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How to Start a Lifestyle Blog

How to Start a Lifestyle Blog in 2022

The internet era opened so many possibilities for all of us to be creative and to share that creativity with the world. People are not looking for idols nowadays, they often find it easier to connect with common people who share their interests and passions in an appealing manner. The blogging scene has flourished – so many creative, brave individuals have found a way to take their little piece of fame by exposing their lifestyles with humor, deep reflection, artistic endeavors, and whatnot. Not only have they become famous, but they’ve also built a supportive community that shares the same interests. If you have always been curious about how to start a lifestyle blog, keep reading. In this article you’ll find out:

Why It Is Important to Choose Focus

Before you even commit to blogging, think carefully about what it is that motivates you to even start. Is it the desire to explain the experiences you went through, or do you want to share the love for specific types of products, or maybe give advice on something you are good at? People need to have an idea of what your blog is about. If one day you are all about clothing and another you advocate for animals rights, you’ll hardly manage to keep your audience. Choose one or a few topics you are passionate about and focus on them. People will recognize when you are authentic and will respond to it. It is essential that you build a trustful relationship with your audience from the very beginning. And, when you are passionate about something, it won’t be a problem for you to get inspired, offer interesting content and keep your blog fresh. Defining your area of interest will help you decide what’s worth sharing and what you should keep for yourself only. So, think carefully about what is your lifestyle actually about? What are you passionate about? What makes your lifestyle unique and interesting for others? When you answer these questions, you are ready for the next phase.

Choose Your Niche

The difference between a lifestyle blog and traditional blog niches is that it focuses more on interests and activities and less on storytelling. In other words, a lifestyle blog is for sharing what you do and what you are passionate about. People often fall into a trap of believing that in order for them to run a lifestyle blog they have to live glamorous, exquisite lives. Fortunately, that couldn’t be further from the truth. You can live quite a simple, ordinary life and have an incredibly interesting blog. Your creativity and passion are what make the difference.

It is not rare that a lifestyle blog is built based on a single, but unordinary life experience. For example, if you went through divorce, illness, career change, etc. you may feel the need to share that experience with other people, to connect with those who have lived through similar rough patches. Or maybe you love shopping and trying new products – that is how product review blogs begin. These are just some examples, the point is that you need to find the element of your lifestyle that you want to focus on, define your niche and then you can develop your content strategy.

Find Your Voice

Now, when you found your focus, explored the blogs within your niche it is time for you to find your voice. Don’t let popular blogs undermine your enthusiasm. Stay true to yourself and your passion and start with baby steps. Creating a lifestyle blog is a joyous adventure, not an opportunity to practice perfectionism. Think about the message you want to leave to your audience, and don’t be afraid to share a different view. When you are sure about the direction you want to take, the audience you want to attract, and the message you want to send out, it’s time to get practical!

Choose WordPress as Your Blogging Platform

Starting with a free blogging platform may sound like a good idea, but in reality, that’s far from the best solution. Free blogging platforms can’t offer you the things you need the most – ownership, professional domain, control over your blog, and monetization. Lack of ownership means your content can be removed at any time, you have very little control over it, and your domain name gives out immediately that you choose a free platform making it impossible to monetize your blog. So, if you are serious about lifestyle blogging, choose WordPress.

Why are we so confidently recommending WordPress? If you’ve ever used it, you get the picture. If not, we’ll brief you. First of all, the very fact that WordPress is without a doubt the most popular blogging platform speaks for itself. Second, and the very important thing is the ease of use. WordPress is an incredibly user-friendly platform. Thanks to the intuitive interface, you’ll be amazed at how fast you are mastering WordPress. A large number of WordPress tutorials allows you to learn everything about it that you may find interesting. The picture below shows the WordPress admin dashboard. This is the page you get to after you log in to your account, and just a glance at the left-hand menu gives you an idea of how WordPress works, and what each of the options means.

WordPress Dashboard view

Although WordPress is basically free, you need to pay for the domain name and hosting provider. Still, you practically get a premium quality blogging platform for the price of domain name and hosting.

As for the way WordPress works, it depends on a WordPress theme. A WordPress theme is necessary for WordPress to work. WordPress themes can be either free and premium, produced by an independent developer or by a specialized company. There’s a solid choice of quality, free WP themes that can perfectly suit your needs, especially if you don’t plan to spend money in this phase. But, no matter whether you go for a premium or a free theme, you need to take time and explore the theme’s characteristics, analyze what you need exactly and how the selected theme can answer your needs. There’s always the possibility to enrich the theme’s functionality with a wide range of WordPress plugins that can also be both free and premium.

Choose Domain Name and Hosting

Hosting and domain name lifestyle blog

When it comes to web hosting, the first thing you need to decide about is what you will be doing with your website. You need a web host that can support the building tools or platforms that you’ll use for setting up your site. It also has to provide you with the storage and speed that are optimal for you. An online store for example needs entirely different support from a poetry blog.

Nowadays, many web hosts offer infrastructure and tools specifically designed for particular types of websites. Some web hosts also offer WordPress installation in a package with hosting services. That’s indeed a very practical solution as it allows you to start building your website immediately after you register your hosting and log in to your WordPress account. A domain name is also very often included with the hosting. Of course, you can buy it from another company, but in that case, you’ll need to adjust the domain name settings. The domain name is practically your website’s address. It is the name that people will type in every time they try to find your website, so take care it describes well what your site is about.

Choose Your WordPress Theme

Choosing the right WordPress theme can be a very creative and enjoyable part of the process of setting up your website, you just need to know where to look for quality themes and what you need in a theme. It is also a good idea to get to know in more detail what a WordPress theme can offer, understand the features and functionality that it can bring to your site, so we recommend you read more about it in our article on choosing WordPress themes. We’ll give you a few examples of excellent, top-quality, multipurpose WordPress themes just so you get an idea of all the things a quality theme can do for you.

Qi Theme is an incredibly powerful, yet entirely free WordPress template that features beautiful, contemporary design and lots of practical features. It comes with 100 demos that cover a very wide range of niches and it is highly customizable. Lots of custom shortcodes, premium images included for free and compatibility with popular WP plugins make it an excellent choice for literally every type of website.

Bridge is a premium theme that includes more than 600 demos, Elementor and WPBakery page builders, and many more cutting-edge features. It features a modern design with parallax layers, a smooth scroll option, CSS3 animations.

Hello Elementor is a very simple, easy-to-use theme that is perfect for those with no experience in building websites. It is a lightweight, practical template that loads fast.

Don’t stop here, explore your options, tons of both free and premium themes are at your disposal.

Create the Pages Every Blog Needs to Have

Every blog needs to include a few necessary pages that provide the user with the basic information about your blog, website, or business. The content on these pages is static which means it is not supposed to change. These pages should be set up well before you launch your website.

The most important static pages are:

Home page – This is the page where the user gets the first impression of your website. It is important that it contains well-structured menus and a brief overview of what your website is about.

About Me (Us) – this page usually contains info about you or your team, biographical data, your mission, and your vision. it answers the questions of why you started your website/blog/business, why you are passionate about it and what your goal is.

Contact Me (Us) – typically includes a contact form, phone and or email, and/or physical address where your users can reach you. You decide how you want to be contacted, so you may choose to include only an email address, contact form, or only your mobile – whatever works for you. Make your WordPress contact page simple, yet informative.

Start Your Blog

Arranging your blog can be an endlessly fun and creative process. How you are going to present your content is entirely up to you. It would be wise to have some kind of content strategy in place before you start. You should also organize your content by categories and tags and do everything you can to provide the best user experience, as that is one of the most important factors for your site’s success.

All Posts
Post Categories and Tags

To avoid some common blogging mistakes, it is best to learn from the more experienced bloggers. We’ve collected all the useful tips and tricks for beginners.

Learn the SEO Basics

A common misconception in the minds of many beginners is that one has to be an SEO expert to have an SEO-optimized website. While an SEO expert is always very useful to have in a team, there are still many things you can do all by yourself to improve your chances of achieving a good ranking, and you don’t need any particular knowledge to do that. You can do a lot by applying SEO tips from proven sources and also by employing the right WordPress SEO plugin.

The first thing you need to do is to choose an SEO-optimized WordPress theme, which itself is a solid base to start from. Optimizing media and setting permalinks is also very important and has a huge influence on SEO, and it is something you can do without anyone’s help. Taking care of your website structure, organizing the content by categories and tags, smartly mixing internal and external linking are all the things that are necessary to be done, and don’t require an expert’s knowledge. And a very if not the most important thing is to produce high-quality content. However smart your SEO tactics are if your content does not hold up to the expectation you will neither keep the audience nor the ranking for long.

Use the Power of Social Media to Promote Your Blog

Social lifestyle blog

The best way to bridge the gap between popular social media platforms and your content is to integrate social media into your blog. That way, you are offering your audience an easy way to connect with your blog via social media elements on your site. These elements could be in different forms – you could add social media widget to your site, add social media buttons, integrate an Instagram feed to your page, and similar. Another way to use social media is to share your blog posts on your social media profiles on a regular basis. Why would you wait for the users to come to you when you can go to them instead? Some knowledge on social media could be useful for this purpose, but it is not rocket science and you can quickly pick up some effective strategies on the go.

In Conclusion

Now that you are equipped with everything you need to take the first steps towards starting your lifestyle blog it is time to give in to your creativity and enjoy the process! Don’t be afraid to explore your possibilities, experiment, and try new things. One of the beauties of blogging is that it gives you the freedom to play, find new exciting ways to express and share your passion and connect with like-minded people. In case you need more advice and support, don’t hesitate to reach out to us in the comment section.

We hope this article was helpful. If you liked it, feel free to check out some of these articles as well!

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