Step 1. Choose an Audience and Subject

The first step is simple but can easily send you down a spiraling rabbit hole of choices: find your audience and subject. The most important part is the audience. Who are they, and what do they want? What sparks interest for them?

The most obvious path forward is to create an audience based on your own interests. In other words, you’re the first member of this audience.

Now, pick a subject. What are you passionate about? What do you want to learn about? This is where you should start, and remember that you can always refine and change things as you go—and you should because your audience will change too.

Example

A great example of choosing an audience and subject can be gleaned from the Succulents and Sunshine blog. We heard this blogger speak at a conference about how she didn’t know much about keeping succulents in general, let alone in a state with cold winters.

She used that interest as an opportunity to learn more about succulents, care and maintenance through blogging. Now, Succulents and Sunshine has a huge audience based on a small niche subject choice.

This story shows how you can really fall into a great blog concept by thinking about the things you want to learn more about. As you learn, you can share your findings and that in and of itself is a great blog concept.

Free Tools

If you’re bursting at the seams with great ideas, you shouldn’t have a problem finding your subject and audience. However, using a free tool like Hubspot’s Blog Idea Generator couldn’t hurt for getting the juices flowing. You may want to do this regardless. Even if you already have a subject idea, you’re going to need content ideas—lot’s of them—to get started.

Step 2. Create a Content Calendar for this Year

Before we get into the details of creating a website for your blog, we should really make sure your idea is appealing to you. There’s no better way to do that then planning out your content for a year. This means setting a weekly schedule and cadence for your posts, brainstorming article ideas and themes and putting it all on a schedule that you can keep to.

As you start planning out content, it should quickly become clear if you’ll enjoy it or not. Successful blogs put out high-quality content consistently on a schedule their audience comes to expect. If you don’t like what you’re writing about, the quality will inevitably suffer, and your readers will look elsewhere.

Free Tools

Planning a content calendar can be as simple or as complex as you like. CoSchedule offers a free content calendar template to help you format and find topics and article ideas for your blog. I also recommend using CoSchedule’s headline analyzer as a rule of thumb for writing engaging headlines for each article.

Step 3. Create Your Blog Website

Creating your blog website will be one of the most fulfilling parts of the process. Before you start, though, run through this checklist to make sure you’re ready to dive in.

• Know your audience
• Know your subject
• Research blogs with similar topics for best practices
• Create a content calendar/schedule you can handle
• Come up with 3-5 names for your blog (in case one of them is taken)

Website Hosting and Domain Name

A lot of people understand websites, but how websites are hosted is less common knowledge. Basically, a website is a group of files that you access over the internet and load on your computer. Those files need a place to live, and that’s your hosting plan.

Hosting companies have come a long way, and you’re in the golden age of DIY websites. Before you start customizing your website and creating content, you’ll need to get a hosting service and domain name. Many hosting providers offer you a free or cheap domain name with the purchase of a hosting plan.

Install WordPress

Next, after setting up your hosting and domain name, it’s time to install WordPress. With most hosting providers, installing WordPress is as simple as clicking a button and waiting.

A note on WordPress: it’s the platform that powers 1/4 of the internet, and it’s built around blogging. We sell a variety of website CMS, or content management system tools, to accommodate preferences. However, we’ve seen the best user experiences and best results from WordPress sites and tools. WordPress offers you amazing flexibility and expansive options.

Once you’ve installed WordPress on your website, you should receive an email with your login credentials. These will get you into your WordPress admin dashboard, which is where you configure all the settings for your website. You can access this login page any time by typing in your website URL with /wp-admin added to the end, for example: yourdomain.com/wp-admin.

Choose a WordPress Blog Theme

The next step is choosing your WordPress theme. A WordPress theme is a template and user interface for creating your own custom website. Themes vary greatly, from free to premium, and each offers different features and ways to customize.

Installing a good WordPress theme can save you incredible amounts of time and money and give you an up-to-date, functional design without requiring you to code or hire a web designer. Premium themes run about $59 on average, and provide incredible features and customizations that you won’t find with free themes.

Read our guide to choosing the perfect WordPress theme for your project or browse the top selling blog WordPress themes on MOJO Marketplace to get some ideas. Keep in mind that you can try any theme demo and experience all the options and styles before you buy your theme.

Install Your WordPress Theme

Once you’ve chosen your WordPress theme, it’s time to install it through WordPress. Remember that installing a theme doesn’t mean it’s active, so you can install as many themes as you like and preview them with an existing site’s content. When you’re ready to push it live, you can click Activate on the theme you like by selecting Appearance > Themes > Activate (on the chosen theme).

Read our guide to install your WordPress theme.

Import Your Theme Demo and Customize

All WordPress themes come with a demo design, or multiple demo designs. These designs are professionally crafted by the web developer who created your theme and are often designed to the current trends and specifications for specific types of websites, such as blogs.

By importing a design, you can have a fully fledged website up and running in seconds. Then all you have left is customizing the content and branding. Check out these two guides to import a demo and start customizing:

1. Guide to Import a WordPress Theme Demo
2. Guide to WordPress Pages, Posts and Menus

Start Blogging

Now that your WordPress site is set up and customized, you’re ready to start writing content, taking photos or designing images, and pushing it all out to your audience via social media and email marketing.

Before you begin, read our post on writing your first blog post in WordPress. This post will give you a primer on the WordPress content editor and show you how to schedule content to publish in the future (wow technology!). This is where you can start putting your content calendar to use.

After your blog is up and running, check back on our Start a Blog and Grow Your Audience categories to learn more blogging tips and marketing strategies.

1. Blogger

The Blogger WordPress theme has long been a favorite for people with a story to tell. It’s simple, but highly functional design enable you to get started quickly and publish stories frequently. This theme is designed with bloggers in mind, first and foremost, so it doesn’t take a WordPress whiz to make it look and work great.

Try the Blogger Demo

2. Freyja

The Freyja WordPress Blog theme offers an elegant personal blogging design with simple customizations that go a long way. You can choose between 2 personal blog demos and an e-commerce store demo and import the designs with one click. However, if you want to go completely custom, Freyja is easy to use and provides all the options a blogger would want.

Try the Freyja Demo

3. Wunderful

Wunderful is one of the cleanest minimalist blog themes you can find for WordPress. With simple layouts and features, it’s very easy to make this blog theme your own. Choose between grid and list layouts for your blog posts, and add widgets and contact forms to tie it all together.

Try the Wunderful Demo

4. Tuulikki

For 2017 blogging themes, you can’t miss Tuulikki, a theme that looks as elegant as it sounds. This theme features a crisp minimal blog design. The look and feel lends itself to fashion, food, family, or home bloggers, and has the flexibility to fit any type of blog.

Our favorite feature of this theme is the posts slider.

Unlike many of the clunky or aggressive sliders out there, this one shows off posts with clean scrolling right at the top of your posts page. This makes for a nice user experience, as your latest content is prominent right next to your main navigation bar. You can choose from the three different slider layouts built in.

Tuulikki also does a great job displaying categories in the right sidebar.

Tuulikki isn’t a one-trick pony, though. With plenty of variety in blog layouts, a promo box, and WooCommerce integration for online stores, this theme packs in tons of style and function.

Try the Tuulikki Demo

5. Carbis

Another contender for bloggers is Carbis, which features a very professional design geared toward travel blogging and rich photography.

We love the featured post slider, and the title box that only appears on the middle post, as well as the awesome category tiles.

In addition, the blog post feed comes in a unique format which slightly overlaps the post body with the featured image, blurring the boundary between photo and text.

Carbis helps you create a great reading experience with room for photos to breathe. It’s a great option for travelers, photographers, or anyone who wants to create compelling content paired with beautiful photos or instructions, such as recipes.

Customize the fonts, colors, and layouts easily with the theme options, and this blog will tell your story with swagger. Or, with a rich photo display and social media links up close and personal, Carbis makes a great hub for the social media whiz.

Try the Carbis Demo

6. ZenBlog

ZenBlog has been a longtime favorite at MOJO Marketplace for it’s straightforward blog format and highly usable features. ZenBlog has plenty of room for photos that tell a story as well as an optimal layout for reading and perusing your thoughts.

The typography design stands out among other blog themes.

The different font weights, for example, guide your eye and create a very finished professional look.

The layout and placement of widgets for ZenBlog are highly customizable, and you can try all the options in the theme demo. Also, the theme developer has created tutorial videos that make it easy to set up your WordPress site just like the demo and customize.

Try the ZenBlog Demo

7. Blogera

Need some inspiration for a uniquely designed blog? Blogera features 25 demo designs, each with a different perspective on what a blog should be. The cool part is you can take any of these designs, import the settings and content with one click, and customize the content.

This theme lets you create any type of blog very quickly because of the demo designs. Seriously, it has everything from a basic travel blog to a unique full-width style, as shown here:

We can’t underscore enough the value of variety here. Want to get started blogging fast? The developer has created a video that shows you how to build your blog in 5 minutes, and our customers have raved about their support:

Try the Blogera Demo

8. Heron

Sometimes, a blog WordPress theme just needs to be simple and focus on the content experience. Heron is one of these themes. You can get started quickly with a pixel perfect design that is tried and true, and puts your content up front.

Our favorite feature is the extended excerpts for posts, which allow you to read a couple of paragraphs before having to click “read more.”

You have many options to make each post unique, such as galleries and sliders, but the layout can remain uncluttered and centered on your stories.

Try the Heron Demo

9. Bloghi

Bloghi is an outstanding design for nature, fashion, and lifestyle bloggers who want to bring style to their writing and photography.

Some of Bloghi’s coolest features are the widgets, such as: about me, advertisement, flickr, video, carousel, and social media sharing buttons. You can add dimension to your blog feed by placing these nice easter eggs in the sidebar.

Above all, Bloghi does a great job of presenting your blog posts in an attractive feed, with all the features you need tocreate interesting categories and expand your audience.

Also, having great support for your theme is not to be overlooked. See what people are saying about Bloghi and their support:

Try the Bloghi Demo

10. Juliet

The Juliet blogging WordPress theme brings sophistication to your writing. Of all the blog themes we’ve combed through this year, this one has one of the coolest category designs, which also give you space to describe the different types of content you create.

Juliet’s elegant layout enables you to pack in a lot of information, photos, and features without getting crowded. For example, this blog feed and sidebar layout features a ton of info, yet it feels adequately spaced.

This theme has many features and styles, but also offers something different—a look book template. With the look book template, you can create as many look books as you like and change the layout as well. The look book is a great way to group evergreen content that fits together, or to provide product guides and comparisons.

Try the Juliet Demo

1. Start with Quarterly Themes

The four quarters of the year provide the perfect framework for building a more detailed content strategy, while also refreshing every three months. Choosing four main themes for the year will also focus your content efforts, providing the consistency in post topics that will build an audience.

The themes that you choose should reflect both your business goals and the needs of your potential customers that you’ve found through customer research. They should be broad enough that individual topics within them address the interests of customers at the awareness, consideration and decision stages of the purchase process.

2. Break it Down into a Monthly Calendar

From your quarterly themes, you can begin to plan out a more detailed content plan for each month. Start by deciding how frequently you will post new content, based on the capabilities of your team and the number of content topics. This could be one new post each day, one every other weekday or even a much more in-depth piece per week.

There are many tools you can use to build out your content calendar, starting with a basic calendar in Google Sheets. CoSchedule and HubSpot also offer free calendar templates for planning out your content campaigns. You can also use task management systems like Trello to organize the content process.

The key is to plan out a consistent schedule of content that covers all customer needs and uses a variety of content types, including long-form posts, infographics and even video. You’ll also want to incorporate holidays and other special events in your calendar when they align with your audience’s interest.

3. Plan to Promote Your Content

Another key aspect of a successful content strategy is effective promotion of that content—which again needs to be consistent in order to draw the audience of customers that you want. If you are just starting out or making new efforts to expand your audience, social media is the key to drawing new attention to your content.

Each social platform has different best practices in order to get the most out of your shares—Social Media Examiner breaks this down in more detail. In order to keep track of your promotion schedule for new content, these social media posts should be included in your content calendar. You’ll also want to consider setting a budget for social media in order to increase your reach.

4. Build Your Content Team

For smaller marketing teams—or even solo ones—the amount of planning and actual content writing needed to be consistent can be overwhelming. This is where freelance content writers can help, though you’ll want to ensure that the freelancers you hire have a thorough understanding of your industry and your audience. Services like Scripted make it easy to find qualified writers and to set up a consistent schedule of content creation.

Once you’ve established a consistent schedule of content, the next step is refining your strategy and your processes to be better and more efficient. Google Analytics is a wonderful, free tool that enables you to measure interaction with your content and promotion channels.

Get going on your new content plan today and start providing extra value for your audience.

Content is King

Writing quality, relatable content about the products and services that you are marketing is easily the most effective way to make money online. By quality, I mean well-written, authentic, researched material. And by relatable, I mean writing and promoting products and services that your audience cares about.

For example, if you are a food blogger, promote cookware. Avoid reviewing things like the new iPhone X, for example, so that it’s clear to your audience where your authority is.

Reviewing a product or service will give your readers the insights they need to make a purchase. Imagine the questions someone might have about a product, and answer them with clear and concise descriptions and explanations.

An issue I run into often managing MOJO Marketplace affiliates is “I am a fashion blogger, how do I write quality and relatable content to promote websites?”

This is about knowing your audience, and finding everything that might be useful for them.

Now, being focused on a particular niche doesn’t mean you can’t help people in other ways. I run into this problem a lot at MOJO, as we help people build websites, and offer commissions to affiliates promoting our products and tools to their audience.

Let’s say you’re a fashion blogger. There is most likely a portion of your audience that wants to build a blog as well; who wants to be just like you. So, in the case of MOJO, I suggest that people write a simple “how to” article about their experience creating a website, and give some advice about how they can reach that goal using MOJO’s products and services.

In other words, there are a ton of ways you can increase your affiliate footprint online, so long as you’re open to the opportunities.

Newsletters Keep Your Readers Up to Date

When blogging or managing a website, collecting emails from visitors is imperative to building a loyal audience and distributing content.

Sending newsletter emails to your audience about new content, updates, or promotions is a great way to keep them coming back for more. Using tools like OptinMonster makes collecting email subscribers very easy.

Newsletters are another content avenue for putting the product or service you are trying to promote in front of the right audience. They also serve as reminders, and people save emails to reference in the future.

Some newsletter formats that are effective:

• Product roundups. This could be a link to a single article rounding up products that are relevant to both your audience, and to each other.
• Announcements for big promotions or product releases.
• Content roundups. Package a week’s worth of content or a suite of related articles to send your audience back to the blog. Giving these some kind of theme often boosts engagement.

Social Media Expands Your Audience

Using social media to promote your content or products is a huge part of managing your blog or website. It actively puts your content in front of users rather than waiting for them to reach your site the old way.

It also puts your blog or website in front of people who normally would not see it and allows people to share your content or products effectively.

You can also reach different audiences and run content tests through advertising on social media.

Much like using Newsletters, Social Media is a great way to put the product or service you are promoting in front of your reader base. Using the reviews you have written, or writing status updates about products or services will drive a lot of traffic.

The credibility and trust that you build with followers across platforms will help you see a boost in conversions.

Exclusivity Breeds Value

Offering products and services with exclusive deals only available on your website is a great way to drive traffic and convert at a higher level. Advertisers are usually happy to give you an exclusive offer, so don’t be afraid to ask. (They know it works).

Check out this MOJO Marketplace exclusive offer on one of our top affiliate’s sites:

This is the ages-old incentive to buy: the deal.

Featuring exclusive deals also helps create the perception of your site as an authority. When you partner with brands that are well-liked by your audience, and you can demonstrate that you have a deep connection to those brands, it works magic.

Even If the advertiser won’t give you an exclusive offer, they’ll probably settle for monthly or seasonal coupons, which you can still spin to your advantage.

To do this effectively, you will need to make sure that you are keeping up on your advertisers coupon offerings through the affiliate network you’re using.

Technology Puts More Tools in Your Bag

Even when advertising technology has come so far, you still see a ton of banner ads all over the internet, used in the most traditional fashion.

How many times have you seen an ad in a sidebar?

Most of the time, these ads aren’t relevant to the content on that page, because they’re just running one ad sitewide.

But there are a ton of plugins available that allow you to experiment with creative ways of placing ads. We all know that pop-ups can be annoying, but they also demand your readers’ attention and can provide useful discounts or info.

Having a pop-up with a coupon code or link to an article that relates to the content on the page you choose to serve the ad on is a better way to serve a less irritating and more useful ad. You can easily create better popups using the OptinMonster  WordPress plugin.

As an affiliate it is very important to try all the techniques available to you. This will help you understand better what your audience responds to, and in turn, enables you to convert at a higher rate and earn more money with your advertisers. Try these five techniques and experiment with your audience. If you have any questions or additional ways to make effective affiliate promotions, share your knowledge in the comments below!

Install Your WordPress Theme

The first step in the process requires a WordPress theme, preferably one that includes a one-click demo import. Any of the top selling themes on MOJO Marketplace should come with this feature. But, whatever WordPress theme you choose, check for that detail in the list of features before you buy.

In a way, you want to shop for your WordPress theme based on the demos if you’re going to use a demo to begin your design.

If you want to design your site completely custom (using WordPress), then check out this article on designing your site.

But if you’re going this route, pick out a theme with a demo that you like. Keep in mind that many developers create amazing demos for industry specific or niche websites.

And once you’ve settled on a theme, you can follow our guide to installing WordPress themes on your WordPress website.

Also, if you’re maybe a few steps behind, and you don’t have a domain or hosting set up yet, you can read our guide to setting up hosting and getting a domain.

Import Your WordPress Theme Demo

Next, if you found a demo that will work, you need to import it into your WordPress site. Due to the variety of themes available, I’ll run through two ways to import a demo.

1. Automatic demo import through your theme dashboard
2. Manual demo import

Auto Import that Demo!

The first option is easy, and will work if your theme offers this functionality. I’ll use the Highend Multipurpose WordPress theme for this demo because it features one-click demo imports from the theme dashboard.

via GIPHY

Here are the steps covered in the gif above:

1. Open the Highend theme options tab
2. Click Import Demos
3. Browse the demos and click Import Demo on the one you want to import
4. Choose which types of content you’d like to import, or simply select All to get the full demo
5. Wait, because it can take a little while

Then, as simple as that, you’ll have the full demo design installed on your website, ready for you to customize it and replace the content.

Now, your theme may not include this in-dashboard import feature. No big deal! You wanna choose the theme that looks right for you, so we’ll show you how to do this manually as well.

DIY that Demo Import!

Okay, so this method is still easy. In the end, doing a little legwork here saves you a ton of time in designing your own site because you get to leverage the demo.

For this tutorial, I’m going to use the Jayo minimal portfolio WordPress theme, which offers a manual demo import. Here’s how it works:

1. Once your theme is installed and active, click Tools and Import.

2. Next, locate the WordPress Importer to the right. If not already installed, click Install, and wait for it to finish.

3. When you’re ready, click Run Importer. This will open up a page that allows you to upload a demo file.

4. Now, you need to locate the demo file for your theme, usually in your theme documentation or the developer’s website, and download it. For Jayo, I simply Googled “Jayo WordPress theme demo import” to get there faster, and clicked the link to documentation.

The documentations shows me the process, and directs me to a specific file in the theme folder. The theme folder is the full package of files you received when you purchased your theme. You’ll need to find that folder first, and locate the file (in this case jayo-demo.xml).

Or, if you bought your theme through MOJO, simply log in to your account, access your purchases, click the download button, and choose Demo Data.

5. Navigate back to the importer, as described above, and upload the file as shown in this gif. Make sure to select a different author after the demo is imported to make it your own.

via GIPHY

Get Your Brand in There

After you’ve imported the demo, you probably want to start making it your own. One of the first, and most obvious ways to do that is to update your colors, fonts, and logo.

All of this can be done through the WordPress visual customizer under Appearance > Customize or from a theme options panel. Of course, this will depend completely on your theme, so you may need to reference your theme documentation or tutorials to figure out how to make specific changes.

If you need help figuring out your branding, see our article on creating an identity for your site.

And if you’re in need of a logo, check out this affordable and effective option offered on MOJO Marketplace.

Don’t Forget to Change the Filler Content!

The beauty of importing a demo is that you get a beautiful design out of the box.

The problem is, you’ll have every piece of content included in the demo to sort through. I suggest making a list of things you need, then go through your pages, posts, and menus and delete all the stuff you’re definitely not going to use.

Then, you can easily jump in to each page, post, or feature that you want from the demo, and insert your own content and images.

For more guidance on messing around with the content, check out our post on editing pages and menus in WordPress, and our post on drafting a great first blog post.

If you need help beyond that, or just some basic WordPress knowledge, look at the WordPress section on our blog, our WP Live WordPress support product, or a website like WP Beginner, which will cover the gamut of what you need to configure your site!