a package. To get the best results for your blog, we recommend that you choose an SSD package. The "Most popular" option gives you 25 GB of storage. That's enough for years of work and mail for your website. And all of this comes at a great annual price.

Once you complete your order, we'll send you a series of emails to guide you through the process. Once the package is activated, you can then immediately begin building your website in the WordPress content management system. One of the easiest ways to create a website. If you want to use a different content management system for it, that is also possible. We support a wide range of them, including Joomla, Drupal, Grav, Umbraco and many others. However, for most beginners we recommend WordPress, as you don't need any programming knowledge here. And have a choice of many pre-built things. Which you can set up with a click of the mouse.

Installing WordPress

We've madeWordPress installation a breeze in our customer panel. All you have to do is press a button and write down your details. After that, you can get started with your WordPress website right away. To make it even more descriptive, we've also made a YouTube video about it, so you can hardly go wrong.

WordPress is the most widely used method of creating a website, from blogs to webshops and everything in between is created with it. This has grown so much because WordPress offers many thousands of free plug-ins and themes that you can install with the click of a mouse and continue to use to make your website look the way you want it to. The basics of a WordPress website, so the look and initial installation can be done in an afternoon.

Installing a theme - the look of your blog.

WordPress lets you choose from thousands of themes to use for your blog, both paid and unpaid. For beginners, we often recommend choosing a popular free theme first. Like WP Ocean or Astra, but most importantly look around the WordPress admin area. Just make sure there are lots of updates for the theme and that the reviews are positive. This can give you an idea of how best to work with the theme. Themes that are not updated regularly and have only negative reviews can be a security risk for your website.

Again, installing the theme is just a click of the mouse, after which all you need to do is configure it. This can work a little differently with each theme, but with many themes you can simply add your logo, blog name and some main colors to be used. That's often all that's needed at first, too.

Create some fixed pages

After WordPress is installed and you've chosen a theme, you can start creating some fixed pages. If you dig in a bit and visit other websites, you'll discover some recurring elements. For example, the "About Us" page, the "Contact Us" page, the home page, and an overview of recent posts. The purpose of these fixed pages in a blog is often to invite the visitor to read more. For example, you can create a page with your most popular articles, a landing page for people who sign up for your newsletter. And so on.

A blog is often started not out of the goodness of your heart, but because you have an idea that you want to make money from. Like placing ads or recommending used products. So you can also include your privacy agreement and cookie statement on the fixed pages. Everything you know about your visitors should be explained here, and you should make sure that your website is safe to use.

Getting started with blogging!

To actually start blogging, you can first set up some categories for your blog posts and then get started with your first article. You can do this about anything you want, a welcome blog or other welcome text is nice. But no one will read it. Because without content, your new blog will certainly have few or no visitors for the first few months. Social media can increase this a bit, so it's better to focus on interesting articles to publish on your new blog.

Also, patience is a virtue, don't give up on your blog too soon and make sure you publish new content regularly. In the case of a blog, the persistent one wins (most of the time).