How to Start A Lifestyle Blog What You Need to Know

Last updated on February 10th, 2019 at 08:49 am

If you landed on this post, then chances are you’re looking for information on how to start a lifestyle blog. These blogs are so popular and from what I’ve seen they do very well on Pinterest.

Why You Should Start A Blog

Since starting this blog in 2016, I’ve seen so many women start mommy, lifestyle blogs and Christian lifestyle blogs pop up. In fact, there are several very popular blogs online that are already making thousands of dollars per month.

Related: 13 Amazing Millennial Lifestyle Blogs That Can Help You

Maybe you’ve read one of those income reports and thought to yourself, “if they can do it, so can I.” Well, you’re correct, anyone can start a blog, here’s my step-by-step tutorial that will help you get your first WordPress blog set up.

But It’s Not As Easy As You Might Think

Chances are you read a make money blogging post that got the wheels turning in your head. Imagine being able to start a blog where you can blog about your life and make money.

Well, the great news is that you can start any type of blog, whether it’s a lifestyle, travel, beauty or a couples blog, it’s possible to earn passive income overtime.

Many lifestyle bloggers share their thoughts and opinions about all kinds of subjects. Read this to find out what a lifestyle blog is.

These blogs have become extremely popular among women. At one point, I thought about starting one, especially after reading this lifestyle blog.

But for some reason, I just couldn’t find some topics that I wanted to blog about. So here I am on this blog sharing my journey and helping you get your blog started.

Related: 35 Lifestyle Blog Names That Will Absolutely Inspire You

Things to Know When Starting A Blog

There are several things that you need to know when starting your blogging journey, regardless of what type of blog you start. I’ll share the ones that I think are the most important:

• Don’t use a free platform
• It takes a lot of time to grow a blog (some niches more than others)
• Invest in the right web hosting from the get-go (this is where I host this blog)
• Don’t compare yourself to others
• Enjoy the journey because you’re going to be at it for a while
• Create a strategy that works for you

I’m sure there are more things that you should know. But the truth is that with blogging comes a huge learning curve and you’re going to have to figure everything else as you go.

Related: What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Blogging

So let’s get busy and help you get your new lifestyle blog up and running as quickly as possible.

How to Start A Lifestyle Blog

Before you can start writing amazing content, you need to set up the proper foundation for your blog. This means you’ll need to install WordPress, find the right theme, set up your social media channels and install the basic plugins.

Once you’ve set up the basics, you can start focusing on content and promoting your blog. But before you move too fast, let’s get your blog foundation set up the right way.

Related: How to Write A Blog Disclaimer What You Need to Know

It’ll be a lot easier in the long run and you won’t have to worry about whether or not you did it correctly from the start.

Choosing The Right Platform

I highly recommend installing a self-hosted WordPress blog. While it’s the only blogging platform, so I can’t compare it to anything else like Squarespace.

I love the fact that you can choose from several types of plugins and themes that will make your blog look like it cost thousands of dollars. But between you and I, we would never spend that much on our blog. (not at the beginning anyway)

Let’s Install WordPress

I recommend getting your domain and hosting from two different companies.I never get my domain and hosting from the same place.

Get your domain from Namecheap as it comes with a free Privacy Whois. Then pick up your hosting from SiteGround.

Try to pay for more than one year in advance as it will help you save more money upfront. I paid for 3 years in advance and went with the GrowBig plan.

They give me enough space to grow my blog to my first 25,000 pageviews. Make sure that you choose a plan that will give you enough space to grow your blog.

Here’s a step by step tutorial that will walk you through on how to install WordPress on SiteGround. It’ll even show you how to use the free Let’s Encrypt which makes your blog https instead of http. Google wants every website to be https.

After you’ve set up your blog on SiteGround it’s time to choose the right theme and plugins for your blog. Don’t worry, it’s not as hard as it sounds.

Getting Familiar With Your Dashboard

If this is your first ever blog, then you’ve never seen the inside of the WordPress dashboard. It can be confusing to a new blogger. This tutorial will help you navigate the dashboard.

You’ll be logging into your blog on a daily basis, eventually, all of it will just become second nature to you. So whatever you do, don’t let it intimidate you there are a ton of YouTube videos that will help you navigate your way around the platform.

Choosing the Right Theme

All WordPress themes are different and each one has their own learning curve. I personally use the Genesis Framework for this blog and the Wellness child theme.

The Genesis themes are extremely popular among bloggers in all niches. If you’re considering using the Genesis themes for your blog, I personally recommend the following:

• Tasteful Theme
• Refined Theme
• Glam Theme

All these themes are designed by Restored 316 which is known for their feminine WordPress themes. They look absolutely amazing and will make your lifestyle blog look amazing.

Genesis Has a Learning Curve

Unfortunately, the Genesis Framework comes with a bit of a learning curve. Personally, I think that it’s worth learning, but if you’re not a very techie person, then the Divi Theme from Elegant Themes may be a better choice for you.

It’s a drag and drop builder that is easy to learn. If you do decide to go that route, just make sure that you don’t use the builder for both the posts and the pages.

Otherwise, it will be challenging to change out themes later on. It’s been a while since I’ve used the Divi Builder but if I remember correctly they place shortcodes in your posts and pages.

When you do change out your themes, it’s very hard to remove the shortcodes from your blog. Other than that it is a very newbie friendly theme.

There are literally thousands of blog themes you can use. Whatever you do, don’t spend too much time on choosing the right one.

Installing The Basic Plugins

A WordPress plugin makes it easy to add a functionality to your blog. One of the biggest mistakes that most new bloggers make is installing way too many plugins.

I recommend installing the basic plugins that will help you get started. Once you’ve been blogging for a while, you’ll start to understand what type of plugins you need to help you accomplish something.

Related: 7 Best Free Plugins That Will Make Your Blog Successful

Getting WordPress Ready

Most people think that WordPress is ready right out of the box. Unfortunately, it’s not. There are several things that you need to do like:

• Change your time zone
• Fix your permalinks
• Setup Google Analytics

These are the most important things to do before you begin publishing content. Here’s a list of 35 things to do after installing WordPress.

Everything on the list doesn’t have to be accomplished before publishing your content. Just work through the list at your own pace. The most important thing you need to take care of is making your permalinks SEO friendly.

Once the Foundation Is Set Up

It’s time to sit down and start writing. Now before you start pumping out content and wasting a bunch of time, I recommend you do your research to find popular blog topics that have done well.

Use Buzzsumo to research other blogger’s in the lifestyle niche and see what has done well for them. This will give you some examples of how to write a lifestyle blog that actually drives traffic.

Don’t forget to check out my JumpStart Blog Traffic which will walk you through step by step on how to drive traffic to your blog using Pinterest and keyword research.

Related: 171 Lifestyle Blog Post Ideas That Will Last You All Year

Without traffic, you’ll never be able to build a successful blog.

Lifestyle Blog Categories

Here is a quick list of the top lifestyle blog categories you can write about to help you get started.

1. Fashion
2. Food
3. Home Decor
4. Travel
5. Gardening
6. Family
7. Beauty
8. Self-Care
9. Health & Fitness
10. DIY & Crafts

I’d recommend starting with 3-4 categories to get started. Once you know what people are interested in, you can branch out and add more topics to your blog.

Start Writing

Starting a blog is challenging because we all want it to grow quickly. One thing you need to remember is that we all start from scratch. You’re not different than anyone else.

The great thing is that you’ve chosen a niche that does extremely well on Pinterest. So make sure that you start learning how to use the platform to help you grow your blog. I recommend the Pinning Perfect course, it helped me understand how to use the platform to grow my blog.

How Many Blog Posts Should I Write

Whether you decided to launch your blog with 1 post or 5 blog posts, you need to sit down and start writing on a regular basis. One of the things that are going to help your blog grow is amazing content that helps your readers solve problems.

If you’re starting from scratch, I would recommend publishing 3 blog posts per week. (if you can do more that will only help you grow faster). If you’re a brand new lifestyle blogger, I recommend sitting down and writing as many blog posts as you can in the first 3 months.

That’s the route I took with my second blog I started two months ago. I used KWFinder to help me find low competition keywords that I can rank for and started writing as many posts as possible. In the past 2 months, I was able to write 40 blog posts.

Of course, you don’t want to publish content just for the sake of publishing content. Make sure that your content is high quality and helps your readers.

Start optimizing your blog posts for both Google and Pinterest. You’ll probably get most of your traffic from Pinterest at the beginning.

But as your blog starts to age and Google starts trusting it, your organic traffic will start to kick in. You’ll probably hear the term search engine optimization tossed around in the blogosphere.

Don’t worry too much about it. But as soon get some free time start reading up as much as you can about SEO. Here’s a list of some sources you can start with:

• The Moz Blog
• Neil Patel SEO

Best Way to Market Your Lifestyle Blog

Hopefully, at this point, you have written at least 20 blog posts. Now it’s time to start promoting it to get your blog in front of readers. I recommend focusing on both SEO and Pinterest to promote your blog (this is what’s working for me).

If you did your keyword research correctly, then Google will eventually start sending you some traffic. However, it’s going to take some time to start seeing the fruits of your labor.

So you’re going to have to get out there and promote your blog. The great thing is that these blogs are known to do very well on Pinterest, so I’ll share how to get started on that platform.

First things first, you’ll want to verify your blog on Pinterest to create a Business account. Next start creating some eye-catching pins, I love Stencil because it makes the process of creating pins so easy.

Create boards on Pinterest that fit your lifestyle categories. Create several boards I started with 10 boards for my second blog, but if you can create more and pin to them on a regular basis, there’s no harm in that.

I’d recommend looking for other lifestyle bloggers to see what type of boards they have. After creating your boards, you want to start getting your pins out there.

This eBook will show you how to come up with an effective manual pinning strategy. Once you have too many pins to keep track of, you can invest in Tailwind to help you automate the pinning process.

I’ve found that pinning 20-30 pins is my sweet spot, it may be different for you. Make sure that you’re pinning with a ratio of 80/20 if you have enough pins of your own to pin.

Pay attention to your Google Analytics to find out which pins are performing well for you. Sit down and create more pins based on your popular pins and keep pinning.

Eventually, you’ll start seeing some Pinterest traffic and you’ll be able to monetize your blog with Ads, affiliate marketing, info-products and etc.

Enjoy The Journey

Blogging can be a great way to earn an income from home. There are successful bloggers who have managed to turn their passion into a profitable blog that allows them to live a lifestyle of freedom in both monetary and time freedom.

It didn’t happen overnight and many of them faced their own demons and struggles. Whether you’re starting a DIY blog, parenting blog or any other niche blog, there’s one thing they all have in common.

They take a lot of work to get off the ground. Think of it like pushing a big weighted ball uphill. It’s going to take a lot of momentum to get the ball up the hill.

However, once you’ve managed to get uphill you can enjoy the downhill ride. Blogging is kind of like this.

At first, you’ll be working and working and won’t see any results. Just when you feel like it’s not working, things will start to click.

So whatever you do, keep pushing through those challenging times. Network with other bloggers and join Facebook groups. Do whatever you have to do to stay motivated until you reach your blogging goals.

Final Take Away

Congratulations on starting your blog. I can’t wait to see what you create and hear about how it has changed your life. Keep your head down and working towards your goals.

One day you’ll look back and see that all the hard work you put in was totally worth it. Then you’ll be thinking about starting your second blog so you can create multiple streams of income.

Hand Picked Articles for You

• 9 Things to Know When Starting A Blog
• What Should I Blog About and Tips to Help You Out
• What is A Lifestyle Blog Everything You Need to Know

Are you considering starting a blog in this niche? If so let me know, I’d love to hear why made you choose this niche.