We know what we are going to blog about right? Maybe you’re going to blog about cooking, being a single parent, weddings, relationships or starting your own business. Whatever you are going to write about you are going to need to take the first steps in setting up your website (blog).

Before you can do anything with setting up a blog you are going to need to purchase a domain name for yourself. The domain name should obviously be related to your content, easy to remember and keyword rich for search engine purposes. For example, on this blog I write about all the different ways to make a passive income, so I chose the domain name www.purelypassiveincome.com. You can purchase the domain yourself through a service like GoDaddy.com or you can let your hosting company purchase the domain for you. Once you have your domain chosen let’s start setting up our website.

I am a HUGE fan of WordPress. It is one of the most customizable and easy to use blog software available and it’s the only one I use. All of my niche content websites use WordPress. The only problem with WordPress is that if you plan on placing ads or making money off of it, you can’t have the free WordPress hosting to host it for you. You will need to obtain your own hosting to host the blog software. The good news is it’s totally easy to set it up and almost every hosting company out there supports WordPress now. Some even have a one click install option. The other good news is that it is relatively cheap to host your own. Check out BlueHost for one hosting option, but really any host will work.

Follow the setup instructions either from your hosting company or from WordPress directly on how to setup the blog software. It shouldn’t take but a few minutes (or seconds if your host has a one click install) and you are ready to go. You will start with a blank slate, a pretty basic look and feel to it and some dummy content for your first post already in it. The first thing I do is go into the admin panel and delete the dummy post and comments. I also purge out all of the links because they usually have nothing to do with what I’m posting about.

Next, you will want to give your blog a new design with a WordPress theme. There are many free WordPress theme websites that you can download hundreds of themes to install. One of my favorites is WordPress Themes Base. To install a theme, all you have to do is go into the “Appearance” tab in the admin panel and Add a New Theme via the upload feature. You’ll upload the entire .zip file that you downloaded from the website and activate it upon a successful upload. Your entire blog design will change right before your eyes. It’s pretty cool and very easy!

After your blog has taken on a new appearance you will want to go into the “settings” tab and start setting up other important details for your blog such as your blog title, tagline, permalinks, writing and reading options and any other area you might want to customize. Just start checking out each section and modify until everything looks the way you want it to.

Setting up your first blog will probably take a little trial and error if you don’t have a one click install available and have never done anything like this before. Your hosting company will probably be happy to help you or you can post questions you have to this post in the comment section and I will try to help you out if I can.

There you have it! Your domain name is working, your hosting account setup and your WordPress blog is ready for your information! In the next post I make we are going to start working on making this thing a little more than just an empty wasteland so stay tuned!