Starting a Lifestyle Blog: What Is It and How Do I Start?
Are you finding that your life is full of adventure or crazy situations that you wish you could share with the world? Maybe you are someone that has a strong passion for writing? Or maybe, you are someone with strong opinions that must be shared! No matter the scenario, starting a lifestyle blog can be a valuable experience.
What is a lifestyle blog?
A lifestyle blog is different than many other blogs in that it is more general. Many individuals, when deciding to blog, will choose a niche to center their blog around. That is a theme or idea that draws a particular audience. For example, I am sure you have seen many ‘pregnancy’ or ‘parenting’ blogs. These blogs have particular niches and draw in crowds of individuals typically interested in pregnancy and parenting.
With this being said, a lifestyle blogger shouldn’t blog “willy nilly”. These bloggers should still have a unique point of view or voice.
Say you and another lifestyle blogger both decide to post about a new trend in fitness. You have both implemented this trend into your lifestyles and want to let your audience know all about the ins and outs of this new routine. What will you do to make your post stand out from this other lifestyle blogger? How is your point of view or voice different?
Lifestyle blogs can be about anything! Categories can include fitness, food, budgeting, happiness, mental health, beauty, and more.
The most important part though? Your point of view and how it will impact others.
How to start a lifestyle blog
Niche down… kind of?
Here is the thing, when you start a blog the first step you must take to choosing a niche. When starting a lifestyle blog, this becomes more difficult. After all, the goal of a lifestyle blog is to share all things your lifestyle. However, even if you decide a lifestyle blog is right for you, it is still important to niche down in some way.
How do you do this?
Well, the best way at explaining this would be to give you a few examples. Say you are a college student interested in starting a lifestyle blog. Your niched down topic may simply be ‘college student lifestyle’. Another great example would be if you were a highly active individual. In this circumstance, you may adopt a ‘healthy female lifestyle’ blog.
The possibilities are unlimited. Overall, you want to think about what you want to give to your audience and what type of audience you are wanting to attract. It is important to niche down to draw in the audience you are wanting but to still leave it open enough to write about many topics.
For example, there is no way you would catch an elderly woman continuously visiting your blog if you were a ‘college student lifestyle’ blog. However, by niching down a bit, you should attract your target audience of college students.
Pick a domain name
If you thought narrowing down a niche was hard, a whole new level of difficulty is about to emerge. That is, choosing a domain name. What does this mean?
First, a domain name simply is the name of your blog. In the search bar, it will look something like this ‘lifestyleblog.com’. That is, if you choose a custom domain for your blog. Many people just starting out decide to sign up for a blog using wordpress.com, blogspot.com, or wix.com. This is all great if you are a beginner blogger and simply want to blog for fun.
Though, it may be worth investing some time and money into creating a custom domain for your blog because it gives you complete ownership of the website.
There are many domain websites offering services to bloggers. Some of the most popular are the following:
Once you choose a website to buy a domain name from, you simply visit their website and check if the name you want is available.
Choose a blogging platform
The biggest blogger platform, and one that almost every blogger will recommend, is WordPress.org. As a serious blogger, you will spend a ridiculous amount of time working on your blog. Therefore, having a friendly user experience in a platform is crucial. If you have never blogged before, having tutorials that walk you through the process is also a must!
Does WordPress.org have all of this? You bet it does!
Now that you have decided that WordPress.org is the best route for starting a lifestyle blog, you need to figure out hosting (I know… it never ends!).
Obtain a hosting service
Much like when you purchased your domain name, purchasing a hosting service can be done through numerous companies. I highly recommend you start with Siteground, they’re affordable and have great customer service.
When choosing hosting services from one of these websites, a basic plan will most likely be more than enough to get you started. Often, these companies will have a special for beginner bloggers that usually entails a much cheaper price if purchased for a longer period. For example, instead of $10 a month, you may get a deal of $2.95 a month if you purchase a 3-year plan.
Once you have chosen a plan that suits you, you will be prompted to enter your domain. Here is where you select that you already have a domain name (if you have purchased from a different company from step 2) or you register a domain name with your hosting company. For example, you may notice that Bluehost can be found on both the domain name list from step 2 and here under the hosting services.
You may choose to have everything through one company or from separate companies. Different bloggers will state they like one method over the other and vice versa.
From there, you will simply fill out all of your information for payment and create your account!
Install WordPress
If you have chosen to stick with WordPress (highly suggested), now is the time that you install it through your hosting service. This will look a little different between hosting providers so a simple Google search or chat with your hosting service will be quite beneficial in accomplishing this.
Choose a theme for your blog
Didn’t we talk about choosing a theme in step one? Well yes… but this is different. Here we are talking about the theme that represents the physical appearance of your blog. Isn’t blogging terminology fun?
The appearance of your blog matters for your readers. This may include the color, fonts, and images you use. No matter the theme you choose, you can always change it later if you find it isn’t representing your blog well.
Within your theme, there are more technical aspects that are important as well. These things include speed/responsiveness and how user-friendly your blog is to your audience. Certain themes are known to slow down blogs while others are ‘light’ and help with site speed. One theme that is known to be fast is Astra. Starting a lifestyle blog off on the right foot by getting a light theme is important to avoid issues down the road.
There are many free themes available as well as many that you can purchase. Themes that are purchased typically provide a better visual appearance than free themes because they are bought already customized. If you aren’t sure how to customize a free theme yourself, purchasing one may be a good idea in the future!
Create and publish
Now that you have the ‘back-end’ of your blog up and running, it is time to publish some valuable content for your readers. Starting a lifestyle blog has only truly just begun. There is a lot of debate on whether you need a certain amount of posts created before publishing your blog. Though, many high-end bloggers state it doesn’t matter.
Either way, it may be a smart idea to create a list of blog post ideas. Along with these ideas, you may want to write out what that blog post will do for your readers. What will make them want to read it? This will give you better direction on if it is valuable content for your lifestyle blog.
Say you want to write an article on the keto diet. Odds are, many people won’t really care if you simply give information on the diet. However, if you write about your personal experience trying the keto diet and include tips for those wanting to try it, people may jump on board!
An important aspect of creating and publishing content is that you must make sure to do it consistently. There is an entire world of blogging that I am sure you never knew about. That includes something called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Trust me, this is a whole other beast of blogging. For now, the important take away is that Google loves when you publish consistently. This means, over time, Google will be more likely to rank your content higher.
Final touches
At this point, your blog is up and running! Congratulations!
Wasn’t starting a lifestyle blog easy?
There are important steps you can take, however, to improve your blogging experience. This is especially true for a lifestyle blog. The biggest of these steps is to create social media profiles linked to your blog.
The biggest social media platforms used for blogging include Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram. Creating profiles with the name of your blog helps get your name out there! You will find that your following will increase and views spilling into your blog will be from these platforms.
Overall, starting a lifestyle blog can take a lot of work! There is much more to know about running a successful blog than what is here in this simple guide. Whether it be strategies to get more traffic or understanding the difficult blogging lingo, it can all be pretty daunting. Take it one step at a time and you will find that blogging is a valuable experience!
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