If you want to hit the road to blogging fortune and glory, your first stop should be learning how to start a lifestyle blog. With your interesting life and activities, a lifestyle blog is a great way to get top position and get more traffic.
A lifestyle blog has very visual content with a broad focus on a variety of topics, which is all gathered around the blogger and a particular hook. Your hook can be anything from beauty to the environment, but it should bring everything together to link content based on your interests, your life, and your worldview.
🤔 Decide your hook What is What about your life that will attract readers? What are you passionate about and what do you know? 📛 Think of a name that’s available as a domain What’s a catchy and memorable name for your blog? Can you get it as the domain name? 💻 Decide a host and install WordPress How can you choose a good host? Which platform is best to start a lifestyle blog? 🎨 Choose a theme to control the look of your site How much control do you need over your theme? What are the must-haves for any lifestyle blog? 🔌 Install plugins for additional functionality How can you get an SEO advantage? How to make it easy for readers to share posts? And how can you speed up your site when you have so many images? 💰 Monetize your blog How to make money with a lifestyle blog?
1. Decide on your hook
Before you can think about the technicalities of starting a lifestyle blog, you’ll need to decide what your lifestyle blog will cover. If your life is what separates the lifestyle blog from other blogs, then the hook is what helps separate it from a personal blog.
In terms of promotion, the hook has three valuable aspects. It will help you…
- Find an audience.
- Maintain your momentum and motivation to continue your lifestyle blog.
- Develop a strategy of content and editorial calendar.
We know that, in its most basic form, a lifestyle blog is about your daily activities and your life. But what is there in your life that will attract readers? And how do you find it? Start with two questions:
- What are your interests?
- What are your skills?
When you have a good list of your interests and skills, use it to think of 3-4 blog niches that you can cover (these can also form the basis for building your categories and content strategy). You will start to see a pattern emerge that will reveal your hook.
2. Get a suitable domain name for your lifestyle blog
One of the forgotten steps in starting a lifestyle blog is finding your domain name. With a good domain name, you’ll make it easier for people to remember your blog and share it with their friends.
Finding the perfect name can be challenging, but it’ll be much easier if you:
- Create a list of keywords, ideas, and keywords. Sit down and make a mind map, use a thesaurus, think of your nickname to create a list of keywords.
- Keep the name between 6 and 14 letters, not too long.
- Make it easy to pronounce and spell and avoid words with multiple spellings.
- No hyphens. No Numbers Both can be confusing and look like spam.
- Indicate the topic in the name instead of including a keyword.
- Make it unique and bookmarkable.
- Make it memorable and catchy.
Once you have a good list of words, I recommend using a domain name generator like Domain Wheel for two reasons:
- You can provide , creative suggestions based on your keyword that you can then use to further refine the name.
- It will provide you with suggestions that are available for purchase, as well as link you to hosting providers for you to can buy your domain name.
3. Decide on your platform and hosting
When you get this far in learning how to start a lifestyle blog, it’s important to carefully consider your platform and hosting options. There is no shortage of either and you can also find free blogging sites for your lifestyle blog.
However, if you plan to make money from your blog and want the flexibility to modify your blog according to If necessary, we recommend WordPress.
Other options, like Squarespace, can also give you an integrated hosting, domain, and editing experience, but at a slightly higher price and without the dedicated community.
You have two options with WordPress: the .com or .org approach. There are some subtle differences between the two, but mostly it comes down to .org being self-hosted and generally cheaper. Self-hosted WordPress also happens to be the best option for total freedom.
Luckily, it’s pretty easy to get started with self-hosted WordPress because most major hosting companies offer a simple one-click solution to installing WordPress.We recommend WordPress because it’s highly customizable and supported by the largest community of any major site builder.
A few quick tips for choosing the best host for your new WordPress site:
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➡️ For beginners, we recommend SiteGround because:
- They will install WordPress on your account automatically. No need to do it by hand.
- They will also sell you a domain name during setup. This means you can take care of everything at once, instead of buying a domain from one company and hosting from another.
4. Choose a theme
The theme of your WordPress site controls how it looks to visitors.
When you first thought about how to start a lifestyle blog, you might You may not have realized how long you need to find the design of your dreams. With 11,000 themes on ThemeForest alone, choosing the perfect WordPress theme can be time consuming. You can make it much easier with the following tips.
- Choose a photography theme, such as Benson, Hestia, or any theme that has image-friendly designs.
- Look on the blog page to see what types of layouts it offers and how easily you can switch between them.
- A list layout will deliver your posts in the order they were published.
- A grid Element-based layout will arrange content as blocks on the page and put more emphasis on images.
- Control over the number of columns helps you organize your content to highlight the featured image.
- You would also like the ability to place categories in different areas, such as below or above the title, to help you draw attention to them.
- A sticky menu can help your readers to navigate the page easily.
With all these considerations, I am going to recommend Hestia. It’s a good choice for a lifestyle blog because it gives you the freedom to switch between list and grid layouts.
It even gives you the ability to select the number of columns in the grid that will allow you to display images in different sizes . You can also see in these images that Hestia has an option to apply a masonry style to her blog page.
5. Non-Obvious Essential Plugins
WordPress plugins help you add new functionality to your lifestyle blog.
If you know anything about blogging, then you’ve heard that you need 100% Absolutely Yoast SEO as part of a good SEO toolkit. However, if you want to create a successful lifestyle blog, you will need to focus on social media to generate traffic. Social media sharing and word of mouth will help you build your audience as well as your targeted keywords.
For social media sharing, you should opt for Orbit Fox. Orbit Fox is our free plugin that gives you access to simple social sharing buttons on your posts.
Did I mention images yet? Images are one of the most important elements of your lifestyle blog. If you’re trying to highlight your lifestyle, you need to be able to show it off to your users.
When considering how to start a lifestyle blog, you should remember that images will weigh down your page. Image optimization is an essential consideration. For a total solution, use Optimole because it will give you the most options for image optimization.
In addition to that, it also makes sense to add some secondary plugins that will further enhance your options when it comes to integrating your site with platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Two ideas:
- 5 ways to integrate WordPress with Facebook
- 5 ways to integrate WordPress with Instagram
6. Monetize
The final and most exciting step in your journey of starting a lifestyle blog is, above all, turning it into cash. The good news is that there is more than one way to turn your blog into money. In fact, there are at least 17 great ways to make money with a lifestyle blog, but here are 4 of the best:
- Affiliate marketing is at the top of the list because your Lifestyle blogging is a natural way to promote products and services.
- Sponsored posts are a strong competitor when you have a large enough audience. You can create an advertising page and also sign up to networks like TapInfluence.
- Sell advertising space on your site. AdSense is easy to integrate into your site and requires little to no maintenance.
- Create your own merchandise and sell it with WooCommerce.
Conclusion
Once you find the lifestyle you are passionate about promoting, you can start sharing it with the world.
* This post contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links and then buy the product, we will receive a small fee. Don’t worry though, you’ll still pay the standard amount, so there’s no cost to you.
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