There are well over 100 million blogs on the internet today. Here are just a handful of the most popular blog ideas and concepts people are writing about.

• Personal Blog – Everyone should have their own little spot on the internet and a personal blog is a great way to accomplish this. With a personal blog you can write about whatever you like, post pictures of your friends and family, while also building a longterm diary to save your favorite memories.
• Entertainment Blog – Whether it’s gossip, celebrity pictures or just for your favorite TV shows… entertainment blogs are all over the place and one of the most fun and fastest growing niches out there.
• Niche Specific Blog – A niche blog is one that could be focused on any individual topics, product, service or thing that you might want to blog about. A good example of a niche specific blog would be “Best Camping Folding Knives”.
• Cooking Blog – A cooking blog is a great option for anyone who loves to cook, share recipes and take pictures of their food. It’s also a great way to learn new recipes and become friends with other chefs online.
• Travel Blog – A travel blog is a great idea for anyone who loves to travel and likes to share their journeys and pictures with others. Some travel bloggers have even been able to travel the world and make money in the process.
• Blogging to Make Money – Last but not least, we have blogging for the pure concept of making money. This is one of the most common reasons why people start a blog. To make money with blogging you need to create a blog that provides value, solves a problems and has a clear monetization method (such as affiliate marketing or selling banner ad space on your blog.)

These are just a few of the most popular blogging topics out there. The great thing about blogging is that there are no rules. Once you start a blog, you can do whatever you like with it. Go niche specific or cover as many topics as you like.

Step 1 – Choose a Quality Web Host

(This is a quick walkthrough for why you should choose A Small Orange as your web hosting service.)

One of the most important decisions before creating your blog, is choosing a reliable web hosting company. The last thing you want it to go live with your blog and have a hosting provider that continually goes down, offers little support and locks you into a long term contract.

A Small Orange is the perfect solution for bloggers of all sizes because they are very easy to work with, offer 24/7 support and have low cost hosting plans that start at just a few dollars per month.

In addition to the obvious reasons why A Small Orange is an excellent host, here are some of the technical benefits as well.

Excellent Support – A Small Orange currently powers million of sites and domain names from all around the world. With this many customers, they simply need to have the best support around. Customers can get in contact with A Small Orange support through 24/7 chat support, email (tickets) and phone support as well. My preferred method of contact with A Small Orange is through their chat support, so I can keep working online while waiting to connect with someone from their support team.

Affordable Pricing – As mentioned earlier, there are many different hosting solutions to choose from. In comparison to them all, A Small Orange is very competitively priced while also offering high quality web hosting. Packages start out at just a few dollars per month and can be paid on a monthly basis, which means you can cancel or leave their hosting at any time.

We also have an exclusive deal in place with A Small Orange, which offers all Blogging.org readers a free domain name for life and 20% off all new hosting packages.

Unlimited Domains & Email – When trying to decide on a quality web host, you want to choose one that isn’t going to limit how many different sites and emails you can setup on one account. With A Small Orange’s “Small” plan at only $4 per month, you can setup unlimited sites, domains and email accounts.

Monthly Payment System Available – I also mentioned earlier that A Small Orange has some of the best pricing around. The great thing about A Small Orange is that they offer monthly payments, which doesn’t lock you into their hosting for a long period of time. However, they also offer crazy low rates of around $4 per month for anyone that wants to pay for a year or more in advance. This is a great option as bloggers usually end up keeping their sites for many years to come.

One last thing I want to mention is that you can always upgrade or downgrade your A Small Orange account at any time. This is great if you want to add more domains, features or even start selling online.

To get started with your blog hosting account, simply walk through the process below, or proceed to step two.

Step 2 – Signing Up with A Small Orange

Step 1. Choosing your hosting plan

As active reader of Blogging.org, you now have the opportunity to grab our exclusive 20% off hosting promotion with A Small Orange. Not only will you receive a huge discount off hosting, you will also receive a free domain name for LIFE! This is an additional savings of $14.95 per year as long as you keep your hosting plan active.

Click here to get started and to claim your discount and free domain name.

Once you click the link above and visit the A Small Orange site, you will be sent to a page like the one below. The first thing you need to do is click on the “BUY NOW” button. This will then send you to the order form page where you can proceed with your account select and selecting your preferred hosting package. Each level of hosting is setup to meet the needs of different bloggers, no matter how new, small or big they are.

By default, you will see that A Small Orange will automatically set you up with their “Small” hosting package, which is more than perfect for 99% of site owners out there.

A break down of each hosting package available through A Small Orange is shown below.

• Small Plan (Recommended) – The Small plan with A Small Orange is the best option for most site owners, as it will allow them to get started with their site immediately, while also giving them everything they need to grow with time.
• Tiny Plan – The Tiny place is a good choice for anyone that wants to setup just one web site or blog. It’s their cheapest plan, but also limits you on setting up more sites in the future.
• Medium Plan – Much like the Small plan, this hosting package offers more storage and bandwidth for expanded growth.
• Large Plan – This premium hosting plan is setup for site owners and bloggers that have a lot of traffic running through their sites or a lot of downloadable data. This package includes 30 GB of storage and 500 GB of bandwidth, along with unlimited domains

You will also notice the 20% discount for each hosting plan.

Step 2. Choosing Domain

After selecting the web hosting plan that best fits your needs, you can then move onto selecting your domain name — which is provided at no extra cost when setting up your account for at least a annual billing.

If the domain name you want to register is available, it will let you know. Likewise if the domain is already taken. If your domain name isn’t available, try to come up with something creative until you find a winner that is available.

Step 3. Review and Complete

After putting in the domain name you would like to setup with hosting, you can then proceed to fill in the rest of your personal details and payment information.

Before completing your hosting sign up process, I also want to point out the “Additional Services” listed right before the bottom of the order form page. Depending on your current and future plans for your blog, you may want to order these additional services. If not, you can simply uncheck them and reduce your monthly hosting cost.

Once everything looks good, all you need to do is click “SUBMIT ORDER“.

After clicking the “SUBMIT” button, you will then receive an email from A Small Orange with your account details.

Step 3 – How to Install WordPress on
A Small Orange

With your hosting account all setup, now it’s time to install WordPress on your server in just seconds!

A Small Orange has made this process very simple to setup. All you need to do is find your welcome email, click on the cPanel button, login to the system and click on the “Install WordPress” option.

To follow this process step-by-step, click here to continue to the next step in our blog creation guide.

Click here to Get a Free Domain Name with A Small Orange!

Reminder: It is not recommended to manually install WordPress to setup a blog, unless you are well trained in how to use zip folders, files, FTP software and .php files. It’s much easier to use one-click installation that is already built into A Small Orange.

How to Install WordPress Manually

Step 1: Download WordPress

1. Download the WordPress package to your local computer from http://wordpress.org/download/.
2. Unzip the downloaded file to a folder on your local computer.

Step 2: Upload WordPress to Your Hosting Account

There are three available options for uploading WordPress to a hosting account.

1. Upload via FTP – Please see FTP Getting Started for more information.
2. Upload via File Manager – Please see How to Upload Using the File Manager for instructions.
3. Upload via SSH – Please see How to Get and Use SSH Access for instructions.

Step 3: Create a MYSQL Database and Username

WordPress stores its information in a database. Therefore, a database will need to be created.

1. Log into cPanel.
2. In the Databases section, click the MYSQL Database Wizard icon.
3. For Step 1: Create a Database, enter a database name and click Next Step.
4. For Step 2: Create Database Users, enter the database user name and password and click Create User.
5. For Step 3: Add User to the Database, click the All Privileges checkbox and click Next Step.
6. For Step 4: Complete the task, make note of the database name, username and password, as you will need them for Step 4 below.

Step 4: Configure wp-config.php

The wp-config-sample.php file has the database information contained within it and tells the WordPress software which database to connect with. This step needs to be completed to make sure the correct database information is connecting with WordPress installation files.

The wp-config-sample.php file can be found in File Manager in the folder where WordPress is installed. To modify the file:

1. Log into cPanel.
2. In the Files section, click the File Manager icon.
3. In the pop-up box, select Web Root and check the box for Show Hidden Files (dotfiles), then click Go.If you don’t see the pop-up box, you may have selected the “Skip this question, and always open this directory in the future when opening File Manager” option. To make the pop-up reappear, simply click reset all interface settings at the very bottom of your cPanel.
4. From the left navigation menu in File Manager, click public_html to expand the folder.
5. Click the folder containing the WordPress installation.
6. On the right side of the File Manager screen, locate the wp-config-sample.php file.
7. Right click on the file, select Rename and change the name of the file to wp-config.php. Click the Rename File button.
8. Right-click on the wp-config.php file and select Code Edit. When the file opens, look for the following information:define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘database_name_here’);/** MySQL database username */
   define(‘DB_USER’, ‘username_here’);/** MySQL database password */
   define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘password_here’);
   1. Replace database_name_here with the name of the database you created (above in Step 3: Create MySQL Database and User See Below).
   2. Replace username_here with the username of the database you created.
   3. Replace password_here with the password of the database that you created.When done editing, click the Save Changes button, then close the file.

Step 5: Run the Installation

Next you will want to go to the installation page through a new browser so you can successfully run the installation script. Depending on where you installed the script, you will find it at either of the following URLs:

• http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/install.php
• http://yourdomain.com/blog/wp-admin/install.phpBe sure to replace yourdomain.com in the example above with your actual domain name.

You should now see a welcome page that says “Welcome to the famous five minute WordPress installation process!”

Step 6: Run the Installation

On this page, fill in the fields for:

• Site Name
• Username
• Password (needs to be entered twice)
• Email address (login information will be sent to this email address)
• Select whether or not to have the search engines index the site

Click Install Now, and you should be taken to the final screen, showing the following message:

Success! WordPress has been installed.

Was this too confusing? Click here to join my recommended host to setup an account and install WordPress with just one click. It literally takes only a few minutes!

This section is a quick walkthrough of how to write your first blog post and change your WordPress theme design. For a more detailed walkthrough, please click here.

With your domain name, hosting and WordPress all setup, you can dive right into WordPress and start creating content for your site. When you signed up with A Small Orange and installed WordPress on your server, you should have also received your login details for WordPress.

Once logged in you will see a screen area like the one below. You can then click on the “Posts” tab on the left side menu and select “Add New”.

You will then be sent to a new screen like the one below where you can start writing your blog content. If you know how to use Microsoft Word, then you will master WordPress in a matter of minutes.

The main areas are your Title and the actual Blog Post Content. Once you are happy with your content and ready to go live, all you have to do is click the “Publish” button on the right side of the page.

You can also easily change the look and feel of your blog through the use of WordPress Themes. To change your theme, simply click on “Appearance” on the left side menu and then click on “THEMES”.

When you are on the Themes page you will see your existing themes and also also add a new theme by clicking on the “Add New” button on the top of the page. This will send you to the WordPress Themes gallery and allow you to upload any other themes you might have.

If you would like to learn more about how to use WordPress, contact me and I’ll send you a few video tutorials that I created for users of this site.