I always recommend wanna-be bloggers to think about their end goal when it comes to setting up a blog/ website. Will it be used as your personal portfolio? Do you have to present it to your potential clients? Will you be using it to secure future sponsorships and deals? Or to set up an online business or monetize your content?
As a blogger, you’ll have the opportunity to make a difference, share your knowledge, and express yourself. You want your blog to be as unique as you are, so make sure you plan your content and design to catch the attention of your audience.
If your answer to any of the above is yes, it’s time to make your blog professional. This post will come in handy for you.
Adventure!
If you’re using it as a side hustle to document your stories, adventures, or as a creative space, you probably can work with free content management systems (CMS) like WordPress.com, a Blogspot.com, a Wix site or using Weebly to host your content.
Whatever your goal is, I always say it helps to have a blog you’re proud to show off and can call your own.
If you’ve finally decided to commit to creating a professional-looking blog with your very own domain, you’re in the right place!
This post will detail everything you need to know about creating a blog/ website with your own domain name and email address.
Starting your own blog may feel like a large undertaking, but it doesn’t have to be. You can start small and work at your own pace or dive right in and start posting right away. We’re here to help you learn more about how to create posts and a space where you can express yourself and create a brand.
Here are the steps that will get you started on starting your own blog.
At A Glance
- How to Create a Travel Blog that is Uniquely YOU
- 1. Find your niche
- 2. Come up with a unique and wonderful title
- 3. Create a layout that’s inviting and exciting
- 4. Tell your story the way you want to tell it
- 5. Create content that people want to read
- 6. Use plenty of photos and/or videos to bring your adventures to life
- 7. Establish a following
- 8. Ask for feedback and interaction
- 9. Engage and build a community
- 10. Stay true to yourself and stick with It
- Why use SiteGround to host your blog/ website?
- How to start a professional blog/ website from scratch – A step-by-step guide
How to Create a Travel Blog that is Uniquely YOU
Wouldn’t pass up wearing a kira, a Bhutanese traditional costume!
1. Find your niche
If you love camping or going to hidden destinations, make your blog about that. Most travel blogs that fail to gain a great following are too generic. When you find a niche topic, you’re more likely to create a rapport with readers that share your interest. Examine how you found your niche.
2. Come up with a unique and wonderful title
There are so many generic blogs out there. Set yourself apart and set your blog up for success with a title and domain name that captures who you are and what you care about.
Avoid the cliches of “travel” and “adventure” and think about what makes your perspective different. You can always ask your friends and family what makes you, you. Often our friends know us better than anybody else, and they can encapsulate what makes us fun, lovable, and worth spending time with. You can also work from a nickname you already have.
3. Create a layout that’s inviting and exciting
When it comes to designing your layout, keep it simple, clean, and keep it one-of-a-kind. Make sure your readers can easily navigate your page but make sure you choose colours that you like and a font that you think expresses your personality.
For me, I like soft colours and flowy fonts, and my whole new blog layout will soon reflect that. I’ve been working with my blog designer and am excited to see how the end result will turn out to be!
When you first create your blog, you will want to anticipate what pages you’ll want in the future. I know it’s hard to think ahead and plan too far out, but reading articles and blogging tips and guides can help a lot!
Punakha Dzong, Bhutan
4. Tell your story the way you want to tell it
Begin your blog off right by telling your story with authenticity. Make an About Me page that will give readers an accurate sense of who you are, where you come from, and what matters to you.
You can also give your reader an idea of why you started travelling and what you’ve learned from travelling. For a fun twist, post family pictures of your first trip.
5. Create content that people want to read
One of the easiest ways to learn what followers are interested in is by exploring your favourite blogs from an analytical view. Think about what subjects your favourite blogger covers and how they approach the subject. They’re probably specific and fun to read, and they probably use conversational language.
6. Use plenty of photos and/or videos to bring your adventures to life
Nothing makes a blog come alive like having the perfect pictures. If you want to reflect back on some of your earlier trips, but you don’t have high-quality, clear photos, try using free high-quality black and white stock photos.
The black-and-white aesthetic will give your posts that reminiscent quality. This is excellent when you’re trying to come up with content at the beginning of the process.
- A Bhutanese monk
7. Establish a following
Many first time bloggers don’t know how to build and find their following. The easiest way is to start with the friends you already have. Post your blog to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Give readers a little preview of the content. You can also try sharing your blog on Reddit if there’s a sub for your niche.
You can also gain a lot of followers by using the right hashtags. Don’t spam up your posts with unrelated tags, though. Here are some interviews of secrets that top travel Instagrammers reveal on maintaining a nice feed.
8. Ask for feedback and interaction
Ask for feedback from people who read your blog. Make your blog a spot where readers can engage with you and share their own experiences. When you’re first developing your blog, ask friends and family what would make it better, what would make it more “you,” and what they like about your blog.
Use this feedback to improve your content and design. Try to keep it consistent to who you are by going back to your About Me page every now and then.
9. Engage and build a community
While you want readers to engage with your blog and social media channels, don’t forget to reciprocate and take initiative to do the same!
Reach out to other writers that share a passion for your unique topic and build a relationship with a fellow explorer. A community is pivotal in growing your blog and brand. They provide support and help, contribute to ideas, and help make your blog come alive!
Couchsurfing friends
Couchsurfing friends
10. Stay true to yourself and stick with It
So, you may not get one million followers in the first week, but even if you get just one, aren’t you accomplishing what you set out to do? If one reader loves your voice, they’re likely to share your site.
Having a smaller group of diehard followers can be just as fun and exciting as having 10,000 followers that meander through your blog without actually reading what you have to say.
Stick with it. It takes time to establish your reputation and have enough content for readers to share and appreciate.
The most important thing to do is it have fun and continue travelling. Get out there, meet people, take great pictures, and share your experience with the world. Take the time to listen to everyone’s story and you will learn more than you may expect.
If you’ve considered creating a blog, make today the day you do it. And make tomorrow the time to hit the road with a camera, a journal, and an open mind.
Why use SiteGround to host your blog/ website?
Why not the other brands e.g. HostGater, BlueHost, Performance Foundry, GoDaddy, etc? I’ve done my fair share of research, and have found mixed reviews about the other web hosting providers. Either their customer support sucks, they have a high cost of running their website, their blogs often crash, or everything in between.
Throwback to one of my first trips in Europe – Cinque Terre, Italy
I’ve started with SiteGround from the beginning of November 2015 and have stuck with them until now – it’s coming close to 4 years!
I won’t go into too much technical details but here are some important factors that won me over to SiteGround:
1. User-friendly and beginner-friendly
They have easily understandable step-by-step instructions to guide you as you set up your domain and website.
2. Ridiculously cheap initial fee to start (USD3.95/month)
When you’re just starting out, you won’t be using or needing a lot of resources. In other words, the 10GB web space that SiteGround provides in their basic plan is more than sufficient for you!
3. 24/7 support
Their chat function on their website makes it super – I repeat, SUPER – easy to contact them and get your technical problems resolved at any time of the day.
Making friends at a Maldives resort 😀
It sometimes gets very FRUSTRATING getting the blog right especially at the beginning stages of setting up a blog and there’ll be times you’ll feel very lost. I’ve been there, felt that and their support team has been honestly very helpful with everything I needed. 5 stars to them every single time.
4. Free daily automatic backups
This is an incredibly important factor that I’ve learned to appreciate through my blogging journey. There will come a time when an accidental setting you made or a wrong plugin you activated may bring your site down. Your site may get hacked by external parties. A wrong insertion of a code can wipe out your blog. These are all mistakes I’ve PERSONALLY committed and almost cried had there not been backup available.
This is when SiteGround’s easy Restore tool is heaven-sent. They used to charge their users for each restoration, but they’ve recently decided to provide it for FREE for all users, which I believe not many hosting providers offer!
5. Free & easy website transfer from existing blog
As in the case for me and many bloggers I know, we started our blogs with wordpress.com, blogger.com or blogspot.com.
Look at me all cold and dorky in 2015 in Stroud, the Cotswolds
It was only later that I decided to turn my blog into a professional site that offers valuable travel information to my readers.
Signing up with SiteGround, I was able to port over EVERYTHING from my wordpress.com site to my current belaroundtheworld.com site. It was a LIFE-SAVER knowing that I didn’t have to start from scratch, or that I won’t be losing anything in the process. The port over was done within a matter of minutes too!
6. Free professional email accounts associated with your URL
With SiteGround, you can create an UNLIMITED number of email accounts with your own domain and check your email from your favourite webmail interface, whether that be Gmail or Mac Mail. They also have SpamExperts to protect you from spam mails.
How fortunate am I to make shooting sunrises in Da Nang, Vietnam a part of “my job”?
Read this:
As I’ve already mentioned in my branding post on why it’s important to have your own email address, this is an important consideration when choosing your web hosting provider. Not many other hosting providers offer this – I still see many bloggers with a myblogname@gmail.com type of email addresses. Not cool.
Are you ready to commit to making your blog work with a professional look? Here’s a step-by-step on how to set up your blog!
How to start a professional blog/ website from scratch – A step-by-step guide
Step 1: Go to SiteGround.
Sign up through this link for a discount of USD3.95/month instead of USD11.95/month of hosting.
I go with StartUp plan since I’m only hosting one website and when I first started, I was only doing this part time so i was looking for the lowest cost investment I possibly need.
If you have multiple websites or are planning to grow multiple websites, the GrowBig or GoGeek plan would be more cost-effective for you.
Step 2: Select “Register a new domain”
Either you already have an existing blog or you are creating a new website from scratch. Either way, select “Register a new domain”.
Step 3: Enter your new domain name
Step 3: Enter your new domain nameYou should already have decided your blog name by this stage. If you haven’t, check out my earlier post on how you can create solid branding for your site.
Step 4: Create a new site or migrate site
SiteGround’s interface makes it really easy for you to register a new website or transfer your existing blog to a new domain, all for FREE.
If you’re starting a new site from scratch, select “Start a new website”.
If you want to migrate an existing blog to your new domain, select “Migrate website”.
You can also migrate your site later from the cPanel. More instructions on using the WordPress Migrator here.
Step 5: Choose a Content Management System (CMS)
Skip this step if you already have an existing blog site. If not, read on.
What is a CMS?
A CMS is a software application or set of related programs that are used to create and manage digital content. Examples of CMS are WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Joomla, Blogspot.
If you don’t already have a blog, I suggest hopping on to WordPress to create content in. They have an easy interface for navigating around and have pretty awesome free themes to start with.
While this is a customised theme made by my lovely friends at Hello Pomelo, I’ve got my theme for my second blog with Blossom Themes. It’s a one-click install and very user-friendly.
Step 6: HTTPS vs HTTP
A site with HTTPS is far more secure than HTTP. It is not only safer for your site, but also SEO-friendly to use a HTTPS site.
This is a tip I wish I knew when I started, so that I didn’t have to go through the additional step of redirecting my HTTP page links to my new HTTPS page links.
According to Cloudfare, if a website uses HTTP instead of HTTPS, all requests and responses can be read by anyone who is monitoring the session. Essentially, a malicious actor can just read the text in the request or the response and know exactly what information someone is asking for, sending, or receiving.
HTTPS uses TLS (or SSL) to encrypt HTTP requests and responses, so instead of the text, anyone who intercepts communications can only see a random string of characters, not the plaintext.
Luckily, with SiteGround, you can easily switch from HTTP to HTTPS for FREE on your domain. Follow these steps to get your site secured within a matter of time!
Step 7: Customise your email address
If you’ve read my branding advice, it highlights an important point that I still see many professional bloggers not have – your very own email address with your domain name i.e. whatever@belaroundtheworld.com. That is why having your own email address would make you one step ahead of the rest!
Here’s a step by step on how you can do it:
Go to your cPanel. Navigate to Mail > Email Accounts.
In this page, just follow the steps to create your own email name.
After that is created, your email address should be listed in the rows below. On the right, click on More > Configure email client.
In this page, there will be instructions on how you can set it up. I set my email up manually because I had problems configuring them automatically. If you’re also configuring it manually, use the settings under Secure SSL/TLS Settings.
For Mac users, if you want to integrate your blog inbox into your Mail app:
Go to System Preferences > Internet Accounts > + > Click “Add Other Account” on the right-hand side > Click “Mail Account”. Follow the steps in the screenshot below.
If you want to integrate your blog inbox into Gmail (which I personally use), here are the steps:
Go to Gmail. On the top right, click on the Settings icon > Click “Settings” > Navigate to the “Accounts and import” tab.
Under “Check mail from other accounts”, click “Add a mail account”.
Enter the following details:
Username: Your full you@yourdomain.com email address
Password: The password for that email account
POP Server: pop3.yourdomain.com
Port: 995 (make sure the “Always use SSL…” option is selected)
Follow the settings as per screenshot below.
Click “Add Account”.
To be able to send emails as your you@yourdomain.com email address from your Gmail account, you’ll need to follow these steps:
In Gmail, go to Settings > Accounts and Import.
Under “Send mail as”, click “Add another email address”.
Enter the email address and click Next Step.
Enter the following details:
Username: Your full you@yourdomain.com email address
Password: The password for that email account
SMTP Server: smtp.yourdomain.com
Port: 465 (make sure the SSL option is selected)
Click “Add Account”.
Wait for the email with the confirmation code, click the confirmation link, or enter the code and click “Verify”.
Boy was it a technical post! If you’ve completed up til this step, you’re all set! Welcome to the online content world, budding boss blogger!
I’ve tried to break it down to as simple as it can be. If you still encounter any difficulties along the way, you can count on SiteGround’s instant live chat to assist you step by step. Otherwise, feel free to shoot me a message and I’ll try my best to help.
Meeting leaders in the travel community is empowering!
In the next post, I’ll talk about how to set up your site so it looks professional, contains all the essential information an online content site should have and is SEO-friendly.
My following posts will also talk about monetizing your blog so that you start cashing a passive income in no time i.e. earning money even when you’re not actively working!
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