All life coaches should consider blogging to help new clients find them. Why? Blogging helps drive traffic for your brand with key word search engine optimization (SEO), offers you the opportunity to develop relevant content and useful information for your customers, enables income-producing paid advertising, and acts as a marketing tool to drum up sales with free or paid lead magnets. Instead of having a standalone website with a clunky blog plugin, you can breathe a sigh of relief and head straight to easy-to-use templates and get started super quick with a free blog template for your business and choose from some great theme designs. Read on for tips about starting a blog in super-quick time.

How to start a blog

Step 1: Choose your blogging platform

Choosing a blogging platform can be overwhelming. There are numerous options available, but it’s best to pick one that enables you to link your domain (and brand IP) instead of blogging and publishing under a provider’s URL (ie: a free site).

Popular blogging platform options include Blogger, Squarespace, Wix and Tumblr, Weebly. Some of these platforms have potential pitfalls such as inability to customize the page, you may not be able to connect your domain name, limited themes and styles, adding e-commerce or enabling third party advertising can be difficult. By the time you’ve figured all this out you’ve wasted a huge amount of time you could have used instead to do something else for your business like finish your e-book lead magnet.

Step 2: BUY A domain.

Will you use a domain name you already own? Do you want to create a domain for the sole purpose of blogging? Is the blog going to be a separate web presence from your main website? Or is your blog site going to double as your main website presence? Some platforms give a free domain for the first year if you sign up for a paid package, so don’t hit ‘buy now’ on a domain until you’ve settled on your blog hosting company.

While it’s not recommend using your provider’s url as your blog address (eg:bettysbakes.blogspot.com), your budget may dictate running a free blog site in the first instance to get you started and figure out what you’re doing or before signing up for a package. There’s nothing actually wrong with this approach but it might not look legitimate to potential customers. If you need a domain, head on over to our favorite domain registrar, GoDaddy, and move onto the next step.

Step 3: Choose your blog host company.

Web hosting is the space on the Internet where you have your blog or website. Hosting is on a server owned by the web hosting company. Examples of some of the big hosting companies include Godaddy, Wix, WordPress, Google Sites, Squarespace. It’s important to ensure you use a reputable provider because if their uptime is poor or they shut their server down for whatever reason, your website and/or blog will go with it.

With so many web hosting companies out there, how do you choose which one will meet your needs? First, determine what it is you **actually** need. Be realistic and practical. There’s no point signing up for the most expensive package if you don’t need all the functionality of that package right away. You will be able to upgrade later if you need to. Some of your considerations might be:

• Will your site be using a lot of images and videos and therefore require a lot of bandwith/storage space?
• Do you expect a high volume of traffic? (Even if you do eventually, you may not initially need the more expensive hosting package just yet).
• Do you anticipate using more than one domain name to drive people to your blog or website – or even using duplicate sites targeting different sectors? (If you need multiple domain names, GoDaddy offers a good selection of cheap domain names)
• Does the hosting company offer ready to go template themes and drag and drop components so you can easily customize your site?
• Will you require a lot of technical support and is there a customer service number for your country?
• What is your budget for hosting each month and will you be able to continue to meet that overhead?

Be sure to check signup prices for site hosting which are sometimes cheap to start with to encourage you as a new customer, but the renewal price is much higher. Also check that how much the monthly hosting is if you pay monthly vs paying annually – these are very often presented as a ‘monthly cost’ but that only applies if you pay for a year upfront. If you decide to only sign up on a month-by-month basis, the cost will likely be much higher. When choosing the company who is hosting your blog, consider both initial signup costs as well as renewal costs, along with any additional fees like payment commission percentages if you run sales through their site or additional costs for storage. Be sure that all costs are within your budget to avoid the risk of blowing your budget out at renewal time and losing your blog and website stats etc forever.

Step 4: Connect your domain to your blog.

Whatever hosting company you choose check they have a tutorial or easy instructions for how to connect your domain name to your blog. If not, you might want to reconsider your host. Connecting your domain to your blog should be fast and easy.

Next comes the fun stuff!

Step 5: Design your WordPress blog.

Now for the fun part! It’s time to decide how your blog will look to the world. Most hosts provide free or paid template themes to get you started. When starting out just pick one that’s already done to get started. It’s likely not practical or time efficient to muck round building one from scratch. Whether you go free or paid, be sure to pick one that reflects who you are and what your business is. In WordPress it’s easy to alter your blog theme in the WordPress dashboard.

Step 6: PUBLISH YOUR FIRST POST

Now, before you get hung up on spending hours curating the perfect content and publishing your first post, don’t be. It simply needs to be as easy as introducing your new blog site and what your plans are for it. You could title it “Welcome to Our New Blog”, or even use the AI generator to come up with a snazzy title you’d never have thought of. Your aim here is to get something up and going live as soon as possible. You can edit it later. Just be yourself and do you.

Once you’ve published your first post, you’re officially in the online blogging business! Congratulations! Now the hard work starts.

Step 7: BloGGING FOR BUSINESS: Promote your content, write more, Rinse and repeat.

Make sure to spread the word about your first post with everyone that follows you (if you have an audience), or share links on your business’s social media. This way not only are you getting traffic back to your website from your socials, but you’re also able to consistently peak the interest of social media followers and potential new clients whether via your socials or in google search with fresh and regular content.

To keep up momentum, set some goals for your blogging and how many posts you want to make every week. Set it in your calendar and also commit to a set time every week for writing and working on your blog, contacting potential affiliate sites etc. A half-hearted site will look exactly that, and not instill confidence in people arriving at your site. If you don’t have time to write as much material as you would like, consider hiring a ghostwriter or buying done-for-you PLR content that you can use if time or inspiration is short. You might even seek out the occasional guest writer.

You will develop a healthy archive over time, so keep using it and refreshing it to grow your business. As you work out which content gets the most engagement you can focus on optimizing and honing your SEO and content keyword skills further to drive more traffic to your site and increase sales or clicks. Good content also establishes you or your site as expert in the chosen field.