Blogging Resources & Tools

Setting Up Your Blog / Niche Website

How to set up and start a WordPress website or blog on Bluehost using Cosmotown as the Domain Registrar!

  1. Select Domain Name
  2. Purchase Domain Name (Cosmotown)
  3. Select Website Hosting Service (Bluehost)
  4. Add Your Domain to Bluehost
  5. Install WordPress
  6. Install WordPress Theme (Blocksy)

1) Select a Domain Name

Before you can use a domain name – you need to make sure it is available.  Use this tool below to check for the availability of any domain name you might be interested in using.  For example – if you were interested in the domain www.ILoveLucy.com type in “ilovelucy” and click the “check availability” button to see if is available, or already taken (It is taken!) 

2) Purchase Your Domain Name

Once you find a domain name that you like AND determine it is available – I would highly recommend you purchase it through Cosmotown.com.   I initially got my domain name through Bluehost for free when I signed up with Bluehost for web hosting and then had to move it after the first year was up – since the renewal rate at Bluehost was significantly higher than it is at Cosmotown ($17.99 for Bluehost versus $8.29 for Cosmotown – with whois privacy included!).  I wish I had just purchased it FIRST at Cosmotown – and then signed up for web hosting at Bluehost.  I suggest that you do this right up front – even though it will take you slightly longer to get up and running.  You will save yourself more money in the long run and some frustration when you are coming up on your first year renewal!

Domain RegistrarFirst YearRenewal
BluehostFREE*$17.99
Cosmotown$5.99$8.29
*Subject to you NOT transferring it within the first year! For .com domain registration as of May 27th, 2021

Oh – and if you think that you will be able to get the free domain name – and just move it to Cosmotown after the first year – Bluehost will charge you a fee to recover their expense of offering it for free – so don’t waste your time! Here is their language regarding their “Free” Domain Policy:

Free Domain Policy

If your hosting plan comes with a free domain through Bluehost and you cancel within the first year, please note there is a non-refundable domain fee based on the regular cost of the domain, which can be found in your control panel, plus any applicable fees, for the domain name. The fee not only covers our own costs, but it ensures that, even if you’re dissatisfied with your experience at Bluehost, you won’t lose your domain name. Upon payment of the domain fee, you’ll be free to transfer it or simply point it elsewhere. Please note, however, that newly registered domains cannot be transferred to another registrar during the first 60 days of the registration period. If you elect to renew your domain name, you will retain ownership of the domain name until the end of its registration period.

Bluehost website May 27th 2021 – click on “Free Domain” on hosting / shared pricing-cards

If you are going to use Bluehost for your web hosting – (which I would strongly recommend that you do) you might as well take care of the one item that you will also need to set up @ Cosmotown while you are already logged in there. Go to the “Manage Domains” section and set the name servers to ns1.bluehost.com and ns2.bluehost.com. This directs web traffic for your domain that is held at Cosmotown to Bluehost – which is where your website will actually reside on their servers.

3) Select a Website Hosting Service

I use Bluehost for all of my websites and have been very satisfied with them!  They are one of the top hosting companies in 2021.  I have found Bluehost easy to work with and have been impressed with the quality of the technical support I have received every time I have reached out to them.  Click HERE to start the process!

Disclosure: I am an affiliate for Bluehost, and will receive a commission if you sign up through my referral link.  There is no additional cost to you, and you will get great pricing through using my link.

4) Add Your Domain to Bluehost

Since you purchased your domain name @ Cosmotown you will need to add it to Bluehost.  After you have logged into you Bluehost account simply click on “Domains” and  then “assign”.  Follow the steps indicated to complete the process.

5) Install WordPress

Bluehost makes it VERY easy to setup a WordPress blog or website!  WordPress is FREE – and Bluehost makes it pretty much a 1 click install procedure. 

6) Install a WordPress Theme

This is really easy too – and I will save you a lot of monkeying around.  I would choose Blocksy as your first theme.  It is free and very easy to customize.  I like the clean look and have been using it on all of my websites for a little over a year at this point.  I tried a lot of others and endured a LOT of frustration before finding Blocksy!

Blocksy being used for our Hobby3DPrinting website.

Best FREE WordPress Plugins For Your New Blog

  • Updraftplus – Free backup & restore plugin.  Allows you to back up & restore to your Google Drive – all for FREE!
  • Ads.txt Manager – This plugin allows AdsTxtManger.com to easily manage your ads.txt and integrate with your WordPress site.
  • Anything Popup – This is a simple plugin to display the entered content in to unblockable popup window. popup will open by clicking the text or image button.
  • Definitely Allow Mobile Zooming – This tiny plugin adds the viewport meta tag with zooming permission to give your users the ability to zoom in your website with mobile browsers.
  • Accordion Blocks – Gutenberg blocks for creating responsive accordion drop-downs. Very simple and available through the blocks menu!
  • Fonts Plugin – Easy way to access & use all the free Google fonts for your website. You can see all the Google fonts that are available HERE.
  • OneSignal – Bowser notifications sent to visitors that opt-in. 
  • Insert Headers & Footers.  Great for the beginner that doesn’t feel comfortable editing the code of your theme for Google tracking or AdSense.
  • Easy Forms for Mailchimp – Allows you to create sign up forms to build an email list @ Mailchimp and grow your blog readership.
  • Featured Images in RSS for Mailchimp & More – Include a featured image in your Mailchimp email notification to readers of your new blog post.
  • WP Fastest Cache (Or JetPack Boost)- to speed up your website.  All things being equal – a faster website will rank better on Google!
  • Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg – an assortment of blocks you can use to spice up your pages & posts. I especially like the “Tabs” block.
  • TablePress – For the creation of much more flexible and powerful tables. I like that the tables can be searched, sorted, & filtered.
AnswerThePublic keyword research tool.

Research Tools

Search Engines

Key Word Research

  • Alphabet Soup Method with Auto-Suggest! – (FREE) Choose one of the search engines. Type in your topic and then go right through the alphabet to see what comes up when you type that letter after your topic! For example: “3D printing” (and see what comes up), then “3D printing” (space) “a” (and see what comes up), then “3D printing” (space) “b” (And see what comes up)…. Interestingly enough, this is exactly what AnswerThePublic is doing. It actually scrapes this information from Google and presents it visually and saves you from all the typing.
  • Retail Sites Auto-Suggest Boxes (Search Bars): Alphabet soup method with Auto-Suggest again – but this time with websites like Amazon.com, & Etsy, as opposed to search engines. You will probably get at least some ideas that you would not by using the search engines alone!
  • AnswerThePublic: (FREE) I like this tool a lot because it is visual and gives you a lot of suggestions to consider. Kind of like a mind map! Gives you ides for long-tail keywords and blog post content / topic ideas.
  • Free Keyword Tool | WordStream – (FREE) – but somewhat awkward to use.  Good starting place!
  • Keywords Everywhere – (FREE) Access keyword difficulty. This is a plugin that you need to install in your browser. You can install it in Chrome & FireFox. Look at the MOZ DA (Domain Authority) score for the website you would be competing against. What you really want to find is keywords where the top results have domains that don’t have a particularly high MOZ DA score. Ideally you want to see the top 10 or so results with MOZ DA scores below something like 25 or 30. That would indicate that you would have more likelihood of successfully competing against such websites.
  • Bing Keyword Research Tool – Meh – not as much information as provided by the WordStream tool.
  • Keyword Sheeter – (FREE) Generate many ideas for long-tail keywords.
  • Ahrefs’ Free SEO Tools (FREE) Keyword difficulty checker, keyword generator, keyword rank checker & many more!
  • Keyword Tool – It will provide you some valuable information for free – but to get more extensive information – you will need to pay.
  • KeySearch
  • Keyword In
  • Ubersuggest
  • InstaKeywords
  • Google Trends – (FREE) Determine if search volume for a particular keyword is trending up or trending down.
  • SEO PowerSuite
  • Keyword Sheeter – (FREE) Great way to generate a lot of keywords quickly! Both regular keywords & long-tail keywords. No volume of keywords or keyword difficulty – just the keywords. For both the volume and the keyword difficulty – you will need to use other tools.
  • Google Keyword Planner – (FREE) You have to setup an account and start a campaign (that you should then immediately PAUSE). A bit of a pain – but worth it. Great tool that can help you find keywords, determine search volume, determine keyword difficulty and find out the keywords your competition is using. You can use this tool to determine the keywords a website is using AND/OR an individual page or post on that website!
  • Google Search Console
  • Keyword Tool Dominator
  • Soovle
  • Keyword Surfer (Chrome Extension)
  • apptweak
  • Keyworddit
  • Amazon / Etsy Auto Suggest – (FREE) Same process as doing the alphabet soup method on Google.

Social Sharing Research

Traffic Estimation & Analytical Tools

  • Similarweb.com – Free tools to get a decent ESTIMATE of traffic to a website. They do offer more features for a subscription.

Artwork, Images & Videos, etc

Looking for some artwork, images or videos to spice up your posts – this is where I would start if you are not able to use just your own media!  You want to make sure that all the artwork/clipart/media that you use is in the PUBLIC DOMAIN & free for unlimited commercial purposes!!!

ClipArt

  1. OpenClipArt – Free public domain clipart – free for unlimited commercial purposes.
  2. PublicDomainVectors.org – Free public domain vectors (scalable clipart) which is free for unlimited commercial use.

Photo & Videos (predominately)

  1. PixaBay.com – photos, illustrations, vector images, videos & music.  Copyright free & can be used for commercial purposes without attribution.  But NOT public domain (but close).  See the PixaBay license here.
  2. Pexels.com – photos & videos.
  3. Unsplash.com – photos.
  4. openverse – Images & Audio (All Openverse content is under a Creative Commons license or is in the public domain.)

Infographics

  1. Infogram.com – infographics to better present information in a visual manner!

Fonts

  1. Google Fonts
  2. Free Fonts Vault
  3. DaFont
  4. Indiana Jones Font – This is just a tool to generate an Indiana Jones style headline or title.  The title or headline is then saved as an image.  Not a downloadable font that can be installed.

Image Manipulation Tools

  • LunaPic – Powerful – but not very intuitive!
  • Resize Image – Straight forward and intuitive tool to do some basic manipulation of images.
  • Remove Background – Uses AI to identify the background to remove and replace with a transparent background.
  • Optimazilla – Image Compressor.  Compress your photos before loading them into WordPress!  I use this for nearly all my photos!

Tracking, Managing & Testing

Essential tools for tracking the growth of your websites!

  • Google Analytics – for tracking visitors, amount of time spent on page, most popular posts & pages.
  • GTmetrix – for testing the speed your website loads & get recommendations for improving load times.

Monetization

Here are some ways to generate some income with your blog or niche website.

Advertising Income

  • Google Adsense – Monetize your website with ads from Google.  There are no traffic requirements for Adsense – but it offers the lowest payout, as well.  You will probably start with this and then graduate to another (more lucrative) network/provider after your traffic gets to 3,000 – 10,000 views per month.
  • Ezoic – One of those more lucrative ad networks you could move to as your monthly traffic gets to the range of 3,000 – 10,000 views per month.
  • Mediavine – Another one of those more lucrative networks to move onto as your monthly traffic increases.

Affiliate Income

  • Amazon Associates – This can be a great program for a lot of people to start with! You don’t have to inventory any goods or be able to process any payments. All you have to do is refer people to the amazon website to buy products – and they take care of everything else!
    • You get paid a commission for each qualifying sale – which typically is around 2-4% – depending on the item.
    • Yes – you do have to apply – and be accepted into the program – so don’t rush into this right after you set up your website. Wait until you get a decent amount of content (10 – 20 posts) on the website and are seeing some traffic to the website (maybe about 1,000 views per month). The first time I applied I did get accepted – but I did not have enough qualifying sales (3) in the first 180 days to stay in the program.
    • Don’t use your own links to buy from Amazon – or your close family or friends. Amazon will be able to detect this and those sales will not qualify.
    • Sale must be made within 24 hours of clicking on your link for you to get credit for the sale.

Other Income

  • Merch by Amazon – Like the Amazon Associates program – this also requires an application & acceptance. Sometimes it may take several requests before you will be granted access to the program. This is a GREAT way to sell merchandise – with Amazon doing all the work for you – other than creating the designs! Amazon takes care of the printing, fulfilment, order processing & taking care of any returns.

Buying & Selling Websites & Online Businesses

  • Empire Flippers – Good reputation for doing some due diligence to make sure there are mostly quality sites & businesses listed in the marketplace.

Sincerely,