How to Start a Self-Hosted WordPress Blog

In addition to generating ad revenue, blogging can be valuable for your personal growth. As part of the process of writing in-depth blog posts, you may shift away from short videos and social media posts, and instead consume long-form content or even seek new learning experiences. You'll become a subject-matter expert on your blog niche, and if you're a lifestyle blog writing about personal experiences, you'll gain self-awareness through introspection. You can even blog anonymously if you're not sure about maintaining the blog long-term, or shy about revealing your inner thoughts. The topics that bloggers feel shy about posting are often the ones that readers are most interested in.

Blogging also makes you more knowledgeable about SEO, especially if you are using self-hosted WordPress and coding things yourself. This can lead to job prospects in either copywriting or web development. As a non-native English speaker myself, writing blog posts has been a great way to improve my vocabulary and communication skills. You can even blog anonymously without negative

In this post, I will explain how to build a self-hosted WordPress blog that ranks on Google and generates ad revenue as soon as possible.

Domain Name and Hosting

If you haven’t already, start by getting a domain name and hosting. You can choose from a bunch of providers such as HostGator, Hostinger, Bluehost, GoDaddy, etc. I used HostGator simply because I had a discount code for them.

Install WordPress

Once you have the domain name and hosting, go ahead and install WordPress. It may take a few minutes, but eventually you’ll be able to login to WordPress at yourdomain.com/wp-admin/ 

If the hosting provider already set up the login credentials but you want to change the username, that isn’t possible directly in WordPress. You'll find that the option to edit username is greyed out. Instead, access phpMyAdmin through your hosting panel, and find the users table where you can then directly edit the username.

Install Plugins

Next, install plugins and delete any pre-selected ones that you won't use. I recommend keeping SSL Insecure Content Fixer for security reasons and Yoast SEO because it will help to generate the sitemap.

Customize Theme

Pick one of the themes available in WordPress, upload a pre-made theme, or build your own. I previously borrowed Luxeritas theme for my second blog. The nice thing about WordPress, unlike most other website builders, is that you can access the functions.php via Theme Editor and customize even pre-built themes. If you use a pre-made theme, watch for theme updates from the developer and keep track of any custom changes on the theme files.

Resolve any compatibility issue between your plugins and theme as soon as they arise. For example, the Luxeritas theme has built-in SEO functionality but I am also using Yoast SEO plugin. Without any customizations, this would cause duplicate meta description tags. There are 2 approaches to resolving this issue: remove meta description from the Luxeritas theme file, or block the Yoast SEO meta description by adding a simple plugin.

Add Sitemap to Google Search Console

Once your site is ready for launch, publish it and add the sitemap to Google Search Console. You’ll first be prompted to verify domain ownership via DNS record, which can be done by adding a TXT record in cPanel Zone Editor. It may take some time for the verification to be picked up by Google. If you're unsure, replace yourdomain with your actual domain in the url below to check that the TXT record was properly added.

https://dns.google/query?name=yourdomain.com&type=TXT&dnssec=true

Here is the YouTube tutorial that I actually used before. It's very straightforward and easy to follow. The creator has published some updated versions since then.

SEO for New Websites

I won't cover the basic SEO concepts like keyword research and backlinking in this post, but here are some initial SEO settings that new websites should consider.

Categorize your blog posts so that readers can easily navigate the site. When doing this, you usually shouldn't noindex the category pages. Google treats noindex pages as nofollow, so it can hurt the site structure. However, if the category pages are not part of the structure (i.e. not reachable through any link on the site), then it's fine to noindex them.

The more you can publish without compromising on quality, the better. Posting frequency does not matter for SEO so if you have some pre-written posts, go ahead and publish them all at once. Since it can take several weeks or months for new pages to rank on Google even if they are SEO-friendly, scheduling your posts for a later time just causes an unnecessary delay. Generally, don't mess with the post dates like scheduling or back dating unless you have good reason to.

If your goal is to rank for low-competition keywords, you should start seeing results within a few months. But if your benchmark for SEO success is lead generation or conversions, then it may take at least 6 months to start getting results.

Monetize Your WordPress Blog

Once your blog starts gaining some traction, you may think about earning some extra income from it, via affiliate marketing or ad monetization. For example, if you meet the minimum requirements and get approval from Google, you can add AdSense to your WordPress site and earn income from ads. Google hasn't published specific requirements, but generally your blog should offer unique and valuable content, and provide a positive user experience with clear navigation. There are guidelines online that say your domain should be at least 6 months old and have 15-20 posts in the same category, which can definitely be indicative of valuable content.