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Has the thought ever crossed your mind that it may be awesome to have a blog to call your own? Maybe you're really passionate about something, or you want to share your knowledge, and even maybe you've read blogging success stories of people making thousands of dollars a month from blogging.
Well, what are you waiting for? You won't know if you can succeed if you don't try. I'll show you how to start your own free WordPress blog with Bluehost.
Starting a blog can be a great hobby or it can also earn you major income. It all depends on which direction you want to go in. Either way, blogging can be very fun. There are days where I can spend hours working on my blog but it doesn't feel like a drag, time definitely flies by way too fast.
I guess when you enjoy doing something, it doesn't feel like work at all.
The best part about starting a blog is how very inexpensive it is. You can start a FREE WordPress blog starting today. It's really that easy. You may be wondering what is WordPress?
WHAT IS WORDPRESS?
WordPress is a blog and website creation tool where you can create and customize your content. It may be a website you want to create for your business or create blog posts for your personal blog page.
To think of it simply, WordPress is like a house where you can customize and renovate it and add furniture (content) to your heart's desire. However, a house sits on land. That's where Bluehost comes in.
Keep in mind that you want WordPress.org and not WordPress.com. You can start your free WordPress blog or site through Bluehost (web hosting provider).
Why you want WordPress.org
- Customize your site to your heart's desire
- Able to make money off your site by placing ads
- Able to install any plugin you want
- It is your OWN site and can't be deleted at a whim
No need to worry about this at the moment. When you sign up with Bluehost, WordPress.org is what you will be using.
WHAT IS BLUEHOST?
Bluehost is a web hosting provider. Think of it like the land where the house sits on. Through Bluehost you choose your domain name (website name). Once you sign up with Bluehost, WordPress is then free to be used as your platform. The best part about starting your own free WordPress blog with Bluehost is that the fee is extremely inexpensive!
I'm talking about LESS THAN A CUP OF COFFEE a month. Yes, I'm serious! You can start your own free WordPress blog with them for as little as $3.95 a month. That's incredibly affordable for creating something that can change your life.
I absolutely LOVE Bluehost! I mean it! Their customer service rocks! If I ever had questions about my site, I can chat with a representative at any hour of the day or night.
Just the other day, I reached out to a rep at 11:30 at night and had my question answered.
Bluehost reps are the ones that helped me get my site up and running when I first started out and had no clue what I was doing. They're really amazing. For $3.95 a month to start a blog/website/e-commerce page it's totally worth it plus more!
Bluehost Benefits
- Low rates- Starting at $3.95 a month to host your website (plan I still use till this day)
- Awesome customer service
- Easy setup and integration with WordPress
- Free WordPress site included
Starting your site with Bluehost is an awesome option for beginners and if you don't get a lot of traffic to your site in the beginning.
Bluehost is highly recommended for those just starting out because their reps go above and beyond to help you get the ball rolling.
Once the traffic to your site starts picking up or you need super premium hosting service, then I would recommend WPEngine down the road.
WPEngine offers great customer service, fast site speeds, and comes with all the bells and whistles when it comes to web hosting.
HOW TO START A FREE WORDPRESS BLOG ON BLUEHOST
First you need to head to Bluehost site to register your domain name and sign up for your website hosting. Bluehost if offering a 50% discount at a very low rate of $3.95 a month compared to $7.99 a month for this service. For their level of service, easy-to-use platform, plus a free WordPress site, it can't get any better than that.
Sign up at the discounted rate of $3.95/month with Bluehost-Click Here
Next, pick your plan
If you're just starting out, choose the basic plan. You always have the option of upgrading your plan later if you need to. The basic plan should be more than enough.
Choose your domain (website) name
You can choose your domain (website) name at this point, or come back to it if you can't think of a good name yet. Also, you always have the option of changing your website name later if you're not happy with what you chose to begin with.
Create Your Account and Pick Your Plan
Within the basic plan, you can sign up for a 12 month plan, 24 month plan, or 36 month plan. When I first signed up with Bluehost, I chose the 36 month plan because I wanted the cheapest monthly cost possible. That is basically $3.95 per month, $47.40 for the year or $142.20 for 36 months. I pay triple in my cable bill for one month compared to what I pay for in a whole year to run my blog.
If you're not sure about a 36 month plan, you can always try it for 12 months which will be $5.95 a month or $71.40 for the year. That's still a really good price to run a website that you can call your own.
To get the cheapest rate, signing up for the 36 month plan would be the best option.
After choosing your plan, there may be some 'Package Extras' that could be automatically checked off. I wouldn't sign up for those tools just yet. First, get your website up and running and you can always download free 'Plugins' to meet your website maintenance needs. You can always sign up for those recommended programs by Bluehost later if you need to.
Install Free WordPress Blog
After signing up with Bluehost, your free WordPress blog and website will be automatically installed. That's another reason why Bluehost is awesome, everything is very simple to use on their platform.
Choosing Your Theme
First, you will be prompted to choose your theme. There will be lots and lots of free themes to choose from. There will also be premium themes available at a cost. You can choose the theme that you like the most.
When I first started my free WordPress blog, I chose a free theme but quickly ended up with a premium theme. Surprisingly enough, using a free theme was actually a lot harder than using a premium theme.
I found that I had to manually try to "build" a page having to customize every single thing which made it extremely difficult for me since I was completely new to the coding/web page building world.
A premium theme was incredibly easy to use. Everything from the home page, posts, contact pages were already beautifully styled and all I had to do was change wording around.
For people that are new to blogging/website creation, I HIGHLY recommend a premium theme. Save your time, frustration, and energy to create what's valuable which is your content!
For my site I use Thrive Architect theme which you can get get HERE.
I'm stating this from experience but for a good part of the first year of starting this blog, I had another theme which I paid around $50 for it.
It was decent enough where I was able to easily design my pages as needed but as time went on I started noticing that the design of my website was hugely limited compared with Thrive.
As you start your blogging career, you'll begin to realize that any little thing you need as far as appearances go for your site, you may need to start getting plug-ins.
Keep in mind that the less plug-ins you have on your site, the better because a lot of plug-ins actually bog down your site and slow it down.
After months and months of messing with plug-ins and being frustrated with the lack of customization for this site, I came across Thrive and it's been amazing guys!
Thrive is literally the all in one package to help you launch a beautiful site with tons of pre-designed pages. Also, you'll find their page design/builder is extremely easy to use. Even a non-techie and beginner like me was able to design my own site.
Thrive can literally help you save hundreds or more because you won't need to hire designers or buy expensive programs if you want to do more advanced stuff like make courses or create sales pages for your site.
Thrive is all you need! I'm seriously in love with this theme builder and it's so easy to use.
You can get a beautiful site up with Thrive, it's really an amazing tool to use.
So, I HIGHLY suggest for you to try Thrive and save yourself hair pulling, frustration, and wasted time using other themes.
Navigating WordPress
Once you arrive at the "Welcome to WordPress" page, click on "Business" or "Personal" depending on what you want your site to be about. For blogs, I would choose the "Personal" option.
Awesome, now you're all ready to get started creating great content!
Just to familiarize yourself with the platform, let's go over a few things you may see on your navigation bar on the left.
- Posts- Primarily used for your blog content.
- Media-Upload your pictures, videos, and other media files for your site
- Pages- This is where you go to create your homepage, contact page, about me page, and more.
- Comments-Check recently posted comments on your site.
- Appearance-This is where you can go to customize the layout of your site by changing themes or adding in widgets.
- Plugins-Offer extra add-ons to your site if you want specific forms, back-up programs, gallery display, number counters, calendars, graphs, and so much more. There's a plugin for EVERYTHING. You will find all sorts of plugins specific to your site's needs.
There you have it, now you know how to start a free WordPress blog through Bluehost. It's simple and easy to sign up. Bluehost has awesome customer service and they will help you with any concerns you may have. $3.95 a month is so worth having your own beautiful blog and website to call your own.
If you have any questions at all, I'll do my best to help you out. Reach out to me here.
Alright, now you're ready to put yourself out there and share with the world!