Have you been feeling called to start a blog… but you’re not sure where to begin? Maybe you feel like you have something to say. A story to tell. A gift to use. But you don’t know what to do with it — I didn’t either. Here’s how blogging found me — and exactly how I would start today if I had to begin from zero.
If you’re feeling called to start a blog but don’t know where to begin, this blog post + video will show you exactly how to start a blog from scratch step by step.
In this blogging for beginners guide, I’m sharing how I got started blogging, what I would do differently today, and the exact steps I’d take if I had to start over as a brand new blogger.
I’ve built multiple blogs across different niches — personal branding, RVing, Travel, Finance, ReSelling, Entrepreneurship, Business, Faith, Sobriety, my Dogs, Cat plus more — and it all started with one simple decision to begin…
In this, we cover:
- How to start a blog as a beginner
- Personal blog vs niche blog / business blog
- Securing your blog domain name and social handles
- What pages your blog website actually needs
- Why your blog is a digital asset
- Why you don’t need an LLC before you start a blog
If you’ve been:
- Overthinking your blog niche
- Waiting for the “perfect” time get started blogging
- Afraid to start a blog from zero
- Or stuck in blog planning mode
Feeling Called to Start A Blog? THIS IS YOUR SIGN TO START YOUR BLOG!
BUT BEFORE You Get Started Blogging… Here’s How I’d Start a Blog Today (If I Had to Begin From Zero) What I’d Do First… Watch This!
This video is the introduction to my 7-Day Blogging Challenge, part of my My FREE Blogging Course where we’ll walk step-by-step through launching your blog the right way.
👍 Like, subscribe @BornToBlogClub on YouTube and tap the bell, so you don’t miss the next video.
🎬 Section / Chapters:
– If You Feel Called to Blog, This Is For You
– Who I Am & How Blogging Found Me
– What Blogging Actually Is (And Isn’t)
– Personal Blog vs Niche Blog
– If I Had to Start From Scratch Today
– Don’t Overcomplicate It (Mindset Shift)
– Why Your Blog Is a Digital Asset
– Securing Your Name, Domain & Social Handles
– Why I Created the 7-Day Blogging Challenge
Here’s the Video Transcript:
If You Feel Called to Blog, Pay Attention to That
If you’re feeling called to blog or write, or that you have some kind of gift, I wanted to make this blog post + video for you and let you know that I can relate to you.
I know that my gift from God is to write and to teach. I wasn’t really sure what to do with those things until I discovered blogging.
If we haven’t officially met, I’m Blogging Brandi.
I have dabbled in all kinds of little business ventures and ideas, but when it’s all said and done, it all comes back to blogging.
What Blogging Really Means (It’s Not Just Social Media)
This section includes:
- Blogging vs social media
- Website vs platform
- Owning your space
- “This is my house”
- Cross referencing blogs
- SEO & algorithms
If you’re not really sure what blogging is, there’s different ways to blog. Let me say that. Blogging could be, you’re just on social media and you’re talking about your life or sharing a little something.
Blogging can be so many different things, but when I’m talking about blogging, I’m talking about like having your own website, your own blog, and it could be your personal one, like I have BloggingBrandi.com, and then you could have a business one or a niche one.
I originally started out with one blog, BloggingBrandi.com, and I don’t wanna say that I didn’t have a niche, I probably had multiple niches, and I went so niche that then I was like, this is not all supposed to go in one place!
How I Went From 9–5 to Multiple Blogs
This section should include:
- Bank of America Merrill Lynch
- Finance background
- Hair school
- Tragedy & healing
- Starting a business before blogging
- All the blog names
All My Niche Blogs
If you’ve ever thought about blogging? I have a dozen blogs NOT just my personal blog — I also have multiple niche blogs.
Some of them are obviously more successful or further along than others, since some are more like hobby blogs, and I haven’t put as much time and energy into them.
Personal Blog
But it all started with Blogging Brandi and then I started talking about my RV life, but I was talking about my RV life on Blogging Brandi.
RV Lifestyle & Travel Blogs
I figured out not everybody on Blogging Brandi cared about my RV life. And so then I created RVersity, my RV Lifestyle Blog, and eventually Maps and Miles as my travel blog. It trickled into more blogs than that.
Dog + Cat Blogs
So then I started out with Birdies Doghouse, that’s my dogs. And then we have a cat. So Johnny has his own Blog Cattitude Chaos.
Money & Finance Blog
MY STORY: Bank of America Merrill Lynch / Finance background + Hair school
And then if you don’t know, before I ever started blogging or got into this and figured out what my gifts were, I was working a nine to five job over at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, just giving my life away to everyone else. And I knew it wasn’t my story. I called my Sara Blakely moment, but I knew it wasn’t for me.
I went to college and did the whole thing because my parents wanted me to do that. Really just my dad. My mom’s always like, do whatever you want, I support you. And so she’s like the best. But my dad is like nine to five system. Do everything by the book.
Even if you’re in the system and you’re thinking, I wish I could get out, I wish that I discovered blogging back when I was in my finance job, obviously, that has never left me. My dad is a big money guru and he does stocks and trading,
and so I have a background in not only cutting hair before I ever did any of this, I went back to school for my finance degree.
So I have accounting and finance and investing and financial planning and whatnot.
So Fancy Financials is my money blog,
Faith-Based Religious Blog
Redirected Energy is my religious and faith-based blog where I share things like daily devotionals and all my Bible besties.
Digital Nomad + Make Money RVing Blog
And then I have RVing for Bosses is like a spinoff of RVersity. It is my Digital Nomad and money blog.
Business & Branding Blog
BLABoss, it’s Brand Like A Boss. It’s my business and branding blog. I wrote a book all about Business and branding. And then I created a website and a blog to go along with the book that has been there for a long time.
Sobriety Blog
And then I also have one called The Drops of B, which is my sober living blog, and I talk all about sobriety and whatnot.
Reselling Blog
I have Ambay Exchange, which is my reselling blog, and I talk all about reselling and flipping items and making money with things you already have around the house, or going to thrift stores and auctions and things like that. I actually started flipping and reselling items to get out of my nine to five job.
Starting a business before blogging
A lot of people think that you just start this wonderful blog and make all this money.
BUT I never started blogging or anything until after I had started a business.
I started a business and then became a blogger when I went through a life-changing personal tragedy. I started blogging to heal.
How I Got My Name “Blogging Brandi”
If you don’t know how I got my name, actually got my name because somebody was making fun of me. My boyfriend at the time, who’s still my boyfriend now, 10 years later. He started making fun of me and he said… oh, whatcha gonna be Blogging Brandi? Blogging Brandi? Ha, Ha, Ha! — I was like, that’s an interesting name. And so I looked it up, nobody was using it, and I ended up getting the URL and the social media handles and using Blogging Brandi. That’s how I became Blogging Brandi.
Rebranding = myself + blog + business
And actually, before I became Blogging Brandi, I was Bloggin, B-L-O-G-G-I-N, Brandi, and then I added a G to the end of my name. So if you ever wanna talk about rebranding, I’ve done it.
I actually have a whole series on my website talking about starting over right now and how I literally deleted myself from the internet and added myself back.
So if you ever think, I don’t know how to do this, I’m gonna have to start from zero and I have no followers and nothing been there, done that more than you know.
Even just changing your name, I did a lot of things wrong during that process, during my rebranding process, things that I would tell you not to do, which is a whole other video.
So if you have questions about that, maybe you’re like, oh, Brandi, I already have a blog. Maybe we need to look at your blog and see why you’re stuck, why you’re not moving, why you’re not inspired, or where you’re at. Obviously, you’re here for a reason. We’re gonna talk about that.
Blogging Blog
And so that leads me to Born to Blog Club. That is my blogging blog where I talk all about blogging and where you’re finding me right now.
I BLOG about my life
If you look at all these and you see what I’m doing or what I’ve done with my life, my life is a blog.
So I blog about my life through healing and all the things that I’ve gone through. This is where I’ve put it all.
And so it used to all be on one blog Blogging Brandi, and then I was just sitting there one day and God was like, girl, they don’t, they don’t go in one place.
Why I Created Multiple Niche Blogs
The reason I say this is I started out with one blog putting EVERYTHING on my personal blog, and then I niched down into multiple blogs.
Because I figured out things like if I wanted to start a YouTube channel or if I wanted to start a blogging website, it’s a lot easier to get traction when you’re talking about one subject (i.e. only RV life, only dogs, or only cats Versus if you’re talking all in one place about “oh, let me tell you about my RV Life. Oh, let me tell you about my cats. Oh, let me tell you about reselling. Oh, let me tell you about something else random that I have going on in my life” — Not everybody cares. Maybe your friends and family.
On that note, if I was starting a blog over again today, and even most of my blogs, my friends and family don’t even know about ’em. I actually don’t ever announce it when I do these things.
I really wanted to come up with a blogging challenge, a series something that I could do to inspire other people. Because I feel like that’s where people get stuck. It’s like, oh, I wanna start a blog and I have ideas, and I have a name picked out, or I have all these things, but I don’t know what to do with ’em.
I can give you checklists and I can give you everything that I can think to give you all the tools and resources. But you are the one that has to take action.
I’ve even built blogs for people, websites, social media stores, handed them a business, a blog, everything in a box, where they could literally just make money. And don’t get me wrong, they pay me, thousands of thousands of dollars for this.
But what if they don’t do anything with it? It angers me, honestly, because then I’m like, well, they didn’t do anything with it. I wanna tell people about these things. And then they don’t even do anything with it.
And sometimes it’s like, okay, if I could just give you the tools and you would take action, your life would change. You could blog for whatever reason.
Don’t Put the Cart Before the Horse
This section includes:
- LLC anxiety
- Legal structure overthinking
- Creating problems before income
- Perfectionism paralysis
I really just wanted this to be a talk. And me giving you a little bit of inspo about getting started blogging, mindset, motivation. Don’t hold back. Don’t think, oh, what if, what should I start my blog about? Or do I need my LLCs and business licenses and all these things?
Don’t put the cart before the horse. Don’t create problems before you start the blog and the business and have money coming in to have a problem to begin with.
You can do a lot of things under your own name before you branch off into a business, and a blog is not necessarily a business yet, although that should be your goal to treat your blog like a business.
Your Blog Is a Digital Asset
This includes:
- Blog as house
- Ownership
- Asset thinking
- Automation
- Email list
- Long-term growth
Your blog is an asset — It’s a digital asset that you have online. And when I think of a blog, I think of this as my house. This is my home. This is my place for people to come visit, roam, and learn more about me or whatever it is that I’m blogging about.
On RVersity, I only talk about my RV life. I do talk about like, oh, we have the dogs and cat with us, and things like that. But I don’t share about reselling on there or my non-alcoholic blog.
Now I might mention these, like cross mention them from place to place, but I’ve just learned that for Google and SEO and YouTube and even social media and algorithms and your audience, they might commingle in all these little places, but they eventually will want to go to those other spaces.
They might find me on Blogging Brandi, but then they’re like, oh, well, let me learn about her dogs, or let me learn about her RV life, or whatever else that they’re interested in.
The Blogging Ecosystem Strategy
This includes:
- Cross-referencing
- Blogging empire
- Courses unlocked onto blogs
- Printful + shop
- Applying lessons across blogs
- Learning once, using everywhere
I try to cross-reference all my blogs. I call that my online blogging ecosystem, so it’s like a blogging empire. I have all these websites and they connect together in some way, shape, or form. It’s hard to explain. I don’t even know how it happened other than the fact that I had everything in one place. I knew it needed to go to separate places, and then I had these online courses, all these different resources. But if I needed to update an online course and is locked behind these closed doors first, nobody can see it.
Google can’t see it. People can’t see it. And then if I wanna update it, it’s like I have to update this whole thing. My idea was let me just take pretty much all my content, all the things that are locked behind, closed doors, and put them on my blogs and treat the blog as like a course itself. And so that’s really what I’ve done with all my websites.
I also have a shop in store and items, and some of those things are not even mine, things that you can set up. So like if you wanted to go set up. And get mugs made and sell ’em on your website. You never even have to take possession of them. People could just go on your website and click and buy ’em. They don’t know that you never even touched the mug.
T-shirts, hats, any kinda little merch people can go online and buy these things. I do this on Printful. All you do is just take a file and upload it online and then put it on your website.
I can’t wait to show you how to do that. And I’ve shown you on the Born to Blog Club.
If I Had to Start Over Today, Here’s What I’d Do First
- Secure domain name
- Grab social handles
- Set up website framework
- Create core pages
- Treat it like a business
I kind of wanted to make this video as a prelude, and I was gonna get all the little things that I would tell you to do to start your blog and website.
I even started making like a little list of them.
If you haven’t seen the series that I’m making, go below this video and check that link out. I’ve created a whole playlist of videos that go together. And so you watch the first one, it teaches how to do the first thing and the second thing and the third.
I just feel like if I don’t do it with you, you’re never gonna do it. And I just wanna show you that it’s possible.
Because I was like, Hey, if I sat down with you right now and you were like, Hey Brandi, what all do I need to get a website started, like right now, like a blog. If you were gonna tell me how to start a blog from start to finish step by step for beginners, how would you do it?
Set Up Website Framework
Well, first I would get a website and start setting that up, and you don’t have to have a name for the website. You could start setting up a website without a name. And you can name it later. And actually the way I do it, your name that you’re gonna put on, it wouldn’t even matter because you don’t connect it till after the website’s put together.
Secure Domain Name + Grab Social Handles
You can go buy a domain. At the same time. I always like to go get the same social media handles, and this has to do with branding.
Then you’re gonna need to think about what’s your name and your logo and your colors and your fonts, and your tagline, and all of these things can be added, updated, changed later on,
Create core pages
but then you’re gonna need pages on your website.
So you’re gonna need a homepage, an about page, a contact page, your blog, a shop,
Promotion
how are you gonna promote yourself, or what’s your other digital assets that you have online?
You’re gonna want the same social media handles as the name of your blog or something really similar. You’re wanting to keep that social media handle the same across all the platforms.
So Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Now it’s X, YouTube, Pinterest. LinkedIn, TikTok, whatever you decide to be on, and I’m not saying you have to be everywhere, but you’ll learn that I teach that you should at least try to secure as many of these social handles as you can because you don’t know that one day you might not wanna be on that platform and you don’t want someone else to have your name.
Then that comes in to doing research with the URL and the social media handles, and I do all of this in like one sitting, just so you know, I can do this in about an hour. When I’m saying secure these, I’m not talking about setting everything up either. So like maybe you go buy the URL and you get the social media handles and you grab the accounts, but you don’t go set up all the headers and add your bio and put anything on your profile really, other than your name.
You just secure the social media handle and your name so you have it to go back to later on.
Same thing like with your email list I’ve set up. Pretty much everything on automation. So if I send out a blog, it can go to social media and then it can go to my email list, and I never have to really do anything other than blog.
And so this is all automated, but it’s taken me a really, really long time to learn how to automate all this. I’m still perfecting it.
And one thing I love about all my niche blogs is when I learned one thing on one blog, I can go apply it to all my blogs.
Personal Blog vs Niche Blog: Which Should You Start?
This section includes:
- Do you need a niche?
- Personal name vs brand name
- Branching into multiple brands
- Faceless blog discussion
- Why face works better (but isn’t required)
So a lot of people ask me, should I start a personal blog or a business blog, or what should I do and what should my name be and what should I blog about and what niche should I be in?
You don’t necessarily need a niche. And I can’t tell you how many people I’ve worked with that go back after the fact when I try to tell them from the beginning to do it in their personal name and make that like their resume, their website. And then if you decide to do some type of business blog or niche blog later on, then branch into that.
Because as a person you can have all these different brands. So if you go to Blogging Brandi, I talk about all of my different blogs. And then you can branch out from there. If you just go to one of these niche blogs, then a lot of times you’ll find me as the author or on the website, you’ll be like, oh, who’s this chick?
And you’ll see I’m Blogging Brandi, and you can go find me. You know, cross reference. I can have the business blog separate from my personal blog, and I could have a business blog and nobody really ever even know who I am. I’ve done it before.
Faceless blogging (with a mask on)
Some of my clients say, oh, I wish I could just blog with a mask on.
And so nobody knows who I am. And you can totally do that. You can have a faceless blog, you can have a faceless business. It does work better if you have a face, but some people like that. I follow some bloggers that I don’t even know who they are. I don’t even know if the stuff they tell on me is true. It seems true ’cause I use it and it works, but I don’t know that when they say, oh, I make millions of dollars from my blog, or I have a million followers, or whatever, that, that’s true because I can’t see that they can show me all they want.
You know? The mystery of it is almost intriguing. For whatever reason, God told me to put my face on here, and so that’s what I do.
Why I Created the 7-Day Blogging Challenge
I just wanted to make this. Like I said, as a prelude, I dunno if you call it a postlude, to my blogging series and about getting started blogging, I blog out of a healing and necessity just because I didn’t know what to do with my gifts and as a creator.
I even call myself kind of an artist. I’m not an artist like painting paintings. I’m an artist when it comes to creativity and coming up with ideas.
Like if somebody said, come up with a name or come up with a blog, or give me ideas for this, I’ll give you a million ideas. And you’d be like, hold on, girl. Slow down just a minute. I can’t even write that fast. To the point where some people probably would be like, okay, I don’t want any more ideas from you.
Watch The Full 7 Day Get Started Challenge:
- Day 1 – What Blogging Really Is (& Why Most Bloggers Quit)
- Day 2 – What To Blog About (How To Choose A Profitable Blog Niche)
- Day 3 – How To Build Your Blog Website (WordPress Beginner Tutorial)
- Day 4 – How To Write Your First Blog Post
- Day 5 – How to SEO Your Blog Post
- Day 6 – How to Get Your First 100 Blog Readers
- Day 7 – How To Make Money Blogging
Final Thoughts
I’m excited about this. I’m a little bit nervous. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this. I don’t mean to ramble. I think I just wanted to get kind of warmed up before I made this series for showing you how to do this, as if we were sitting here and I was doing this step by step with you.
I want you to be able to copy what I’m doing and think about how to apply exactly what I’m doing to YOU: Your blog, your niche, whatever you’re creating.
Next Steps…
If we haven’t officially met, I’m Blogging Brandi. Welcome to the Born to Blog Club. Be sure to join the Born to Blog Club, so you won’t miss any updates and Follow @BornToBlogClub on social media.
Plus, watch the playlist that I mentioned and everything else.
If you don’t wanna miss the next video, be sure to like this video, subscribe to my channel, and tap that little bell icon so you’re notified each and every time I publish a new video.
I love you, and I’ll see you in the next one!
Join the 7-Day Blogging Challenge
If you’re feeling called to blog, don’t ignore it. Join the Born To Blog Club and start the 7-Day Blogging Challenge. I’ll walk you through it step by step. This is your sign.
#HowToStartABlog #BloggingForBeginners #StartABlog #BeginnerBlogger #BornToBlogClub
