How to Start a Blog - For Beginners

How to start a blog?

If you are looking for - how to start a blog?  you have landed at the right place. In this post we will go over the different considerations and decisions you have to make when you start a blog.

1. What are you reasons for blogging? You need to decide what you are blogging for. Is it for fun or profit? If you are chasing visitors to your blog, what do you want them to do when they arrive. Maybe you just like to write, that is fine, blogging can be absolutely therapeutic in some ways.

2. Decide what you are going to blog about? 

If you are very certain about the reason that you are blogging then that will help you understand and decide on what you are going to blog about. What you are going to blog about is also determined by the people that you are trying to talk to. You can blog about current news, viral videos or controversial topics. You can stick to a certain topic, eg car repairs, or how to get a six pack. By staying consistent on one topic you can gain credibility and be seen as an expert in your field. Product reviews are also a good thing to blog about.

3. Free blog or paid blog

Free blogs are all over the web, simply do a web search and you can find some. Some examples are blogger.com, WordPress.com, blog.com and Weebly.com. Now with most things in life freedom is not free. Your site will not be your own, the domain will be something like bradsblog.wordpress.com so you will have the same domain name as many other people. If you are looking to make money most of the free services don't allow you to advertise on their sites. Free blogging services aren't the best option but are an easy free way to dip your feet in the water.

Paid blogs -

For a paid blog you have to pay for the domain and the hosting. You will then own the blog yourself and therefore have more control over the blog when you begin to try and make money. A lot of the free blogs don't allow you to advertise on it. You can use the free program WordPress.org program to put on your blog, which will give you themes and utilities to help make your blog.

Cheap options is brainhost.com, HostGator.com, GoDaddy.com all offer hosting solutions. For example GoDaddy.com hosting starts at $2.99/month. So you are looking at about $36 dollars a year for hosting. Take a look at all the options and see what special deals you can get. Most of these hosting provides will provide you with instructions on how to use their easy 1 click installation of WordPress on your new hosted domain.

4. Domain names

Now you will have to register a domain name (this is the actual name of your website/blog). Domains start at about $7 but can go up into the thousands. You can use a registration services at GoDaddy.com or maddogdomains.com to register you domain name.. The more popular domain names usually cost more. Eg obviously you would have no chance buying the domain like nba.com but you could buy mynameisjohnsmithfromasia.com would be pretty cheap, however weird. A nice simple option when starting is to go for names like firstnamemiddlename.com etc something like that.

You can always change the domain name later or have more than one all linking to the same actual webpage. For example you might own 3 domain names but have it so if you type in any of them they all go to the same website. Once your website is up and running we have answered the question how to start a blog? However this is simply the start of your journey into blogging! The next things you have to focus on are traffic and content.

5. Traffic

When you put something on your blog you want people to read it or see it. This is where the process of traffic comes into view. If you want your blog to achieve success you need to learn to get traffic to it. You can find on the internet many different options here depending on your expertise and budget.  traffic can basically be broken down into free and paid traffic.

Free traffic which includes

• Search engine traffic,

• Social media traffic (Facebook, twitter etc),

• Forum posts,

• Article marketing.

Paid traffic includes

• PPC (paid per click) advertising, for example the little ads you see at the top of every Google search,

• Single adverts which is where you pay someone with a large list of email subscribers to email them and tell them about your blog,

• Banner advertising - you buy an advertisement space on a website for a set term eg 1 month 6.

Content

Once you have your site up and running you need to start posting relevant content in the form of photos, articles or videos. remember content is the king