How to create a successful blog? [Guia Completo]

Nowadays, due to the coronavirus and the consequent quarantine, many are unemployed or in need of extra money. An excellent option to achieve this goal is to learn how to create a successful blog!

To learn the step by step on how to make this work, check out all of our necessary tips and steps!

If you want to know exactly how to do this, keep reading this guide and see all the necessary steps, plus some tips at the end.

1. Why create a blog?

Anyone considering doing this certainly wants to know how to create a successful blog in order to earn money. Before we can teach you exactly how to do this, let's address an essential issue: why do this?

Having a blog gives you visibility

If you have a brand that you want to expand, if you have excellent products that you want to sell, if you want to be better known for what you do, having a blog can help you a lot, since with them you can consistently captivate and maintain an audience.

And, even better, producing quality content ensures that whoever accompanies you will share what you read with your friends and acquaintances, further increasing the visibility you have.

Having a blog gives you credibility

Really good blogs help their creators to gain authority and credibility in the area that the blog covers, which is because those who follow you only do it because they assume that you really know what you are talking about – and hence the need for excellent content!

Having a blog helps in your trade

If you have a store, be it a physical store you want to expand or an e-commerce, knowing how to create a successful blog can help you a lot not only in sales but also in the exposure you will receive.

To be able to really serve this functionality, it is necessary that you have the discipline to keep the blog active, which will create loyal readers. With that, strong connections are created and the likelihood of those who accompany you to decide to buy something increases!

Having a blog can help you (personally)

For those who cannot communicate properly, having a blog is an extremely useful tool for personal improvement. With this form of media, you learn better how to communicate in writing, improving the quality of writing and your reasoning ability.

Anyone who is not very good at doing online searches can improve a lot in this, since for each article or content that you write it is necessary to carry out a research process.

Having a good blog helps other people

Those who like to teach or help can use this as a motivation to learn how to create their own blog, since they have the function of elucidating doubts that millions of people have, ranging from simple problems to very specific and important things.

2. How to create a successful blog?

A very broad question, which will be answered in the following topics in our text.

More generally, a blog that will do really well can be from almost any area, it will be created on the platform where you have the greatest affinity and it can be in any language.

The traffic received can come from several sources, it can be organic (which comes without your involvement), come from social networks and more. You need to create a good strategy, have the highest quality content and have a particularly attractive design, with some fundamentals.

3. Decide what your market will be

Essential to be able to find out exactly how to create a successful blog is to know which market it will fit into. There are a really large number of options that you can choose from.

This decision is based on two main factors: how much you like the subject and how much competition you will encounter.

That is, you need to choose a topic that you like and feel comfortable writing and seeking information, learning and teaching daily.

Also, choosing a topic with less competition (that is, about which less blogs talk about) can be a pretty good idea, as long as, again, you have an affinity for it.

The most and least common blog topics covered are listed below, based on a study by Wpromote. It is good to keep in mind that the topics vary between countries, but this can serve as a general basis.

4. Choose where to create it

Another very important part when it comes to how to create a successful blog is on which platform or website you are going to create it. The most common are Blogger and WordPress, which has two versions.

• Blogger: The first of them, Blogger is the oldest platform of its kind, created in 1999. It is, until today, one of the biggest and best platforms for creating blogs and is where newbies start, but offers few options to scale it, being quite limiting.
• WordPress.com: It is currently the largest blogging platform internationally, responsible for 28% of online sites. But, as it is its own platform, it ends up also having the same problem as Blogger: it is limiting and offers few options for scaling the blog.
• WordPress.org: Finally, we have the free WordPress platform, which has the same content manager, but for use in own hosting. Just download, install on a hosting server and create the content, being the best option in the long run.

In short, anyone who wants to have multiple scalability options for their blog should use WordPress.org. It is worth mentioning that the website where you are reading this article, Apptuts, is created using WordPress.org!

5. Choose the domain

The next step in learning how to create a successful blog is choosing the domain you are going to use, which needs to be done before you can install WordPress on a hosting service.

The domain is the name that the blog will have on the internet along with some extension like ".com.br", ".com", ".net". The extensions are not all the same: “.com.br” serves to indicate that the site comes from Brazil, while “.com” and “.net” are international, so they do not indicate nationality.

So that you can choose your domain, using sites like Registro.br to check if they are available is a good thing. For international extensions, Hostgator is very suitable.

In addition, the name choice has some main recommendations:

• The name must be easy to remember, being simple;
• Avoid using two identical letters together, such as "designnovidades.com.br", as this can confuse reading;
• The name should be short and easy to write, as no one will remember a long name. Avoid, for example, “TodasAsNovidadesDoDesign.com.br”, preferring “inovaçõesdesign.com.br”;
• Avoid using trademarks in your name, such as Facebook, Google, Apple or Microsoft in your domain.

6. Choose the hosting service

To create a successful blog, the choice of hosting service is almost essential, since if your site is infected by a virus or falls frequently, no one will want to continue reading it.

Therefore, it is highly recommended that you use some international service, such as Hostinger, highly reliable and well established, in addition to being very affordable, starting at R $ 6.95 per month. More information about it is on its official website.

7. Install WordPress

The time has come to install WordPress.org on your hosting server to finally learn how to create a successful blog and put it on the air!

This can be done in two ways: using the installation service in one click, which is recommended and facilitates the process, or installing step by step, which gives more options but is quite complicated and completely inaccessible for those without technical knowledge . However, the guide on how to do this is below.

Download WordPress through the official website. Unzip the files using programs like WinRAR. One of the extracted files, the wp-config-sample.php, needs to be renamed to wp-config.php.

Upload all extracted files to your hosting account, using Cpanel in the folder public_html. In the options, click “MySQL database” to create the database and choose the desired name.

Now, create your administrator username and choose a strong password, associating the username with the database and giving all privileges.

Go back to the folder where you extracted the files, open the wp-config.php with your favorite text editor and fill in the data correctly, with the created username, password and database name. Save and upload, replacing the existing file.

To complete this part of the process, just enter your domain in the hosting service. If your blog is just starting, it is recommended to check the box that says "Prevent search engines from indexing this site", deselecting when the blog is ready.

8. Choose the theme for your website

To create a successful blog, having a good design with a beautiful theme is important. To add your theme, go to the WordPress control panel, where you will see all the navigation menus.

click in "Appearance" is on "Themes", where you can search for the theme you want for your blog. If you want recommendations, we have the selections of the best WordPress themes for your site and the best WordPress themes to create portfolios.

In addition, you can also refine the search using the menu “Characteristics filter”. After selecting what you like best, just edit and configure it to be as you want.

9. Write great content

The highest quality texts and content you can get, which are relevant, is another key factor for anyone who wants to learn how to create a successful blog.

Your content must be new, you can't always be doing the same thing that your competitors do. Deep and exaggerating texts are welcome.

Finally, it is very important that you maintain publication consistency, even if it is just one article per week.

10. Choose your monetization model

Whoever aims to create a blog most likely wants to work at home and on the internet to earn a good extra income, so that the monetization of it is necessary.

• Indirect monetization: This model is mostly used in personal and professional blogs. It serves in a way that you advertise what you do on your blog so that you are invited to, for example, lectures and face-to-face training. The income comes from sources outside the blog.
• Direct monetization: This model is the most common. Through it, your income comes from working with affiliate programs or Google ads. It is particularly effective for blogging articles on various topics, such as computers or music.

11. Study SEO

To be able to create a successful blog with a large number of hits and have a high traffic, learning SEO is extremely important. In a simplified way, SEO is the optimization made for search services, to help have organic traffic.

That is, by studying this you will be ahead of the competition, being necessary to understand how Google interprets and understands the searches performed to define what is relevant and what is not.

12. Final considerations

Some almost essential end points when it comes to creating a successful blog are listed below

• Determine your goals: What's the use of creating a blog if you don't have goals? Create realistic goals, such as reaching a certain number of visitors monthly, defining which traffic you prefer;
• Have a newsletter: For the retention of readers, the creation of a newsletter (registration with email) can be very good, since your readers will receive notifications with relative frequency of your new articles.
• Invest in the blog: To be able to really make extra income with a blog, you need to invest in it, hiring a professional designer to make the logo and buy your own theme, for example.

So, what did you think of our complete guide on how to create a successful blog?

Tell us what you think of the article, saying if we helped you create a blog. Remember to also check out our guides on how to create websites without the help of an expert and how to find the right digital bank for you.