 So Nealey I've always wanted to know how to make a blog, but I have no idea where to start. Well, you're a luck That's actually what we're gonna cover here today on the journey Now let's know with building your first blog you really have to figure out. What do you actually want to write about? So my greatest passion is food eating it. Yeah eating it talking about it seeing it Whatever right on so that's a good that's a good thing to blog about there are tons of food bloggers out there Hopefully you'll get some free food out of it. That's what I'm hoping for But once you figure that out you got to really figure out who your audience is who do you want to serve? So is there a type of food that you'd like to blog about? I would say probably just a new up-and-coming restaurants in the area So your audience is more the trend of your people foodies the millennials the millennials like us So that's super important to figure out what your your actual blog is going to be about and who your audience is Because you have to be targeted with your message if you try to serve everyone You actually end up serving no one. It's like trying to boil the ocean. You just can't do it All right The next thing to really think about is understanding why you actually want to start this blog because there's a lot of work Involved so Alex, why do you want to start this blog? Well? I just love to write so it's a great outlet for some creativity Okay, also just you know try it try new food options. I dig it I dig it so now that you have those questions answered the next part of really starting your blog is figuring out What the name of it is going to be and the branding now? Do you have an idea of what your name is going to be because I have an idea Yeah, what do you think I should name my blog? So I already checked and the domain name is Alex eats food comm is available perfect So the blog Alex eats food, right? So I think I think that's what we're gonna make today So with that name if you're struggling on trying to figure out what your own name is We got a video up here on naming that'll definitely help you out But to carry on with that the next portion of it comes branding your brand is literally every single aspect of your blog That's the the way you talk on it. That's the images you use the text the font Literally everything so you want to try to keep that consistent The more consistent you are with your branding the more people are easily able to recognize you right like if you see like go Daddy's color the green and orange you instantly think go daddy or like the red and yellow what colors do you think of? McDonald's McDonald's right, so keep it. It's food look at that All right, so the last thing you need to ask yourself before you actually start going into building the website is Figuring out do you want just a blog or do you want a full-on website with the blog included? So Alex, which one do you want? I think I want to keep it simple just do the blog for now So that way I can still focus on all the food eating right looks that's super important Yeah, so we're gonna go ahead and show you guys a quick demo. Let's go check it out All right, Alex, so we're about to make your blog here I'm gonna take you through actually installing WordPress on a hosting account There's a difference between WordPress comm hosting and self-hosted WordPress now for most business owners I would definitely recommend a self-hosted WordPress This is basically you going to a hosting provider buying hosting and installing WordPress on top of it Sounds like a lot of work, but it's actually pretty easy to do so check it out So inside a cPanel most providers have it you're gonna look for an thing called install a Tron There's lots of apps to choose from you click WordPress Install this application Then it's gonna give you a lot of different options. We have our domain name here Alex eats food calm directory The blanks you don't want to like slash something you just wanted the domain You have the username and password here your email you can update that as you need to and Then you click install at the bottom. Wow, okay Easy enough. All right, so you've never built a WordPress site before right, right? So brand-new so the cool thing about WordPress is that you can access it literally anywhere you want to so Where's kind of your favorite kind of favorite places to work? I like to write on my blog whenever I'm you know at home at home chilling out Yeah, I like coffee shops and work in there so I can access it there, which is cool So you go to your domain name and then forward slash WP dash admin. There'll be a login screen I'm cheating and doing like a one-click login here inside a cPanel So now there is a get started wizard We're gonna skip past that just because you may not have that get starting wizard with your hosting provider So hit no, thanks So this is WordPress it can seem overwhelming There's lots of stuff here to choose from but I think the very first thing that we need to do is choose a theme for your site Okay, so a theme is basically like how you want your site to look feel and function Okay, so there are different things that I can choose from there are a ton So you go to appearance and themes you have some default ones here I would recommend installing your own okay, but when I have you kind of choose your own we're gonna go to the most popular here and We'll just tell me when I'll let you pick whatever one you want. I like this one All right, so we're gonna Sydney. Let's do it So you mouse over it click install so then once it's installed you click activate and then you just install a theme Okay, super simple. All right, so after themes we want to kind of check out some plugins So plugins are basically little add-ons to your website. Okay, so you can literally do almost anything with the plug-in There's that old phrase. There's a plug-in for that We actually made a video on our favorite plug-ins. We want to check it out, but I'll show you how to install a plug-in It's pretty much the same as installing a theme. Okay, so plug-ins add new and And then it's gonna show you some of the featured plugins here Then we're gonna go to popular and I'll let you kind of check it out. So let's check out We definitely want people to find your website. So we'll install Yoast SEO here and Just like that we're gonna click install so once you do install again same thing activate and then that plug-ins done All right, so that's installing a plug-in super simple But let's get to the real meat of making your blog and that's the post So what do you want to make a post right now? Yeah, let's do it cool So where's a place that you recently ate at or maybe your favorite place in Austin? Let's go with hop.dy great burgers. So super simple mouse over posts and go add new And then you're gonna go to the editor and this is going to be where you can basically start writing all your content So how do you spell hop.dy is the HOP? HOP Hit daddy. I can't type HOP DO DDY Cool hop.dy exactly as it sounds So you put your title here. You can add all your content. Look at all this great content. I'm writing I'm just the best here all the words guys my blog is gonna be a lot better than that. Super hot fire All right, and then so this is what was called the Gutenberg editor now It's just really called the page editor. You can add all your stuff here So as you see I just started typing there's this little plus guy right here and you can add even more content So maybe you want to start adding pictures of your restaurant or the restaurants you eat at rather or the food you eat You do so here and just add your image and then you can choose from the media library Okay, I don't have anything the media library So no hop.dy pictures. So I'm gonna grab just a picture of a burger just for example sake I'm gonna go to pexels.com and just type in burgers See what pops up and these are all free images, right? Yes These are all free images makes it super helpful, especially if maybe you're not doing food reviews We have to have the image if you see some cool stock photos These all look delicious, and I'm hungry All right, so I'm gonna download this really quick Cool. What's cool about pexels too is these photographers are giving their photos for free If you want to support them you can donate or follow them Instagram, which is pretty cool Very cool little kick back there, and then once you have your image you're gonna upload it there And then add your alt text so alt text is basically what Google can read because Google can't understand what an actual image is So you have to tell it so super awesome burgers And then select and Then we have our post and then as you see here we installed Yoast SEO So there's a little section to update your search engine title search and descriptions and all that good stuff And now last but not least one of the more important things to think about with your post is to have a featured image Basically, so when you have your your site, right? It's not just text you have that little little image there to capture it Make sure you're on the document tab go down to featured image Set featured image, and I'm going to be lazy and just choose the same image Burgers all over the place burgers burgers burgers, and then when you're done you can publish Or if you say you you've created a bunch of content You don't want them all published at once you can actually schedule it right here So publish when do you want this to publish say on friday friday? All right So let's check it out All right, so obviously title we're gonna have to update a little bit But then here's here's your your blog post So the feature image always shows first and then your content and then your feature image You have comment boxes so your visitors can go and add their own two cents or say that is a super awesome burger I'm super hungry now But let's check out a couple other places on wordpress. Okay. All right, so I'm going to show you guys widgets And what exactly do widgets do? Widgets are a wordpress's best friend So on your blog post you saw that there was that sidebar with not a lot of real content It's just kind of default generic stuff. So if you go to appearances and then widgets Is this basically all this content that you're gonna have on your sidebar and on your footer Some themes may give you more options for sidebars, especially if you have blue commerce You could have the sidebar just for your blog post You don't want your blog post just add like products you want to have posts But you want your products to show other related products things like that got it So you can easily just get rid of stuff You don't want by clicking and dragging and then something else to really check out is the the customized tab Most themes, especially the free themes will have all the options to really design and style your site right there I'm just going to give you a quick overview of what this looks like So this Sydney theme has a ton of options. And so I was actually a little surprised You can have all your stuff here. So your site title Your header area things like that your home page settings So this is super important. So you're going to have your latest posts show up So let's go ahead and go back All right, so let's check out your website. So you again just click the my blog that little shortcut to get to your website Nice. So why does it say create your menu here in the top right corner? Um, because we need to create a new menu here. So that menu is going to be your navigation It's all you like your home links. You're about contact all that good stuff Uh, you either click it there if you're on the front of site Or if you're in the dashboard, it's appearance and then menus You can add your stuff here. So it looks like we have a menu already kind of created. We have home and then sample page I don't want sample page to show up. So I'm going to go ahead and just remove that And then go ahead and click create menu Then once you do you'll see at the bottom here it shows menu settings So you can auto add pages so add you as you add like an about contact things It'll automatically come here So you don't have to and then display location primary menu is so it'll actually appear up there So if we go primary menu and save And now check out the site It'll show home. Okay. Just like that Then we have your awesome hot dotty post with all this randomness and then hello world Right there the default the fault post there So what does it mean when it says uncategorized right there? I almost forgot. So every post has a category so you can have like burger restaurants or you can have Ice cream places whatever you want it to be So by default wordpress doesn't know what to put so it's going to have an uncategorized category So you go to post categories and then just click quick edit We're going to just type in burgers here Make it nice and simple But as you add posts you can add content here for categories or inside the post itself Okay So now one of the issues with having a blog is Potentially the amount of spam you might get there are bots out there that just go out and just basically add just Nonsense posts trying to get links back to their site. So how do I avoid that? Um, so there's a few things you can do So most of the time wordpress will come pre-installed with the plugin called the kismet anti-spam You can sign up and do that Otherwise you can do like a cap show plugin that makes sure that they're an actual person on your website and commenting Plugins like discus, which is like facebook login or twitter login is definitely good to help prevent some of that stuff too So earlier you showed me that seo plugin, you know, how do I make sure that my content is going to be seen? Yeah, uh, let's actually check out yost. So if you go over to your page We want to go back to edit it again. So you can either click directly on it or click edit here So under yost, it's going to give you a lot of recommendations and things like that Like again, I have nonsense here just for the sake of this but you're the writer. I'm going to let you create here I'll work the magic later, but it'll take a little snippet here for you So by default it's going to have title page separator and site title. So you can get rid of this and do hop dotty my favorite burger place review Or whatever you want it to be. Okay, it's going to give you a little kind of wheel the more content the better See goes to green green is good Basically, and then it's going to be like a little snippet of how it's going to look on search engines The you want a lot of content that's attention grabbing and has kind of your your focus keyword So your focus keyword would really be like hop dotty review You want to make sure you have that in there and then your meta description Like it says, please provide a meta description by adding a snippet below Basically, it's a quick little snippet of what someone's going to get out of your content if they read it You want to keep it engaging? But again, make sure you have whatever your focus word is for you would be hopped out of your view So have that somewhere in there as a business owner your page your post You'll you'll want to make sure that you have some type of focus word for that page Whether it's a review or an about us or a service and include it in your your description and your title And then you can kind of go down. There's an SEO analysis It's going to give you a lot of information and you can literally just go down the rabbit hole of just clicking all this stuff I'll leave that for another video Actually, we did a video on seo if you want to check it out right here Whoa, so why does it say not secure there in the top left corner? Technically, it's not secure. So Really, I mean it's secure like the information on there is fine But with WordPress you have that wp-abdom where you log in, right? So it's not secure. So if you enter in your username and your password that information is sent over plain text on the internet So if there's a man in the middle of text someone's what's called sniffing captures that information. It's out there Super yeah, it's rough super important if you have like a type of shop or you're taking credit card information Or there's personal information So that can be easily fixed by getting an SSL certificate So if you do enter username and password it's sent over the internet. It's all jumbled up So even if someone grabs it they have no idea what the heck it means Okay And then on top of just really just safety and security you always want to make backups Especially with a blog and you're constantly adding stuff that you plan to post how many times a week or how many times a month I'm planning on posting probably about once a week. Okay. So that's like 52 posts a year So if something were to happen to your site all those posts are gone So make sure you have some type of backup service most hosting providers will have something for you Or you can find something third-party But it's always easier to do it with your hosting provider since it's all usually automated But you want to protect all this time invested into this project. Make sure it's just not gone to the blink of an eye Right. All right. So these are just the basics of building your first blog Again, there's lots of options to kind of go through and make it your own Like we still need to update the the title and then comes up a navigation color It's things like that At least this has a solid foundation for you to build your first site and then from here it's just exploring That's kind of the fun of WordPress. There's so much to explore so you can never stop learning Perfect. Well, thanks for all the help and let us know in the comments below What videos you guys want to see and be sure while you're down there Make sure you like the video and subscribe to our channel as well This is the journey. We'll see you next time