Tag: building niche website

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Episode 1: Why WordPress, what’s niche blogging, and what to know before getting started

How to build a small business website or blog for beginners – on a budget

If you are at the beginning of your blogging career, or just setting up a new business and need a website – you probably want to find out how to build a small business website with good SEO without breaking the bank.

You’ve come to the right place. I’ve been teaching WordPress since 2010 in Ireland – check out what clients say about my WordPress training – and I’ll show you everything in this ‘How to start a blog 2021‘ step-by-step tutorial:

Each WordPress beginner tutorial will cover

• What kind of options you’ve got for each WordPress topic (free and premium)
• Advantages and disadvantage of each and what to look out for
• Where it’s worth spending some money and what you can do yourself easily (even for WordPress beginners)
• I include lots of written and video tutorials for each topic so it’s easy for you to follow

This is a full-blown tutorial series on how to build a small business website for beginners and getting into niche blogging, with individual detailed posts for each topic. The index makes it easy for you to find what you’re interested in, skip parts you don’t need and go back to parts you might like to do later.

Do I have to pay for the tutorial ‘How to start a blog 2021’?

All WordPress tutorials on this site will be completely free and I will include everything I usually teach participants in the WordPress Starter, WordPress Advanced and WordPress customised training. You can also leave a comment below, on any topic you’re interested in and I will try my best to include them in upcoming tutorials.

Why WordPress? And is WordPress good to build a professional website or blog

Let’s get the facts out of the way: WordPress is extremely flexible, user-friendly and very search engine friendly right out of the box. So it’s a brilliant tool for beginners as the site can be set up easily without any coding knowledge, and lots of hosting providers offer automatic WordPress installs now. WordPress is also loved by Google and your site won’t need much customisation to be found and indexed by search engines.

“WordPress automatically solves a ton of SEO issues. 80-90% of the mechanics of SEO is already taken care of with WordPress, straight out of the box, before you even use any special SEO plugins.”

Matt Cutts, Former Head of Google web spam team for 10 years – at Wordcamp 2009

WordPress for beginners & experienced users

That said, it’s certainly not just for beginners. WordPress is also great for experienced users as it’s entirely customisable. With over 8,000 themes and over 50,000 plugins to choose from you can build pretty much any type of blog, personal, niche or business website. Let’s have a look at some well-known WordPress websites.

WordPress for News, Fun and Super-stars

For good reason, it’s trusted by world-renowned businesses including CNN (this is a massive news blog which shows WP’s scalability and how it copes with massive traffic every day without any issues). Other sites built in WordPress include NASA, Forbes (their whole site is built in WP but they also write about WP like this interesting post on the ‘5 top WP trends to follow in 2020‘ and other tech news in general), Bloomberg Professional Services, and Microsoft News.

But also fun sites like Star Wars, Walt Disney and Sony Music trust WordPress.

And super-stars like Snoop Dogg, Beyonce and Katy Perry who all have their sites built with WordPress as well.

Now to be clear, the sites mentioned above don’t use WordPress out of the box, they are heavily customised by professional WordPress developers as to be expected by such large organisations and corporations. However, it shows the scalability of WordPress and that it’s a trusted, reliable, flexible and customisable Content Management System (CMS).

So, I think you get the picture – WordPress is a very popular and most trusted content management system. Which you can also see on this infographic by Trends.Buildwith.com on ‘CMS Usage Distribution on the Entire Internet – Distribution for websites using CMS technologies’.

My WordPress experience and what’s in it for you

Now, back to us – the average small business owners and what we can get out of WordPress!

I have been working with WordPress pretty much every day for the last 14 years. Over the years I have worked with a few fabulous WordPress marketers and developers on different projects together, and I’m very lucky to be part of the most lovely organiser’s team for WordCamp Dublin. You can find WordCamps all over the world. They are casual, locally-organised, not-for-profit conferences covering everything related to WordPress & beyond. Let’s hope Covid-19 will soon be under control and that events will be possible again, so we can organise another awesome WordCamp Ireland in the near future. If you make it to the next one, please say hello ;-).

WordPress Training

As my main job, I offer WordPress group courses and customised training for individuals and groups of staff in Ireland. My clients range from charities and self-employed individuals to financial services providers, county councils, the Department of Education, schools and colleges such as UCD (University College Dublin), hospitals and clinics, property developers and large organisations such as KPMG, Fineos (large insurance software company) and the Houses of the Oireachtas (the Irish Parliament). 

Building niche websites

I enjoy teaching them all, every website and individual’s requirements are always different so every training day is unique. However, the one type of person I enjoy teaching the most is the person who is passionate about something and (finally) wants to create niche websites to blog about what they’re really into!

Niche blogging

Niche blogging can be incredibly rewarding and lucrative, and is especially suitable for new bloggers. People get very excited when they learn that they can create a successful niche website within a short time frame and even outrank some large sites with a high domain authority score, even as a very new blogger. Good keyword research and a bit of passion for the chosen topic is all that’s needed. But I’ll come back to building niche websites later again in a lot more detail.

Are you one of them? A new blogger with passion? If so, please let me know in a comment below – I’d love to hear from you!

What’s the format of the ‘How to start a blog 2021 tutorial‘ – and can I jump in and out?

Some posts in the ‘Start a blog 2021 tutorial‘ will be a comparison post with different options explained like ‘What’s website maintenance? The 5 best and most affordable plans. Why it’s so important and could it be the best money you ever spend?’ or ‘Keyword Planning – KWFinder vs. Long Tail Pro‘.

Other posts will be video tutorials especially if they are very detailed and the steps are easier to follow when you can watch how to do it like in ‘How to connect WordPress with an FTP client’.

And some other posts in this series are written step-by-step tutorials like I usually use in participants manuals like on ‘How to create Pinterest Rich Pins with RankMath in 5 minutes’. 

So, depending on the topic I cover that day I will choose the method which I think will be most useful for readers. You are also welcome to let me know in a comment below which method you find most helpful. 

The full ‘How to start a blog’ tutorial can not be written overnight as you can imagine it’s very time-consuming, but I will publish posts for the guide as I develop them – step-by-step ;-). 

So ideally subscribe to my email list and I’ll keep you up-to-date on any new tutorials I create.

You can go straight to the next post and find out ‘What’s the secret to successful blogging, how to find your niche, and why you definitely don’t need to be an expert to start a blog‘, or find out ‘Where to find the best and fastest website themes‘.

Here you can find an index of all published posts to ‘How to start a blog 2021 – The ultimate tutorial step-by-step’ so far and I’ll keep updating this index as the guide develops.