A blog is a kind of website that displays written content, popularly known as a blog post. The website owner or the blogger write contents based on a theme that he may be interested in a personal perspective that helps its users to connect and interact with the writer.
What is a blog?
The blog is a method of expressing something in a medium. In a blog post are displayed in reverse chronological order (the latest post first). There is a comments section, that helps to interact with the regular readers. The blog helps to connect and interact with like-minded peoples. Personalized writing and interaction help to get trust from the readers.
Do you need a blog?
Before going to start a blog, you must ask some questions yourself. Do you want to express yourself and share your knowledge and information with your readers? Do you want to become a better writer by expressing yourself? Are you ready to spend a few hours to work with your blogging environment and invest time to publish new content regularly? Finally, do you want to make some money from your blogging passion?
Advantages of Blogging?
You can build a writing platform. If you are a writer you can share your writings with an international audience. You will get more exposure to the world. Thinking that you are writing articles from your bedroom or living room using your laptop or desktop in a remote unknown village, after publishing the post will view from different cities, different countries and from different continents. If you can make an impact on your audience, you will become popular to them and they will wait for your next blog post. If your blog gets enough attention from an international audience and gets enough viewers you can display advertisements on your blog and get money from it even when you are sleeping!
Excited, in simple thinking, it is easy and quick, but in actual practice, it takes more time than you think. Sometimes, the blog becomes an instant hit, sometimes, it may not get any hit in a year. So, it is a little bit tricky and requires a lot of hard work and patience. Here is my simple step by step guide to starting a blog without having any technical knowledge and coding skills.
Step 1: Decide the Niche
Step 2: Pick a blog name
Step 3: Choose a blog platform and Webhost
Step 4: Customize your Blog
Step 5: Write the first post and publish
Step 6: Write more…Promote more…
Step 7: Place advertisements at proper positions and make money
Let’s start your blog,
Step 1: Decide the Niche:
This is the first and important thing, selecting an ideal niche is really important to keep your website run for yours and get enough articles regularly. Decide the niche, means select a topic that you are going to talk about (like traveling, technical articles, new gadgets, lifestyle, fashion, health, beauty, finance, marketing,… the list is huge). You can select your niche by identifying your interests and passions. Ar you really interest to solve some problems that others can’t? Then identify the problems you can solve (eg: solving Windows operating system errors). So, you decide on a topic of interest and you are confident to say something about it. Good, next is to analyze the competition. You have to check a few popular blogs on the same topic (use search engines) and analyze how much attention it is getting from the international and national audience (use website traffic estimators). If you are planning to generate money from your blog the traffic is a must. The more the traffic the more the revenue. The more the views, you will get more competition from advertisers to display their advertisements. If you are writing for a passion, then easy, choose your topic, create a blog and write meaningful and useful contents regularly. Interact with users and answer their questions.
Step 2: Pick a blog name:
You can use your own domain or can create a free domain for your blog. Before that choose a blog name that will represent your blog on the internet. You can include the name of your niche like travelblog. You can also choose custom names (like Mashable) for ego surfing. You can create new ones or can create with wrong spelling from the existed ones. It is better to choose a name with niche included or a unique name to identify your blog easily on the internet.
Step 3: Choose a blog platform and Webhost
Next, decide a blog platform write and post your contents. It is not easy to write everything in HTML scripts and publish it one by one. There are some specific tools available to publish your blog post daily without thinking about coding, they are called Content Management Systems (CMS).
A Content Management Systems (here onward CMS) is a software that facilitates writing, editing and publishing content online. There are a number of CMS available online, WordPress, Drupal, Magneto, Joomla, Modx, Typo3, Concrete5, etc. You can find a huge list of CMS through a simple search. But the problem with the CMS is you need to place it (here onward host) somewhere on the web, so the readers can access it 24X7 around the world. The hosting requires a fixed fee for each month. Did you hesitate to spend money to start a blog? There is a solution for it, use hosted blogging providers. Blogger, WordPress.com, are some of them.
Blogger
You can start to write just by creating an account (like your email account). In blogger, click create your blog, log in with your Google account (you can use your current user account, or can create a new one for blog). After login, you are welcomed to Google dashboard. Enter title, address of blog and select a suitable theme (you can change it later). Here Title is your blog name to show as the title. The address is the URL that you want to access your blog (Eg:myblog.blogspot.com). Here you can add a custom domain name like myblog.com, if you have purchased a domain name already in that name.
WordPress.com
It offers versatile plans and pricing for your domain. It is similar to blogger, you can create a free blog. You can also purchase a Personal plan with free a domain for one year, or can buy or upgrade to Premium or Business plans. To get started with a free plan, enter your email address, choose a name for a blog and give a password for login. The free blog always carries a free domain name. that is the subdomain of their main domain (myblog.wordpress.com not myblog.com). If you need your own domain (myblog.com) you need to purchase one.
Step 4: Customize your Blog
Customizing your blog depends on the type of account and hosting plan that you have chosen. For a blogger and WordPress.com account settings is there, you can choose a theme from the available theme and experience yourself in your browser. If you are satisfied choose and use the theme.
Domain name and Webhosting
For a self-hosted WordPress account, you can do more customization than the free one. You can purchase and use premium themes and plugins. You can add different plugins to add more features to your site. You can easily buy and start your own WordPress hosting account in minutes using Bluehost. Bluehost offers automatic WordPress installation and its updates. Free SSL certificate to protect your domain. A free full domain for the first year. Hundred of premium WordPress themes and sufficient fast SSD storage. In this account, self-host WordPress software (wordpress.org) is used. Bluehost’s WordPress hosting plan makes hosting a blog is an easy task. Once installed it will automatically be updated to the latest version. The only thing that you need is to post and publish blog posts and renew the hosting plan every year to keep the blog alive. Mediatemple offering managed WordPress plans with unlimited data transfer. The Mediatemple managed WordPress hosting takes care of the technical side like optimizing the site for speed, security monitoring, launching, checking stats, 24/7 support creating and restoring the backup. A little bit premium but you can focus more on creating contents than maintaining and updating the site regularly.
Step 5: Write the first post and Publish
In a self-hosted WordPress blog, the interface looks like this screenshot. Enter post title, post description, enter a category, add a featured image (an image that represents your post-usually display above the content), enter a few tags and click Publish button. In blogger and wordpress.com you can create your post in the post editor.
Step 6: Write more…Promote more…
You need to write more posts and promote it on social media and share among your friends and connections. You can use some paid promotion if your blog contains enough post to attract a huge number of visitors to your site.
Step 7: Place advertisements at proper positions and Make money!
I know, this is the section that you are looking for. It is not as you think and also it becomes a success, it is huger than you can imagine. Mashable is a tech blog site started in 2005 by Peter Cashmore and regularly write blog posts from his bedroom attracted millions of users around the world. His hard work pays off and sold the blog for 50 million dollars in 2017. I advise you to place the advertisement only after getting enough traffic to your blog, not on the first day. Use a tool like Google Analytics to analyze the website visitors, page views and demographics to write more reader-focused articles. To display the advertisement you can use Google Adsense, Media.net, Buysellads, etc.
