How to Start a Lifestyle Blog (Step by Step)

Are you planning on starting a lifestyle blog? Are you passionate about something in your daily life which you would want to share with the world? Here is a complete guide on how you can become a successful lifestyle blogger and make a living from it.

Making income with blogging is not that difficult as it looks. If you find something passionate in your life, which you think is something that many people would love to read about, then you can start your lifestyle blog!

A hobby can any day be a job. You can even create a career out of blogging as a lifestyle blogger. You can create amazing pieces of content that can inspire and entertain people on your blog. If this is taken seriously by any passionate person, they can make it as a professional lifestyle blogger. Furthermore, they can even become an influencer in the niche if you are able to build good authority in your niche. Your hobby can really be turned into a business.

Today, blogging is a lot more than just a means of expressing ideas and sharing experiences. If you love doing something, you can start a blog about it right now. Many people who had the talent and the gift started to share their experiences with the world with the medium of blogs, and now they are making more than they thought of with their blog and content.

If you have the knowledge and skills required to make it as a blogger, you too can become a successful lifestyle blogger.

Now we know why you should start a lifestyle blog, we can go ahead and see how you can make it as a successful lifestyle blogger.

How to Start a Lifestyle Blog

Starting a blog has many ways. You are open to options that make it suitable for everyone to choose from.

There are many questions that a beginner has like: How to become a blogger? How to make a career in blogging? Or How much an average lifestyle blogger makes?

No worries. These questions can be scary at first but lay back, take a deep breath, and start with the thing that is the step one of most of the projects.

Research!

Whenever you want to do a specific task, what do you do first? Mostly we do our study and understand how something can be done and how you should go about it to make the most out of your time and how you can do it most efficiently. This is exactly what we will be doing here.

Start looking for and examining the resources in your niche. This can serve as a good motivation since you will be going across and learning various things about your niche.

Here I will be giving you some golden pointers that will help you in reaching your goal faster. You can take a look at these tips anytime, but before we start with that, you need to make sure you are not working under any pressure.

Stress and pressure is something you need to leave behind at this moment. The essence of any lifestyle blog is that it takes the stress off from people and if you, as a blogger, are stress initially, it will be difficult for you to go further and write amazing pieces of content.

So, first of all. Look at this as a good step and not as a challenge. Enjoy the process, and while you are at it. Let your audience feel the passion you carry with you for the niche you are working in. And do not worry if your initial launch is not the same as you wanted it to be. You can always improve yourself, and there is no such thing as perfection. Improvements can always be made.

There are millions of things that you need to do when you are blogging but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s focus on the fundamental things that you need to do at the beginning of the journey.

Let’s have a look!

Step 1: Decide your Niche

Of course, your niche is going to be a lifestyle blogger, but you need to dig deeper and see what the thing that you are going to blog about.

Also Read: How to Choose a Profitable Blog Niche

A good and user-friendly blog should be uncluttered and should have a main or prime objective, which in turn becomes your niche. Your lifestyle blog can have loads of categories. Yet, all of those sub-categories will lead and point to a single category, and that is your niche.

It is not a written law that you need to implement the one niche rule but doing so has its own benefits. You will be able to seamlessly target your audience and focus all your work in attracting that segment of users.

You can even find like-minded bloggers and can even build connections when you are blogging with a focus on a specific niche.

If you are having problems finding a niche, here is something that will help you in summing it down easily. You just need to answer these two questions.

What is your biggest interest?

Writing blog posts on topics that you are most interested in and love to learn about every once in a while. This will help you establish yourself as an expert in the niche and as someone who users and readers can always go to when they want to learn something in that niche.

Do you have any special skills or knowledge that you love to talk about?

Consider going for the niche that you are already familiar with. If you go fishing every now and then, then you can start a lifestyle blog on fishing. If you are a fitness fan and love spending time at the gym, you can start your lifestyle blog with a focus on the fitness niche.

Also Read: How to Find the Most Searched Blog Topics

Also, if you are fond of cooking, you can start a food blog that can always have other content as well, but it can always point to one single niche, and that is cooking.

Answering these questions will help you in coming more close to your niche and seeing what you actually enjoy and can talk about for days without getting bored. If you can’t settle on a single niche, no problem! You can start with both the niches but make sure that they are interconnected in some way so you can make the most out of running two niches. Inter-related niches can be cooking and eating, driving and vehicle review, or fitness and health and so on.

Step 2: Choose a Blogging Platform

When it comes to choosing a good blogging platform, there are various platforms you can choose from ranging from free to premium paid ones. Out of all these blogging platforms, the most popular blogging platform out there is WordPress without any doubt. The CMS is currently is the most popular and most preferred in the industry and is currently powering more than 33% of the websites out there. This is huge if you think of it as every third website is built with WordPress. 

Also Read: Why WordPress is the Best Blogging Platform

The control and customization options this platform offers is something that cannot be found anywhere else. You do not even require any special coding skills, and you can tweak your lifestyle blog the way you want easily.

If you are confused between choosing the free version and the paid one, go for the paid ones. Since you want to make a career in blogging, you need to have control over your blog in terms of monetization, etc. If you go with the free version of WordPress, you will not have control over the ads, which will be running on your blog.

Go with WordPress.org instead. This version of the platform is open source and is available for free on WordPress.org. You can grow your blog with this version easily, and you will not face any issue regarding monetization and ownership. Since this is an open-source project, you will be the owner of the domain, blog, and even the hosting.

You just need to choose a domain, select a hosting and, install WordPress on the website, and you are good to go. You can choose a theme, page builder, plugins as per your choice there.

Step 3: Choose a Domain Name

Now you need to choose the domain name for the blog. The domain name is the website URL, which is used to access your website’s home page. For example, www.google.com has a domain name as ‘google‘, www.wpblogdesigner.net has a domain name as ‘wpblogdesinger‘. Similarly, you need to choose the domain name for your lifestyle blog.

This is not a small task as this is what your blog will be known with forever, so you need to do a little digging before you buy one.

An ideal blog name should be readable and must contain the words you want to identify your brand with. Try to find the combination of words that you find will make a reliable and trustworthy web presence. A good name will decide the future success and the fate of your lifestyle blog.

You should try to find a domain which is short and easy to remember. A long and confusing domain name is something that often people find hard to remember.

Also, try to use the combination of words that is easy to say and spell out. You must not feel reluctant to speak out the words. Also, while choosing the domain name, remember to make sure that the name should always reflect the main ideology and message of your lifestyle blog.

Your users must be able to guess out what the blog is about by simply reading the blog name or the domain name.

Lastly, do keep in mind that the name you decide to go with is one-of-a-kind. The domain name must reflect your identity and should not be a parody or rip off of any other brand.

Step 4: Choosing a Hosting Plan

Now the next thing you need to do is choosing a hosting plan.

There are many hosting options out there, but for a beginner lifestyle blogger, a hosting plan with minimum features will do the job to get started. 

While you will be looking at the most basic and elementary hosting plans, ideally you should not go for the cheapest plan available. You need to make sure that the hosting provider you are going with has all the necessary features that are required for any WordPress website. 

Make sure the hosting plan you go with has a fast load time. You do not want to go with slow servers. Slow websites tend to drive off users and visitors a lot. Also, since you want this website to be your full-time business one day, you need to focus on the safety and security of the website. Make sure the servers and the host is effectively optimized and up to the mark when it comes to safety.

Moreover, since you are not too familiar with database and server architecture, you need to look for a hosting that has a good customer support team and has an excellent support system. You do not want to leave your site hanging, in case it crashes while you are making changes. A host with real-time support is highly recommended.

Moreover, there are many types of hosting plans available, like managed hosting, dedicated hosting, shared hosting, Managed DIY hosting, etc.

Selecting and Integrating a host

For a simple beginner lifestyle blog, a single shared hosting by any major hosting provider will be good enough. I recommend you go with the Siteground shared hosting plan. They offer all the things that I have mentioned above, and on top of them, you get more useful features for your website.

Once you have purchased the host, you need to set it up. If you have bought the Siteground hosting plan, it is pretty easy to get started. You can use the 1 click installation of your host, and the Siteground will take care of the rest. 

Step 5: Customize the website

Now you are all set. You have the website ready. WordPress is installed. You have the backend access and now comes the fun part. Customizing your WordPress website to make it look the way you want. There are many ways you can customize your website, but not all ways offer full customization.

If you do not have specific requirements and would go with any layout for your website, you can go with any theme you want. There are many themes available for free on WordPress.org repository. Select, install, and activate a theme, and you are good to go.

If you want to design your website the way you want and wish to take full control of how your theme looks, you can use the Blog Designer plugin which is made specifically for customizing a WordPress blog as required.

The plugin has more than 50 layouts that work with any theme of your liking, and you can even further customize these themes as per your requirements without any coding requirements. You can customize the archive pages and single blog pages easily with the Blog Designer plugin.

Check out the Demo of Blog Designer plugin

You can get the free version of the Blog Designer plugin and can extend how much you can customize your WordPress lifestyle blog easily.

Step 6: Planning your Content

The domain name and the layout you choose for your website is crucial. Although it is not the most important thing that you needed to achieve success in blogging. The most important role in your blog is your content.

What you write, what you publish, and how effective it is, defines the future of your blog. Your content is something that is required to attract the audience and the readers. This is the root of all the incomes and earnings. The more targeted users you will have on your website, the more incomes and deals will be coming your way as well.

Also Read: How to write a blog that converts

If you are publishing mediocre content, no matter how many blogs you write, it is not going to work. They all will be lost in the massive list of search engines and will never bring any useful, targeted traffic from search engines.

If you are going to publish useful, detailed, and share-worthy articles, then go ahead. You will see the impact and effect that a single useful article has on your traffic. Try to focus on quality first.

You can keep the frequency and speed a little slow and can start with covering elementary topics in your niche. Once you start getting a little comfortable, you can move towards more wider in-depth topics. This will prepare you and train you on how you should be writing. Also, you will get a chance to improve your skills.

You do not need to publish every day but try to keep a schedule and a frequency at which your blog goes out. Having a schedule and frequency in place will help the users by telling them when your next blog post comes out. If you are not consistent, your readers will not be able to find out when your blog is going to roll out.

Step 7: Build the USP of your Blog

Why a reader should come to your blog and not the other hundreds of blogs out there? Why your blog should be getting visitors and why a visitor will be coming back to your blog only?

Finding the answer to these questions will tell you what is going to be your unique selling proposition or the USP. The best and the foremost thing you can do is giving a personalized touch to your blog. This will help you in making a personal connection to your readers. 

You need to find the thing that will add the original effect to your blog. If you are planning a fitness blog, you need to cover multiple things under it like food and nutrition, fitness, dieting, working out, etc. You can subcategorize your topics and need to cover things like gymming, yoga, running, etc. under that niche. Having good bifurcation and categorization of the blog will help in building the USP of your blog.

Try to think creatively as well. Do not hesitate in giving out freebies to your readers. This has proved to be one of the best technique in getting readers and subscribers. Let’s take our previous example. If you are running a fitness blog, you can always give out workout schedules, diet plans as freebies to attract more subscribers.

Step 8: Attracting your First Readers

The most challenging task for a blogger can be getting readers at an early stage. Since you are just starting out, you need to first make sure that Google is indexing your blog posts. You can force-feed your blogs to Google using the Search Console by simply entering the link of your blog so that it can get indexed and start showing up in google search results.

You can also start promoting your blogs on social media as it will help you get traffic faster. There are lots of other things that you can do to start your blog promotion based on the niche you are working with.

Also Read: How to Effectively Promote your Blogs on Social Media

You can always try to look up various ways to get the initial traffic to your blogs. For starters, I can definitely give you some pointers. You can also do guest blogging on other blogs in your niche. This will help you build networks in your niche as well.

Winding It Up!

I am sure with these pointers, you can launch your own Lifestyle Blog easily. Try not to miss any of the steps given above. Every step adds great value to the process of building a growth-oriented lifestyle blog.

With the Blog Designer plugin, you can design your WordPress blog the way you want. You get more than enough templates, and the customization and various designs you can make with the plugin is countless. I am sure you too can get a unique design for your blog easily with the blog designer plugin. If you want to give Blog Designer a run, you can get it here!

If you ever get stuck in any of the steps above, you can drop a message below. I will get back to you as soon as possible!

What is the niche you wish to build your blog around? Is there a specific niche you have in mind? Let me know that too by commenting it down!