I want to share with you How to Start a Fitness Blog in few easy steps, while keeping this article short and easy to read. If you are already here reading and looking for information on how to start your first blog, or maybe your first fitness blog, there is a very good chance that you already know it. Blogging can be very profitable business. What you don’t know and you should expect is that, as every other business, blogging is hard and time consuming. Don’t expect to start a fitness blog today, quit your job and start making six figures tomorrow. I am not trying to discourage you from blogging, but rather help you realize that the dream of working from home on your own schedule takes a lot of work, patience and sacrifice. And please, do not start a fitness blog and quit your job on the next day. You will have to work hard for some time before seeing any meaningful income .
So, here are the few easy steps you should follow to start your new fitness blog in no time at all.
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- Domain name and Hosting
- Installing WordPress
- Installing Theme
Domain name and Hosting
First thing first. You can’t have a blog without a name. The domain name is the address people use to get to your site. Mine is aworkouts.com. You would also need website hosting service. This is the service that stores your website’s files. You will have to pay to rent server space from a company, that agrees to store your files. It’s something like iCloud for your website. The good news is that you can get a free domain name, when purchase hosting with BLUEHOST. Of course there are many different companies out there that offer those services. Some are cheaper, some are more expensive. Some have great reviews and some don’t. I use BLUEHOST on all of my sites and I would always recommend them to start a new blog with because of their price and simplicity.
Free vs. self-hosted blog
You’ve probably heard, that you can build a website for free. You can start your free blog with service like Blogger.com. Although starting a blog with free service is cheap and easy, it’s not for everyone. If you are starting a hobby blog, you may be fine, but if you want to start a blog/website for business purposes, I do not suggest free services. Here are my reasons.
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- You’ll have a subdomain such as Blogger attached to your blog. It will look like that – www. aworkouts.blogger .com. This doesn’t look very professional.
- You won’t be able to customize your blog with things such as plugins. Some platforms may offer more than others, but overall it can be a cause of frustration.
- You have limited advertising options, making it harder to monetize your blog and earn money.
- You don’t own your blog at all, which in my opinion is the biggest disadvantage with a free blogging platform.
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So, if you think you are ready to own your own place on the internet and start a fitness blog head to Bluehost and get a good deal
Don’t forget to claim your free domain name. You can check if your name is available here:
4 Tips on How to Choose your New Domain Name
1. Keep it short. Shorter the name, easier to remember. That of course is not always easy, considering the fact that most of the short domain names are already taken.
2. Choose a domain name that’s catchy and memorable.
3. Choose domain name that includes a keyword of what you are going to write about. Keywords can help improve your SEO and help with ranking on search engines (Google, Bing) later on. For example, if you are going to write about fitness in general, include in your name words like fitness, health, strength, workouts, etc. If you are going to write about building muscle mass, try to use gain, muscle or maybe build.
4. Always try to use .com extension. It’s more familiar and easier to remember.
Installing WordPress
When you are done purchasing your domain and hosting, you need to go to Bluehost and login to your new account.To be able to customize your new website without coding or special IT knowledge, you have to install a special creation tool – WordPress. Although there are other options like Joomla and Drupal, WordPress, in my opinion and the 23% of all websites on the internet powered by WordPress, is the easiest and most powerful system for blogging and website. But don’t worry installing WordPress is easy and best of all FREE.
In your Bluehost login page click on Hosting, then Home in the top left corner and scroll down until you find a box named – Website.
Click the Install WordPress button located inside the Website box. When you are asked to put domain name for installation, enter your new domain name. In the field next to the domain, you can enter a subfolder such as ‘blog’ or you can leave it blank. If necessary, you can edit the email address, username and password for the new WordPress installation. Click “advanced options” and you can change those settings. Username and password are important, as they will allow you to login to your new website through WordPress every time you need to post recipe or update something. Read through the license and service agreements, check the boxes and select the Install Now button.
Now you can enter you new domain name – www. yoursitename .com in the web browser to see your site live. To make changes and start writing new articles go to www. yoursitename. com/wp-admin/.
Congrats.
Installing Theme
The first thing you should probably do once you have your site live is making it pretty and visualize your ideas. There will be a lot of things to learn, a lot of mistakes to make and a lot of instructions on how to do stuff to read while managing your new site, but the easiest thing to do is changing your website Theme. When logged in your WordPress site, Simply go to Appearance → Themes
You will find that there’re tons of free WordPress themes to pick from. You can scan through the free options and find something you like. If you want something that really catches the eye, you would need to purchase Premium Theme. You would need to pay for them once but they really worth every penny, as you will find out when start blogging more often. Here are some options I recommend:
- Genesis Framework – This is framework I run this and some of my other sites. It’s light fast and very flexible, which means you can change virtually everything. You will find out that most big WordPress sites use Genesis. Once you get Genesis framework you will need to get a child Theme.
Once you got your site going start adding content and writing articles, as this is the single most important part of every successful blog on the internet.