How To Start A Craft Blog 2022

Unedited Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello. And welcome back to the channel today. I’m going to show you step by step how to start a craft blog. So what we are going to cover today is what is a craft blog. I’m on provide a few examples. I’m going to show you and tell you why you need to pick a niche, how to niche down, and get web hosting.

[00:00:14] Now, I will explain why you need web hosting as a new blog or website, and I’ll show you how you can get a free domain name for free for the first year. After that, I’m going to show you how to install work. How do I install both a free and premium WordPress theme, essential changes you need to make to your website to get traffic, and how to start.

[00:00:34] After that, we’re going to talk about some ways that you can make money, why you need to share your content on social media in the very beginning, and about how many blog posts you need to write to start getting trim traction. Now, I recommend that you click the first three links in the description, as they will be the links I referred to throughout this video.

[00:00:49] So let’s go ahead and get right into it. What is a craft blog? Now? A craft blog is simply a blog where you’re answering questions and solving problems—different craft niches. For example, maybe you are targeting kids, crafts. Perhaps you’re targeting summer crafts, holiday cramps. There’s a huge niche of art.

[00:01:07] And I’m going to show you how to find a niche and niche down right now. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to jump over to. A website called hobby lobby. I’m sure you’re familiar with it. Now. Hobby Lobby is grand because it’s a craft store, but if we look at the different departments, you can see that these are all different crafts that you could create.

[00:01:23] In fact, you could even niche down and create content under some of these other boxes or some of these alternatives as well. But this is, these are different options for you. And there’s a lot of opportunities here. You need to pick one of these departments is what they’re called on hobby lobby, but these are our niches that you could get into.

[00:01:42] You could start a floral wedding craft blog. If you want to, everything you can do is check out websites that are actually—forming well in the craft space. For example, if we go over to, if we go over to a beautiful mess.com, this is a craft website that is gaining some traffic. One thing that you can do is you can reverse engineer what they’re doing and replicate and improve.

[00:02:03] So what we can do here is we’re just going to copy the domain name, and I’m going to talk a little bit more about the domain name in just a moment. I’m going to copy this and put it in our keyword research tool, and we’re going to see what words are ranking for, and then that can help with. Help give us some direction.

[00:02:18] Now, in the very beginning, when you have a brand new blog or website, you want to focus on keywords that have a difficulty of five or fewer. If you look at this here, the K D Ray here is zero to 100. So anything above five will be a challenge for you to start ranking and get some traction as a new blog or website.

[00:02:35] If you are using this tool, you can change the keyword, difficulty to five or less, and then you can see what they’re ranking for and should give you an idea of the type of blog. You could start. For example, as you can see, galaxy nails are organizing for a live edge coffee table. So you could show people how to make furniture.

[00:02:55] But you could go through here and take a look. I saw something where baby headbands could be something that you create continent. That’s an entire niche that ended up itself like baby crafts or crafts that you could make for new parents are expecting. So what I recommend is that you pick a niche and then niche down again, go over to hobby lobby or Michael’s, whatever you prefer, and look at the different departments.

[00:03:17] These are all different sub-niches that you could get in. All right. So let’s go back over to our slide deck here. The next thing you need to do is you need to get web hosting. Now, web hosting is a company that you’ll work with. You will rent hard drive space called a server, and that web hosting company will make sure that your website is available for people from around the internet to see your website.

[00:03:39] You’ll pay a monthly fee, but you’ll get a domain name for free for the first year. And the great thing is. They’ll the web hosting company will take care of everything on the backend. So you’re just responsible for adding content and making sure that everything is up to date. And if we go back over to the website that we referenced earlier, a beautiful mass.com is the domain name.

[00:03:59] You’ll get one of those for free for the first year. So what you’ll do is click the link in the description, and I’ll actually walk you through the process of getting a domain name and why posting right. So when you click that link, you’ll be taken to this website, where you’ll go ahead and click get started.

[00:04:13] I recommend clicking the first one on the far left, the basic plan. If you’re just getting started with a website, but as you can see, there are several options, but click that click select, and then move on here. You’re going to create a domain name. If you have one in mind, you’re going to type it in here.

[00:04:25] Like you see that I do. What I recommend is to try and find a domain name. It’s going to be related to your niche. Now, what I do is type in a domain name that I know is already taken. When it’s accepted, you’re going to get this. You can then do go back and try different domains. Now make sure again that you want to pick one related to your niche, click next, and then you’re going to see a green box that says that it’s approved.

[00:04:47] The next step is to go through and enter your contact information. Make sure. When you scroll down here and make sure that you leave all of the settings on but again, entering your contact information, the scenes right here, where it says domain privacy, leave all of this check. If you don’t leave a statement, you’re going to get people reaching out to you.

[00:05:04] Spamming you, emailing you, trying to get you to sign up for web hosting. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to go ahead and sign up and then jump back to you once I sign on and move to the next step. All right. So I have signed up, and I’m going to go ahead and set up my website. Just create a simple username and password, make sure it meets the requirements.

[00:05:24] And then move on, make sure that you write it down to write it down in a safe spot so that you have it. And you remember it because it can be a pain to go ahead and get everything back and have to enter in some vital information, but just make sure that you write it down. So it’s effortless and straightforward.

[00:05:39] Now, one thing that I do want to note is that this part is not sped up. This is real-time. And you can see that you’ll go from absolutely nothing to a complete website in less than probably 10 minutes. And once you click submit, you’re going to move on to the next step, where you get to log in. So here is where you’re going to start creating your WordPress website.

[00:05:58] Now, the great thing is Bluehost does everything for you. And it’s straightforward. So again, I’m not speeding us up at all, and I want you to see what it takes to create a web. So Bluehost is going to do a little bit of work in the background for you. And we’re just going to click on skip this step.

[00:06:15] This first one I clicked on. I started a blog, but just click, skip because we know what we’re doing for the next step. And I’m going to tell you what to do so that we can get up and running. So click get started right here on the left-hand side. And then move on. Just click, skip here. And click skip here and then just pick the first one in the far left.

[00:06:36] Make sure that you’re picking a three theme because they’ll charge you. They have both free and premium articles, which we’ll talk about in just a moment. So right now, it’s creating your WordPress website in just a few moments. You’re going to click on LA. To WordPress on the right-hand side there, you’ll see it in just a second.

[00:06:51] And then we can start looking at some basic configurations. All right. So we click login in. Now we have a WordPress website. You may need to click refresh a few times to get it to work, but now we have our website, as you can see. Now, what I’m going to do is I’m going to log in and delete a few plugins.

[00:07:10] Because right now it has the coming soon. And so if someone tried to get to your website at this moment, it’s going to say coming soon to them, even though we can see it, this is what your WordPress website looks like. But for everyone else outside of your network, it’s going to say coming soon. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to go down to plugins eventually, and we’re going to delete some of the plugins that we don’t need.

[00:07:31] Now, I will talk a bit about plugins later on. Plugins add additional features and functionality. We are going to deactivate the blue host as well as the other plugins that are already activated. And then we can go through and make the necessary changes, which I’ll cover in just a moment. So we’re going to deactivate them and then delete them.

[00:07:49] Now you want to make sure that you only. The plugins you’re using on your website, the more plugins you have, the slower your website’s going to respond and function, and you’re going to lose out on ranking. So make sure you have a lean setup, very few plugins, and then move on. As you can see right now, I’m just simply bleeding some stuff that you don’t.

[00:08:09] If you want to, you could keep them, but obviously, you don’t need this other stuff if you’re just getting started. What’s more important is the themes that we’re going to talk about in just a moment, as well as getting writing. So I’m just going to go ahead and delete those, deactivate them. And then we’re going to start moving on to settings, which is all right. So let’s go ahead and make some changes that we have to make so that you can start getting traffic. The first thing you want to do is change your site title to be the title of your website. You can make this your domain name. For example, my domain name is web hosting rewind, and you can see that’s my site title.

[00:08:41] And then the tagline. What your website’s all about—any very concise manner. As you can see here, mindsets, get the latest news and info on all things—web hosting. What you want to do is make sure that yours is relevant to your niche. For example, if you are creating content about makeup, you can say, come here for the latest tips and tricks for all things makeup.

[00:09:02] Next, you want to ensure that your WordPress address is HTTPS and not HTTP. Make sure your site address is HTTPS as well. And then, the administration email should automatically be set to uncheck the membership so that anyone can register. Make sure that this is unchecked. If we scroll down here, you want to change your time zone to your time zone.

[00:09:24] There are all sorts of them here. Next, do you want to make sure that your date format is set to the way you want? And then go ahead and click save. If we go down to writing, there isn’t anything in writing that we need to change. After that, we’re going to go to reading and reading is very important.

[00:09:40] You want to make sure that your homepage displays your latest posts. That’s the first thing. And the second one is you want to make sure that your search. Visibility is unchecked. Do not check this to discourage search engines from indexing. This site, you do not want it because if this is tracked people, aren’t going to be able to find your website, and everything that we do after this is going to be a waste.

[00:10:03] So go ahead and click save. This should be unchecked next. If we go down to discussion, there isn’t anything that we need to change. Media, we can leave this as is, and then permalinks will be necessary right now. Your permalinks are set to plane. Do you want to change it to a post name?

[00:10:20] This has been done for search engine optimization. What’s going to happen is when we create a new blog post, we are going to make it so that it’s search engine optimized. We’re going to use the keyword in our title, and the keyword will show up right here is. And this is called search engine optimization.

[00:10:37] Make sure that it’s at the post name and then go ahead and click save, and that’s everything that you need to do to make sure that you start getting traffic. All right. So now that we’ve installed WordPress, we’ve established a free theme. I’m going to show you how to install a premium WordPress theme in just a moment, and we’ve made some changes so that you can start getting traffic right now.

[00:10:55] You have a free, basic—theme on your website. I recommend that you go out and get yourself a premium theme because it’s going to add additional features and functionality. That’s going to make your website look a lot better. So, for example, if we go over to a beautiful mess.com, this is a premium WordPress theme.

[00:11:12] You can see it’s inviting. It is. It looks much better. Look at these different colors here and the diverse menu. This is all from a premium theme. And if you click the second link in the description, you can get a premium theme. So when you click that second link, it will take you to this website here.

[00:11:29] And what you can do is just type in your craft or the title of your blog, and you could potentially find different opportunities. For example, by typing crash. Hit enter. You’re going to find premium WordPress themes for crafts. As you can see this first one here, it says arts right in the title.

[00:11:45] So that could be a good one. What I recommend that you do, let’s spend some time going through and find a premium theme that will be harmonious or in line with your target. Once you find one that you like, you will click on this button and add it to the cart. When you add it to the cart, you will check out and pay for the premium theme.

[00:12:03] And then you’re going to download that zip file to your computer. Once you download the zip file, you will unpack that zip file, and there will be a second file. We’re going to take that second file. And we are going to install it into the back office of our WordPress website. And to do that, we are simply going to go to.

[00:12:19] We’re going to click on themes. When we click on themes, we’re going to click on, add new, and then we’re going to click on upload theme. We’re going to drag and drop that second zip file right here. Or we can manually find it by clicking choose file and finding it. Once you edit here, you are going to click on install now and then activate.

[00:12:35] And just like that, we have a premium WordPress theme on our website. The next thing that we want to do is start writing. And I get three questions when it comes to creating a brand new blog, how do I start writing? How long should my blog posts be, and how many blog posts should I write? And I’m going to go ahead and answer two of those questions right now.

[00:12:53] So to start writing, you’re going to click on posts, and then you’re going to click on, add new. When you click on add new, we will add the keywords that we found here into our post title. All right. So we’re going to copy this keyword here, just like this. And we are going to paste it over into the title.

[00:13:11] Of our blog posts. And the reason why we’re doing this is we’re doing this so that we can get discovered through the search engine. This is called search engine optimization. And what we’re going to do is we are going to leave our keyword at the front, and then we are going to make our second half of our title so that our customers or potential audience wants to click on it.

[00:13:30] So we will just type in everything you need to. Nope. And this again is designed to get people to click on our link. And to read our blog posts. And so that is how you start writing. Now, the question is, how long should our blog post speed? And that only depends on a few factors. It depends on our keyword.

[00:13:52] It depends on what our competitors are writing. And it depends on how many words it takes to answer the. In general, your blog posts should only be as long as it needs to be. One way to determine how long your blog posts should be is by pasting in the keyword, looking up, and seeing what your competitors are doing.

[00:14:10] Now, what I recommend that you do is open this one right here. This is a website we were just looking at. And this website, this blog post looks like. It’s probably about, oh, this blog post is short, but it has a lot of comments. So if we scroll back up here this blog post, if I had to guess, it’s probably about 2,500.

[00:14:28] So if we do word counter, it’s 2000 words. So that should give you an idea of how long your blog post should be. It should be at least 2000 words. What I recommend that you do is I recommend that you go through and read this blog post, just come through it and try and figure it out. Topics the blog post didn’t cover.

[00:14:46] That’s going to help you add more credibility and more relevancy. And everything that you can do is take 10 minutes before we start writing and do a little brainstorming session to help you with brainstorming. So I like to start with these writing prompts. Who, what, when, where, why, and how? And so what we’ll do is we’ll take about 10 or 15 minutes, and we’ll just ask questions concerning our keyword.

[00:15:09] So we could say when. To use this curtain. And so what I want you to remember is that when you are brainstorming, you mustn’t worry about spelling words correctly. It’s more important to get your ideas onto paper and not necessarily worry about spelling words correctly because you’re always going to come back when you write your blog posts to finish that up.

[00:15:31] You want to take 10 or 15 minutes—basic questions concerning your keyword. After the 10 minutes is up, you will simply delete the ones that didn’t make sense or aren’t going to help your blog posts. And you’re going to keep the ones that will help your blog post and help answer your customer’s questions.

[00:15:47] You’re going to turn these questions into subheadings by clicking on the heading. And then you’re just going to go through and answer the question you should. You could say you should use this and these situations. Okay. And then you’re just going to go through and answer the questions and make sure that you’re helping the customer solve the problem that they came for.

[00:16:08] And then once you’re done, you’re going to go ahead and click publish. And once you click publish, it will be available for the world to see and read. All right. So if we go back over to our slide deck here, the next step is to figure out different ways to make money. And there are several ways to make money with your blog or website.

[00:16:23] If we look at this website here, For ads and you can place ads right on your website as well and make money. There are five ads, all of these with the best buy. And then this one right here in the bottom, right? I believe this is an ad as well. And the great thing with ads is that they can be automatically placed right on your way.

[00:16:40] And it can help you make money. When you first get started, you will probably have to work with Google AdSense. Google AdSense is an ad network that works with everybody. And the cool thing is once you click that get started button and the top writer in the middle, they’ll walk you through the steps of having ads placed on your website automatically.

[00:16:58] You don’t have to do a whole lot of. You just have to answer a few questions, and ads will be automatically be placed. The downside to Google AdSense is that they don’t pay a lot, and you’re going to make pennies on the dollar until you start making significant traffic. Of course, once you have 10,000 page views per month, you can move to a premium ad network like Zoellick AdThrive or media.net, but there are other ways to make money as well.

[00:17:19] You can make money with. And with affiliate marketing, that’s simply recommending or selling other people’s products and services. And the way that affiliate marketing works is that you are going to go out and find affiliate programs that are congruent or in line with what your target audience is looking for.

[00:17:34] And you are simply going to put affiliate links in your blog posts. One affiliate program you can join is hobby lobby. I know they have an affiliate program. I believe Michael’s has one as well. And if you want to learn more about affiliate marketing, I do have. Free course, it’s the third link in the description.

[00:17:50] Go ahead and click that third one to learn about affiliate marketing for free. You can also sell your own physical and digital products. Maybe you’ve put together a book for crafts, a book of crafts for kids, a summer book of crafts for kids. And you can sell that right on your website. There are WordPress plugins and even some of these themes that we looked at before. They include a feature where you can sell your own digital or physical.

[00:18:13] Now, selling products is outside the scope of this video, but that is an option and an opportunity as well. If we jump back over here, the next step is to share your content on social media. I recommend that you share all of your blog posts, uploads them to social media. The reason why I think you should share them is simply you’re not going to get any organic traffic from Google or. It does take a little while for Google to see and recognize your content. In the meantime, you can share your content and relevant places. There are forums, Facebook groups, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube. There are several places where your customers or potential customers are already hanging out where you can share that content and start getting traffic.

[00:18:53] So every blog posted upload, just go ahead and share it to Pinterest and some of those other places as well. The final question that I get all the time is about how many blog posts. I feel like you should write 50 blog posts before deciding if this is worth continuing doing. I think 50 is a good number because you’re going to get better at writing.

[00:19:14] You’re going to get better at keyword research. You’re giving yourself 50 opportunities to gain traffic leads and sales, and you’re letting Google know that you are serious about writing. A lot of people stop after ten, and many more people stopped that for 20. So what I recommend that you do is go ahead and post 50 posts.

[00:19:31] Do one a day for 50 days or one every other day for 100 days. It doesn’t matter. As long as you get the 50 now, be sure to check out the three links in the description. The first one is web hosting. The second one is premium WordPress themes. And then the third one is to a free affiliate marketing course.

[00:19:46] Be sure to like subscribe, ring the bell to be notified when I upload my next video. Thanks for watching. And we’ll see you then.