How to start a blog for FREE
Fast forward to now, I am starting this new blog to teach people how I do it –Blogging with Wisdom. No need to get overwhelmed, work 24hrs a day or be frustrated that you are making no progress. Let me show you how to blog for years to come.
Should you start a hobby blog or a professional one?
The start up cost isn’t much but then, the next year when you have to renew your site, it drastically increases. If you haven’t made any money off your blog that year then you will be paying out of your pocket. This will continue until you actually start making money or quit.
What you need to start a blog:
- A hosting
- A domain
What kind of blog do you want – free or 100% self owned?
Free platform:
Self hosted:
Difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org
I should mention here about the most common confusion among bloggers – WordPress.com or WordPress.org?
WordPress.Com is a FREE site. They will host your blog for free but your domain will be yourname.wordpress.com. Read more about WordPress.Com below.
WordPress.Org is a CMS (Content Management Software). It is for self-hosted websites. You have to buy a domain and a hosting and then download wordpress.org software on it and then you can start blogging. It will be a 100% paid site.
- Search engine optimized. Blogger is owned by google. That means blogger blogs are favored by google in search rankings. If you want to be found on google, choose blogger. I blogged on blogger till 2013. When I moved my blog to self hosted, I was surprised that how my very little SEO knowledge was enough to help me rank! The posts that I had written on a blogspot blog were perfectly SEOd even without the hassle of plugins. Blogger made it so easy for me.
- Easier to monetize. You can earn off it. Blogger lets you place ads. In fact they support you by recommending that you place Adsense ads where as WordPress does not. For a long time WordPress did not even support affiliate links either. That means no earning from amazon or any other affiliate product at all. You also cannot sell from them. I had been earning through ads and affiliate products on blogger well before buying my own site.
- Blogger is easier to personalize. They give you excess to the code that helps you personalize it so much that you can’t even guess that it is free hosted. Your blog will look professional and pretty with just the very basic HTML knowledge.
- They follow best practices and you don’t have to break your head on google changes. Let me give you an example, when the GDPR changes happened earlier this year, those of us on self hosted went crazy trying to get the legal things right. Blogger people calmly clicked one button and they were done. (Well… most of them did.)
- You don’t have to bother with SEO details. Meta description on posts, Titles… image optimization… they handle it all. You just do what you are good at and make sure you fill all the boxes they give you.
How to start a blog for free on Blogger- step by step.
1. Go to Blogger.com. Log on with your Google username and password or just click the start a blog button. You are in.
2. Choose a Display name. This is the name that you will be known as. You can choose either your name or a pen name.
5. Choose an address. This is the URL of your blog. The address that people type in to go to your blog.
Since you are hosted on blogger, your address will be yourchoosenname.blogspot.com
All blogger hosted blogs have the .blogspot.com at the end. If you want a ‘dot com’ address you have to buy your domain name. (Details about that in the next post.)
If the address is available it will show a blue tick at the end. If it shows that it isn’t available, try another name. I also recommend to look on google if {your name dot com} is taken. Because most of the times someone may have already chosen your name so you may not get a ‘dot com’ version of it.
6. Choose a theme. This is what you want your blog to look like. Think of it as a dress for your blog. You can change the theme as many times as you like… later.
That is it. Your blog is ready.
What to do after you have created your blog
Well… hold right there young lady! I understand you are very excited to write your first post and hit publish but is that really a good idea… just yet?
What generally happens when people land on your blog is that they want to look around to know you better. What good is it if people hop on to your blog, see your Hi and then leave. Don’t you want them to keep coming back?
Yes, give them something to keep coming back!
Coming up in the next posts, I will show you how to make your blog pretty. In the meanwhile, let’s start planning those first posts. Download the FREE worksheet below and fill it in. You will need it time and again to remember why you are starting this blog.
GRAB THE START A BLOG PLANNER
Do you have any questions? Leave it in the comments!
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Thank you so much! This is so useful