Super Bite Letter Head, Hi there, my name is Anya. I’ve been blogging for more than eight years and I love every moment of it. Blogging helped me to find my first job and continues to be my lucrative side-gig.

Do you want to learn how to start a blog?

In 2010 when I was learning how to create a blog, I spent a lot of time searching for helpful information online. I was only able to find it piece by piece on a variety of websites. To save you time, I’ve created this free step-by-step blog tutorial to teach beginners how to make a blog quickly and easily. It’s not as complicated as many people think!  FirstSiteGuide is a free resource that is 100% supported by readers.

Disclosure: If you purchase products through links on our site, we may earn a commission. It comes at no extra cost for you but it helps us to create more useful content.

More than eight thousand people started their blogs using this free guide.

A 3-step blog success validation process:

1. Check niche size.
2. Explore competitors.
3. Analyze monetization potential.

This process will help you obtain a clear idea of the size, competition, and monetization potential for your proposed niche. If you are not sure how to select and validate a blog’s niche, read our detailed guide.

At this stage, you’ll need to look at the available blogging platforms out there and determine the type of blog management software that you are going to use.

I recommend building your blog using the self-hosted WordPress blog setup that I share in this guide.

When it comes to blogging sites, you have a few options. Below are usage statistics showing the distribution of blog technologies in the United States.

Let’s look at the top 3 solutions and I’ll explain the main difference between them.

Self-hosted blog solutions 

You don’t have many choices when it comes to self-hosted blogging systems (also called a Content Management System or CMS). As you can see from the graph, the most popular is the free and open-source system WordPress.org.  If you want total control of your blog, or plan to run ads, sell products and services via your blog, then this is the best way to go.

Your domain name will be the name by which you will be known online, no matter what niche you choose. It’s your blog’s unique address on the Internet. It will be yours as long as you continue paying the annual fee ($10 to $15 per year for a .com).

Users who know your domain (URL – uniform resource locator) can simply type it into their browser’s address bar. Others will be able to discover you through search engines such as Google and Bing, so you definitely need to find a unique blog name.

If you can’t find a domain name you like, Bluehost will let you choose one later. That will give you time to do some research and thinking before you start your blog.