Welcome to Classy Career Girl’s Love Your Work and Life Podcast. I am your host Anna Runyan. I am getting a lot of questions lately on blogging so I decided to dedicate an entire one-hour training all about it on Facebook live recently. Today you’ll get to listen to me share everything I have learned about starting a blog over the last 6 years since I first published my first post.

We have over 1,500 articles now on CCG. Some written by me and some written by guest contributors. We’ve made mistakes. We’ve had some big wins and of course, the whole blogging world has changed a lot over the last few years. Most importantly though, I am going to share with you today, what I would do if I started all over again. From what platform I would use, to how often I would blog if I was starting all over again and even to the plugins I would use to manage it all.

If you are short on time but have a message to share with the world, you are going to love this. Grab a pen and paper and let’s dive in!

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If I Was Starting a Blog Right Now, Here’s What I Would Do First

1. Use Bluehost.com to purchase a domain name (Cost: $10/year) and hosting ($150/year).

2. Download WordPress.org through Bluehost (Cost: Free). Find a free WordPress theme or search for a theme under $50.

3. Design my logo myself on picmonkey.com. (Cost: Free)

4. Go to Target and spend $25 on the prettiest office supplies, notebooks, straws and pink staplers I can find. Check out the $1 section for some great deals. You can also get a white posterboard at Target as well for $1 and use your iPhone or phone camera! (Cost: $25)

5. Create Pinterest images on picmonkey.com. (Cost: Free)

6. Use the Yoast SEO plugin. (Cost: Free)

7. Create a personalized Leadbox on every article using Leadpages to collect emails. I would give away a checklist or cheat sheet on every blog post that is directly related to the content of that article. (Cost: $29/month)

8. I would write one incredible article once per week with a ton of great info (just like this one!). I would stay very consistent. (Cost: Free)

9. Promote my blog everywhere all week long. Over and over again. Use quotes from the article and different images from the same blog post all throughout the week. Make it a great post. Have a great lead magnet for that post with a cheat sheet that went along with that blog post.  (Cost: Free)

10. Create a video for every blog post. Embed it onto the site and upload the video to YouTube and Facebook separately. Also, share 1-minute sections of the video on Instagram. Video on mobile is so popular right now and it’s only going to grow over the next few months. You can reach so many more people when you upload videos on Facebook right now than just posting a quote. (Cost: Free)

11. Partner with other writers and share each other’s content. Ask them to share their articles on social media so it drives traffic to your site. Your readers will love reading different voices on your site as long as the writer is sticking with the categories of your site.

The more often you post, the more you can share on social media and the better rankings on Google. I think this is a better strategy than guest posting since it drives traffic to your site rather than you driving traffic to other people’s sites. I love this strategy because I love creating communities and sharing other people’s advice because I feel like it creates better content and more value for the reader. (Cost: Free)

The total cost is way less than $500 to start. Just go for it, ok!?

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