A blog or weblog is an online informational website or journal which displays the information in the reverse chronological order, with the latest post appearing first. It is a platform which offers the writer or the group of writers to share their views on an individual subject.
There are various reason to start a blog for business or personal use. If you are a businessman you can grab the customers attention through your blog post. The main purpose of the blog is to connect you to the relevant audience. You should keep your blog running. Running a blog makes you competitive and searchable.
Why Should You Start a Blog?
A blog enables you to reach the millions and even billions of people who are using the internet. It can help to promote your business or you yourself. It is a platform for attracting an audience because it provides something of value to the audience before asking for anything in return.
You can establish your authority in space by posting a blog about an important topic that is relevant to your audience. It helps to enhance your professional image. Blog these days can be viewed as new business cards that were in use during the 1990s.
Blog helps to organize your thought and forces you to teach yourself what you don't know. You will have to learn about the topic if there are any gaps. It helps to articulate your thoughts and internalize something that you've learned.
Blog helps you to be your own media company. You can express your ideas and tell your story without depending upon the journalist. You can decide on your own how to portray a story, what information to exclude and what information to include.
It can help in creating friendship among the people and also good business contacts. Your regular audiences may turn into your friends, colleagues, partners and even lovers. Having a blog with lots of audiences provides opportunities to monetize. It can be a great tool for side income. Who doesn't want to start a blog if they can turn their passion into profit?
How Can You Start a Blog For Free?
Now, you want to start a blog right? You may wonder how I can start a blog for free. So we are going to explain how can you create a blog for free and generate huge audiences.
The first step for starting a blog is to choose a blogging platform. There are many free blogging sites that offers you to build your blog for free. Below is the list of best 8 websites that allows you to start a blog for free.
Wordpress
If you want to 100% own your blog and think for setting up a serious website to work on long-term Wordpress.org can be the best option. It is the king of all free blogging sites. You can download it and build the site as per your need. It offers some free Wordpress hosting but you can pay a moderate amount of money for standard hosting. You can try Bluehost which is very cheap ($2.95 per month on the basic plan) and provides solid features such as a free domain name, free SSL, 100 MB of email storage per account and unmetered bandwidth.
You have full authority over how your site looks and functions but the setup process is a little bit more hands-on.
There is also another platform provided by Wordpress that is used mostly for personal blogs (Wordpress.com ). It is easy to set up and completely free if you're okay to have a custom domain name. But it prevents from monetizing your blog.
Medium
It is the best platform for people who look for access to built-in audience and don't care about having their own sites. (www.meduim.com) is a multipurpose platform where anyone with an account can post their blog. The main advantage of posting the blog in Medium is that your blog will be exposed to a wide audience. Medium is visited by 60 million readers per month.
It is very easy and simple to get started. You can just sign up and start writing. But using Medium you are not building your own space as in Wordpress.
Wix
It can be helpful to non-techies. It offers some regular website functionality along with a blog. It is a free website that allows management of site through front-end. You don't have to handle anything from the back-end as it offers drag and drop options.
The design is modern and very intuitive which can be used by beginners and advanced. I offer free hosting and a nice collection of free and premium themes and templates for different purpose. It offers the addition of multiple elements to the pages like multimedia widgets, background, menus, forms, video boxes, topology and many more.
Ghost ( ghost.org)
It is similar to Wordpress but is simple and modern at the same time. It can be downloaded for free but you need to pay for hosting. You can try DigitalOcean's services which is cheap and comes with a bunch of features.
It is very easy to create a post in Ghost once you set up your own website. It offers a live preview of the text on the right side of the screen. You can choose for your preferences with Settings provided near the editor screen.
Blogger
It is one of the oldest free blog site. It can be useful for people who want to post their personal blogs. It is not the best platform for professional use. You need to create an account in order to use it. After creating an account you can pick one of the themes and start your blog. The editor looks like a Word page and the interface looks like a Google+. It does not offer advance customization. It focusses on writing rather than appearance. One nice part about this platform is that comes with Ads spaces.
Joomla
It is similar to Wordpress.org but not that obvious when considering it as a free blog site. It offers free software but not hosting and domain. Bluehost can be a good option due to its low cost and free domain. Due to its flexible interface, it can be used for complex websites. It offers varieties of template and extension to add custom functionality.
It provides old-school editor which is similar to Microsoft Word. It enables the user to choose font, colour, emoticons, tables to list a few. The Joomla editor is tabbed. The first tab is the editor and you will need to switch to the next tab to select post categories, date, tags, keywords etc.
Tumblr
It is the original free blogging site on the internet. This is a bit different platform compared to other blogging sites. It is more multimedia or social media-oriented. It offers a playful interface and is easy to get started. It is purely for personal use and may not be useful for business-oriented plans. It also does not allow to display ads, use integrated links or integrate a blog with Google Analytics.
Weebly
It is a versatile site which can be used to post a blog, sell products or showcase your portfolio. It is somehow similar to Wix as it offers drag-and-drop elements. You can add button by simply dragging it to the page and customize it.
It offers media boxes, sidebars, ad spaces, newsletter subscription to list few. Weebly comes with built-in Analytics and offers you to use your own customized domain after you pay. You will receive five custom pages, a Weebly subdomain and 500 MB storage and ad spaces on the free plan.
Once you have chosen a platform as per your requirement, you should follow these steps to create a good blog post.
Pick a suitable blog name
Your blog can be about your hobbies and passion, life experiences or even your personal blogs. Before choosing your blog name it is a good idea to choose your blog topic. Once you've chosen a topic for your blog you should give a good name. It must be descriptive so that the viewers can instantly tell about your blog just from your blog name. Don’t try to get hung on just one word. If your blog is about cooking, the word food or recipes also would let people know about your blog. If your blog is about yourself then use your name or you can bring some variations.
After having a good name you will need to choose a domain extension. ABC.com domain extension is widely preferred but .org or .net also works well. You should keep in mind that you cannot have spaces between the words in domain extension.
Make your blog available online
Most of the people find it difficult but it is not so difficult as you think. All you need is blogging software and hosting. These typically come packaged together. Hosting company stores all of the files for your blog and delivers them to the audiences. The most preferred hosting is Bluehost due to cheap and free domain name.
Customize your blog
You can go to Bluehost.com and log in. You can log in using your domain mane and password. You can also reset your password by clicking the 'Forgot Password' link below Login option. Everyone has their own idea of displaying their blog. If you are using Wordpress, you can change the entire design and layout with just a few clicks. You can use the theme of your choice. There are several themes that are pre-installed on your blog.
Write and publish your blog post
Now you are ready for your first blog post. Go to your blogging site and click 'posts' on the top left menu. Click to 'Add new' to start writing a new post. You will see the editor screen. Enter the title of the post and make sure to save your title. Now, you can create your blog using various tools provided and customize as per need. You can add pictures to your blog by clicking to 'Add Image'. After everything is done you can publish your blog with SEO title and tags.
Promote your blog and generate money
After creating your blog post you should spent good time for promoting it. Writing great content or creating a well-designed blog is just a start. You can use various online platforms and social media for promoting your blog. You can collaborate with the professionals in your field. Collaborating includes interacting regularly through social media and comments and promoting each other's blogs and products. Engage with your audience by replying to the comments and questions this shows that you really care about your audiences.
Make sure to post blog regularly so that your followers won't drop off. Your blogs are likely to come top on searches if you post your blog regularly. Optimize and submit your blog to search engine like Google to receive a huge amount of traffic to your site.
A blog is going to make you money but don’t expect it within the first week or even a month. After you have put enough effort and dedication your passion will automatically turn in to profit.
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