Blog Plan Lesson 4: How to start your blog step-by-step
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This is an exciting day! We’re going to launch your website together!! Woo-hoo! For the sake of your sanity, I’m not going to force you to watch a 3-hour video to follow along with.
(phew!)
Instead, let’s take this process step by step and build our website out together. I’ve kept the videos below brief and my goal is to get you to the finish line with zero gray hairs or curse words!
There will be a ton more content to help you customize and make your website your own down in the bonus trainings. But I warn you, it’s far more important to get a strong foundational blog built out before tinkering with other goodies.
So let’s get this thing up and running!
Step 1: Setting up our hosting account and launching our website
Before we can build our virtual home, we need to buy a small plot of land in the cloud, so that’s what we’ll cover first:
In the video above we are going to cover:
- Setting up our hosting account
- Deciding which server & plan is right for you
- Launching our first website
In case you have any issues following along with the video above or would simply like some additional resources, I’ll include some Cloudways documentation which might be helpful:
Step 2: Setting up your Theme and basic website Housekeeping
Now that we have the basic website built on Cloudways, it’s time for us to choose a “floor plan” for the home and start to sweep out any bits of dust that the builder might have left behind when they handed us the keys. Is my housing metaphor getting old yet?
In this video we will be covering:
- Setting up our free Kadence theme
- Get a super quick tour of your website’s main menu
- Update our site permalinks to make our website more attractive to Google and our readers
- Clear out the sample pages and posts that our website came with, so we have a blank canvas to work with.
Step 3: Connecting our custom domain name to our website
Don’t get stuck here!
This section is NOT REQUIRED when you are first getting started. Many students let themselves get stuck on their website’s name⦠and they never create content! If you know what you’d like to call your site, continue on the lesson and follow the steps below.
If you aren’t sure what to call your site yet, simply proceed with the course using the default domain Cloudways gives you. You can always come back to this step and set up your name later.
Now with that annoyingly yellow disclaimer message out of the way, let’s set up our custom domain for this new website!
What we cover in this video:
- Accessing Google Domains
- Tips on buying a domain including add ons and features
- Setting up Domain management inside Cloudways & setting up your Google DNS
- Checking out our website using its new domain name!
Step 4: Securing your new website
When you first connect your website’s domain, you’re likely going to see scary warning messages all over the place. That’s completely normal. We just have to install a “SSL” to tell the world that we are a shenanigan-free zone. Here’s how to do it:
What we cover in this video:
- A basic background of what SSL is and why it’s important. If you want fall asleep from boredom, you can read this lengthy explanation of it (personally, I’ll pass!)
- How to set up a free “Let’s Encrypt” SSL Certificate using Cloudways. Here is a written explanation of the same process for your reference
Aaaand, we’re live!
If you’ve followed along to this point… WOW! You’re a (virtual) homeowner! Congratulations!
Now Suzi is going to walk you through the beautiful world of blogging. I’ll meet back up with you throughout the course and bonuses to get geeky and turn our basic site into a beautiful blog!
Great job!
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Here’s Everything You can Unlock For an incredible price Today:

Blogging Success Mindset

Choose a Profitable Niche

Name Your Blog

Websites 101

Launch Your Blog!

4 Way Keyword Research

Growth-Focused Blog Strategy

Create Great Posts Fast

Passive Income Techniques

Bonus: 4 Blogging Growth Strategies

Bonus: Heavenly Hosting

Bonus: Blog Beautiful
Sure itās possible for ugly websites to rank on Google⦠but itās so much easier to be proud of a beautiful site! So in this bonus, we are going to make your blog stand out using professional design templates, and tons of easy-to-follow customizing tutorials.

Bonus: Super-charged SEO
If your site doesnāt get traffic, it doesnāt make money! So in this bonus, weāre going to go a few levels deeper with our SEO strategies and teach you additional free software that can make every blog post rank even higher! Weāll show you how to use artificial intelligence to ālook over your shoulderā every day and give you little tips so your blog gets smarter, happier, and richer every day!

Bonus: WordPress 101
Launching your first WordPress blog is like learning a gazillion new skills all at once. We know it can be overwhelming. So we created a special bonus that walks through every screen and button one by one with you. You definitely donāt NEED to know what every button does, but itās a resource for you to flip back to whenever youāre curious or nervous, and need us to give you that āooooh, thatās what that does!ā feeling.

Lifetime Access
Launch as many blogs with Blog By Number as you want! We’ll keep the course updated and relevant for you, and you can always revisit and continue to build the blogging business of your dreams!