I am so excited that there are so many people interested in blogging and working from home! If you read my post 2 Side Jobs That Make Me $3,000 Per Month as a Stay At Home Momyou can see exactly how and just how much I’m making working from home. Blogging has taken my family and I places I would have never imagined. We recently had our very first sponsored blog trips, first with Royal Caribbean, you can see our recap post here and now with Disney, which you can read about here.

I have lots of info that I want to share. Part of being a blogger is sharing your knowledge and things you have learned with others and I am so excited to talk more about this here.

Today I am going to help you get started on the very first thing that you need before you can make money from home. You NEED a website. In fact, I have several.

Everyone has websites these days and a blog is the BEST way to start. Why? Because it’s simple, just start writing about topics that your target audience would be interested in and people will find you!

You can use your blog as a standalone way to make money OR you can even use your blog to help support another business, maybe you already create products or want to in the future. Blogging is the best way to build a community that trusts you and are interested in what you have to say.

Regardless of where your business takes you, working from home for your online business means that you have to create a presence online on your blog AND on social media. So why not start now?

LET’S GET STARTED

I am going to tell you how I started blogging. I didn’t know what I was going to blog about. I didn’t know what a hosting account was, I didn’t know exactly who I was writing for, I just knew that I wanted my own space on the web and I knew that it would eventually evolve. So don’t wait to start. You don’t have to have all your ducks in a row 🙂 or have all your questions answered to get started. In 5 years my blog name has changed, my blog topic has evolved and I went from making $0 a month to now over $5,000 a month just from a little idea I had years ago. So my advice to you is – Don’t Wait! Just Start! You will figure it out as you go along. 🙂

I RECOMMEND STARTING WITH A WORDPRESS PLATFORM AND BLUEHOSTAS THE HOSTING COMPANY.

Related: How I Make Money Blogging and get to Stay At Home with the Kids

I have used WordPress since I started building websites many moons ago. WordPress is awesome because the options to customize are endless. There are endless amounts of templates, both free and premium available to choose from. There are thousands of free plugins that will allow you to customize your site easily without any technical knowledge.

The WordPress platform itself is free, but in order to use WordPress online you will need to establish a hosting account through a hosting company. I recommend Bluehostsince it’s reliable and inexpensive. Hosting basically means that you are paying a company to store all of your files on their server. Your blog files have to be kept somewhere!

A WordPress website with a custom domain will cost you about $60 – $100 per year depending on how many years you purchase up front.

There are free options out there like Blogger and Squarespace. However, if you are truly serious about monetizing your site or making money from home then do not go with Blogger or Squarespace. There are limitations for both and what may happen is that you will end of switching to WordPress, in the long run, anyway which could wind up being costly and complicated.

Now let’s get into the details and I will walk you through step by step in getting your first WordPress blog setup.