Maybe you’re a keen interior design hobbyist, maybe you run your own interior design business, or maybe you’ve discovered a new-found passion for revamping your own home’s interior. One way or another, you’re asking yourself the question ‘Should I start an interior design blog?’
Well, this post is going to help you to answer that question!
This page uses affiliate links – if you click on a link I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you; as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases – thank you!
I’m going to walk you through all the things you need to think about if you’re deciding whether or not to start an interior design blog, and I’m going to show you exactly what to do next if you decide to go ahead and start your very own interior design blog!
Plus we’ll look at some really great examples of interior design blogs for inspiration.
But before we get into the real nitty gritty, allow me to summarize the answer to your question, ‘Should I start an interior design blog?’!…
Yes, you should start an interior design blog if you want to do any of the following: promote your interior design business; showcase your interior design skills or a specific project; learn new skills while blogging about something you love; have fun, and quite possibly make some money at the same time!
So that’s my honest answer to the question ‘Should I start an interior design blog?’ – yes!
If you now want to skip straight to creating your own interior design blog rather than reading my advice below, you can go right to my beginner’s step by step guide on how to start a blog, or go straight over to bluehost to start your website with a 30 day money back guarantee.
Having created several blogs across a range of niches over the years, I would say that starting a blog is pretty much always a worthwhile endeavour! You can learn so much in the process, and if you do it well then your interior design blog can open up lots of opportunities for you, some of which you might not have even thought of.
And you’ll feel so proud of your gorgeous interior design blog once it’s up and running!
In fact there’s only one good reason I can think of not to start an interior design blog… and that’s if you really don’t like interior design!
Since you’re here reading this post, I’m guessing that doesn’t apply to you.
So now that you know my general answer to the question ‘Should I start an interior design blog?’, let’s get down to the details!…
(Psst!… my most important advice here regards the interior design ‘niche’, so be sure to read down to at least that point!)
Good reasons to start an interior design blog
There are many good reasons for starting your own interior design blog…
1 – You like the interior design niche
Maybe you’d just like to start a blog in general, and interior design is a topic that interests you. That’s great, because interior design can be a really good niche to get into.
By the way, if you’re not familiar with the concept of a ‘niche’, it basically just refers to the topic that you choose for your blog.
Some niches are better than others if you’re interested in getting lots of visitors to your site. I’ve written a whole post to help you choose the best blogging niche for you – but since you’re here on this post, I’m going to assume that you’ve settled on interior design!
Having said that, we’ll come back to this topic in a little more depth when we go over some essential good advice for your new interior design blog in a little while.
2 – You want to promote your interior design business
If you’re running your own interior design business, or thinking of starting out, your potential customers will expect you to have a website.
You can go ahead and set up a website extremely easily and cheaply on bluehost, but I highly recommend including an interior design blog as part of that website (by the way, all of the information here is the same whether you’re setting up a blog or a more traditional website – the main difference is usually just that a traditional website has a static front page, rather than a blogroll).
That’s because content marketing (which essentially just means marketing yourself through your blog posts) can be a really effective tool to help grow your business, and your blog posts also offer the perfect way to keep your business’ social media accounts active and interesting.
3 – You want to showcase your skills or a project, as a hobby
Maybe you want to start your own interior design blog just for fun and to share your ideas and projects with your family or a wider audience.
If that’s the case, just go for it!
You literally can’t go wrong if you just want to do this for fun!
4 – You want to make some money!
In addition to all of these reasons, you may well want to make some money by starting an interior design blog!
And you can absolutely do that if you go about things the right way (and I’m going to tell you exactly how to do that in a moment).
Interior design lends itself really well to affiliate marketing – where you feature a product on your blog, then get paid a commission if a customer clicks on the link and goes on to buy the product.
I’ll go into this in more detail soon too, so don’t stress about it for now.
You can also run ads on your site – if your blog ends up getting lots of visitors, which is totally feasible when you go about things the right way, then you’ll profit from the ads. Lots of website visitors can also lead to opportunities for sponsored products, where companies pay you to advertise on your site.
There are plenty more reasons why you might be asking yourself the question ‘Should I start an interior design blog?’, but this list includes most of the main ones.
Whatever your reasons, you should know that starting an interior design blog can be easy and fun! Take it from someone who has started multiple successful blogs without any prior knowledge of how to make a website, or do anything ‘techie’ for that matter!
How to start an interior design blog from scratch
So hopefully by now you’ve moved on from the question ‘Should I start an interior design blog?’ and are now asking ‘How do I start an interior design blog?’…
Well don’t panic, it’s actually pretty easy!
I’ve written a full step by step guide for you along with pictures in this post, but let’s just go over the basic process before I show you some lovely examples of stunning interior design blogs.
Here’s the essential process to follow to start your interior design blog. If you follow these steps you’ll be up and running in no time, with a gorgeous and effective blog!
And remember that if you need more help you can just hop over to my full step by step guide here!
Essential steps to start your interior design blog
These are the essential steps I’m going to take you through to set up your interior design blog:
- Set up hosting
- Choose your interior design ‘niche’ (or more accurately, sub-niche)
- Get your domain name
- Set up WordPress
- Get a theme
- Start to write your interior design blog
- Sign up for affiliate schemes
This page uses affiliate links – if you click on a link I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you; as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases – thank you!
Step 1: Set up web hosting for your interior design blog
A web hosting service enables you to put your website on the internet – you can’t have a website on the internet without some kind of web hosting.
I recommend going to bluehost.com for your web hosting account – it’s very low cost, reliable, easy to set up, and they have great customer service. They also do a 30 day money back guarantee, so it’s risk-free.
I encourage you to go for the lowest priced option – it does everything you need and only costs about the same as one latte a month!
If you go over to bluehost now, you can just follow through the setup process extremely easily – but if you want some extra help, including screenshots, remember my in-depth step by step guide is there for you at any point.
Assuming you go straight over to bluehost, just go ahead and fill out all the details like your email address, password setup etc.
Two important points to note – at some point during the bluehost setup process you’ll be asked if you want to choose a domain name now or later, and to select a ‘theme’ (like a template that determines how your site looks) for your blog.
In each case, it doesn’t matter whether you do it now or later. However if you do want to go ahead and pick your domain name at the start of the setup process rather than later on, be sure to read my advice below first!
You can change your mind on the theme, but changing your domain name can be tricky.
Step 2: Choose your interior design ‘sub-niche’
Your ‘niche’ is simply the subject that your blog is based on.
So here, we already know that your blog is going to be in the interior design niche – one less thing to think about!
But wait!…
While you can keep your blog general and post about everything to do with interior design, I encourage you to consider ‘niching down’.
That’s because when your niche is broad, like interior design, you can often find that the competition is very high, and you may struggle to attract potential visitors to your site.
However, by making your niche more narrow, you reduce the competition.
Allow me to demonstrate with an easy everyday example, then an interior design based example!…
Imagine you want to blog about news and current affairs. So you create a news website and post a daily blog about the top stories of the day across the globe.
Your blog might be fascinating to read, amazingly helpful, and beautiful to look at… but is anyone ever going to find it?
It’s very very unlikely that your new blog is going to pop up on page one of a google search, above all the established news giants like CNN and BBC!
However, if you niched down to a small local area and just covered the news in that area, you would find much less competition there. Consequently, it would be more likely that potential visitors could come across your blog when they run a search on google, and you then end up with plenty of website views.
There’s a caveat to this though! While you will find less competition the more you niche down, you also need to pick a subject that enough people are interested in who might visit your site.
To go back to the news example, I could create a news site about my city and stand a good chance of getting a fair number of views. But if I choose to create a news website for my village then I know that there are only ever going to be 1000 or so people who would be interested in that news, and only a very small percentage of those will end up on my blog.
So it’s a balancing act – niche down, but don’t niche down too much!
An interior design example of niching down could be to niche down from general interior design to focusing mainly on interior design for bedrooms. Or even going further and concentrating on children’s bedrooms – you get the idea.
An exception to this concept would be if you’re running a blog alongside your interior design business and your main goal is to keep your social media accounts active and provide something interesting for your customers to read. In that case you might not be concerned about ranking high in google searches.
Or you might already have thousands of social media subscribers – in which case maybe you’re going to concentrate on getting your blog views through that channel rather than google searches (though I would suggest targeting both for maximum impact).
And similarly if you’re just doing this a hobby – then you don’t necessarily have to think about any of this!
If you don’t know what to niche down to then don’t worry at all – you can start general and see how things evolve as your blog grows.
Step 3: Choose your domain name
Now that you know whether you’re targeting a sub-niche, or blogging about interior design in general, you can move on to choosing your domain name (which just means the name of your blog/website).
This bit is fun!
And it’s worth taking a bit of time over as you really want to get this right.
To actually select your domain name you’ll need to go back to your main bluehost account and navigate to ‘domains’ – unless of course you’re doing this as part of your initial set up process. In either case you’ll find the steps are easy to follow.
Now you can just start searching for domains you like the sound of!
If you’re doing this with a different web host, the process is likely to be very similar.
Some general advice when selecting your interior design blog name…
1 – I always prefer to go for a .com address as they tend to be more memorable. The exception would be if you’re setting up a business blog/website – then you might prefer to choose a domain extension specific to your county, like co.uk for example.
2 – Check online for websites or businesses with the same or similar names, and in particular make sure you’re not using a name that’s trademarked. You might also want to check across social media platforms to see if you could create accounts under the same name as your blog, or if they’re already taken
3 – Choose something memorable, which also usually means something relatively short.
Step 4: Configure WordPress
If you’ve chosen bluehost for your web hosting, then WordPress will have been automatically installed for you.
With some hosts you will have to go through a few extra steps to install it before you can proceed to configuring the setting, but this should be made clear from your web host’s main dashboard page.
Before we move on, let’s just be clear on what WordPress actually is!
WordPress is the content management system that most people use to write and format their blogs and websites. It’s widely regarded as the most powerful and reliable content management system you can use, and it’s what bluehost will automatically install on your site.
So now you need to go to your WordPress dashboard (which will look something like this…)
and follow through a few steps to set it up properly. Remember that you can click over to my step by step guide if you need some extra guidance, explanation and screen shots!
This bit is boring, but you do have to do it. Don’t worry though, it’s also pretty quick and easy…
1 – Delete unnecessary plugins
A plugin is like a bit of add-on software that you can put on your WordPress site to help you do more advanced things or add new features.
For example, you can get plugins to add image galleries to your site, or to send out promotional emails to your customers, or to block spammy comments from your blog posts.
There are thousands of WordPress plugins available, both for free and premium versions.
Usually there will be some plugins automatically installed on your blog, and it’s usually best to delete them and start with a clean slate (though you don’t have to). However if there are any plugins specific to your web host (ie that have your web hosts name on them), leave them installed.
To delete plugins, just go to ‘Plugins’ on your WordPress dashboard, then ‘Installed Plugins’, then tick any plugins on the list apart from your host specific ones (like a bluehost plugin), deactivate them, then delete them.
2 – Trash the default WordPress post and page
Your site will probably have an example WordPress post and an example WordPress page installed. You’ll need to delete them.
First go to ‘Posts’ in the left menu on your WordPress dashboard.
See if there’s an example post there (often entitled ‘Hello World’), click on trash and it’ll disappear.
Then go to ‘Pages’ on the left hand menu and do the same!
3 – Complete your profile
Go to ‘Users’ on that main left hand menu in WordPress. Choose ‘Your Profile’.
Fill out your details and ‘nickname’, which is how your name will appear when you reply to reader comments on your blog.
Then click ‘Update Profile’ to save your new settings.
4 – Set ‘General Settings‘
Now go to ‘Settings’ on the main left hand menu, and choose ‘General’.
Fill out your blog title, tagline if you want one, and change your email address and time zone if you need to.
Leave the ‘WordPress Address’ and ‘Site Address’ fields alone.
Click to save your changes!
5 – Set Permalinks options
Back on that left hand menu, choose ‘Settings’ then ‘Permalinks’.
All you need to do here is make sure that the ‘Post Name’ option is selected. If it is just move on from this step, if not then change it and save changes.
The permalink setting determines the url of your blog posts and pages, and this option gives you the neatest and most professional looking urls.
Now we’re all done with this rather boring step of WordPress configuration!
Step 5: Choose a theme for your interior design blog!
This is fun!
Now you get to choose what your blog (or website) is going to look like!
You may have already gone through this step during your bluehost setup, but even if you did I recommend reading through this bit in case you want to make some changes!
I always love this step because once I’ve chosen my theme I can start to see my blog coming to life and starting to look awesome.
There are essentially two types of theme you can choose for your blog – a free theme or a premium theme. And within each category there are thousands of different themes to choose from.
You can think of your theme as being like a template that the contents of your website fits into – there are lots of different templates resulting in lots of different styles of blogs and websites.
Bluehost, and most other web hosts, offer tons of great themes to choose from. If your budget is low then I encourage you to stick with a free theme as there are lots of lovely ones – you can always upgrade to a premium theme further down the line if you want to.
Personally though, I choose to invest a small amount of money in a premium theme for all of my sites, because I love the way they look and find the ones I’ve used to be very adaptable and user-friendly.
If you’re interested, I tend to go with Pipdig themes, some of which look like this…
To actually choose and instal your chosen theme, follow the steps in this video from bluehost:
Step 6: Start blogging!
Yay, you finally get to start writing your interior design blog!!
Two bits of advice here before you get going:
1 – Don’t worry too much about your writing style or how good you are! Just start writing, you’ll develop your skills as you go along – for now just get started.
2 – Always write with your reader in mind. Try to be helpful and informative – you want to aim for your blog post to be the most helpful blog post out there on the subject you’re writing about! (That’s what I’m doing right now – I want to make this the most helpful blog post available to help you decide whether you should start an interior design blog!)
With this in mind, think about the angle you take with your posts. For example, think about which of these posts will be more helpful to your readers, and more attractive to click on from a google search: ‘How I decorated my small bedroom’ or ‘5 Amazing ways to decorate your small bedroom’.
Well, probably the second one – because it’s aimed at helping the reader, rather than just telling them about something you did.
To start writing your first post, go to ‘Posts’ and ‘Add New’ on the main left hand menu on the WordPress dashboard.
And to start writing your first page (like your ‘About’ page), go to ‘Pages’ and ‘Add New’ – told you this was easy once you get going!
To help you out with writing your posts and pages in WordPress, I created this post – it gives you a really helpful step by step process, I recommend checking it out!
And you might like to stop by this post too, which will help you to find some lovely free stock photos to use in your new posts and pages.
Step 7: Sign up for affiliate schemes
An affiliate scheme is one where a company pays you, the affiliate, a commission to send customers to them.
There are tons of different affiliate schemes available, and the different ways you can make money through them is for another blog post.
However what I’d suggest doing right from the beginning is signing up to be an Amazon Associate (which is their term for affiliates).
As an Amazon Associate, you will include links to Amazon products in your blog posts, and if your readers click on your links and then make a purchase on Amazon, you can make a commission (which is usually very small), at no extra cost to the customer.
So for example, you might write an interior design post all about wallpaper, and include links to some wallpapers you love on Amazon.
The scheme is simple to use and really helps you to start getting to grips with affiliate marketing. And of course you can make some money through it, but don’t expect to make lots immediately!
And on that point, try to make sure you don’t frame your writing around making money, particularly at the beginning of your blogging adventure.
Always try to be helpful first, and see any income you can make as a bonus.
Otherwise you really risk your writing being inauthentic, which only damages your blog and your reputation in the long run.
You can find out more about the Amazon Associates scheme and sign up here.
And now that you’ve finished that step, guess what???… YOU’VE DONE IT!
You’ve just made your very own awesome interior design blog – congratulations!!
This is a great achievement and the start of an amazing blogging adventure!
I hope that you’ve found this post useful and that it has helped you to answer the question ‘Should I start an interior design blog?’
I wish you lots of luck as you continue to create your interior design blog, and I hope that you enjoy the world of blogging as much as I do!
Ready to get started on bluehost with a 30 day money back guarantee?…
Lovely interior design blogs for inspiration
I haven’t forgotten that I promised to find some examples of lovely interior design blogs to help inspire you in creating your own!
So before you go, check out this beautiful selection of gorgeous and helpful interior design blog… maybe your own will be featured on a list like this before too long!!
Dream of Home
I love the cute yet practical layout of this interior design blog, which has a great mix of practical ‘how to’s’ and inspirational posts.
Dear Designer’s Blog
Dear Designer’s Blog is a chic and stylish interior design blog, that’s updated regularly with inspiring content.
CSW (Culture South West)
CSW has lots of helpful ‘how to’ articles, along with inspiring photography and a clean layout. The ads can sometimes get in the way a little bit, which is something to bear in mind if you end up putting ads on your own interior design blog.
Eye Swoon
I love the name! Plus the bright stylish layout and the lovely photography that accompanies the helpful articles.
Chris Loves Julia
A lovely blog which is especially worth checking out if you’re thinking of basing your interior design blog around projects you undertake yourself.
Tidy Life
A site packed full of helpful how-to’s and handy interior design tips, with an easy to navigate layout.
Ready to get started on bluehost with a 30 day money back guarantee?…
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