How And Where To Create A Flourishing Blog| A Step-By-Step Guide.

You are quite curios about how to start up a blog and share interesting topics. Yes, you might be equally considering where to start from or how to go about it. You are at the right place...and at the right time.

Do you know that my blog is doing pretty well? In fact I started receiving more than 2,000 unique visitors from the first month my blog was created. So, trust me as someone you could listen to and learn from when it comes to building and launching your site.

Questions To Answer Before Creating A Blog

1. Why should I create a blog?

Sometimes you might be asking yourself this question. It is normal for some beginners, apart from those who have set plans on how and where to start.
You may be interested in many trending issues such as fashion,entertainments, sports, weather, news, education, and many others. If you want to contribute your own quota on those topics to the global community, then you are there! Make up your mind on what your blog will be about.

2. What kind of blog do I need?

Knowing the kind of blog you want to create is another important thing. For some people, they may want a small personal blog just to share their thoughts just like the social networks. For some others, they may want to build a massive website that contains many things. It is left for you to choose what kind of blog you want and go for it.

Note: If you already have a solid idea of the whys, then skip this and go right ahead with the guide.

I bet you already knew all of that, but it’s nice to be reminded.

Creating your own blog can take a little while, probably up to 30 minutes. So grab yourself a coffee or juice (whatever you fancy) and let’s get stuck in. If you need any help during the set-up process, get in touch with me here and I’ll help as best I can and answer any questions you might have.
The Steps Covered In This Blogging Guide
It’s nowhere near as difficult as setting up a website from scratch (there’s very little technical ability needed here). In fact, there’s no coding required by you. Good news, huh?
How to Start a Blog in 5 Steps:

There’s five main steps you need to do in order to start a blog. If you follow this guide exactly, you’ll have your own blog set up in 30 minutes or less.

1. Choose a great blog platform
2. Choose a web host for your blog
3. How to Set up a blog on your own domain
4. Design your new blog

Useful resources for blogging

Step 1 – Choose your preferred blogging platform
Choosing where you want to build blog is pretty much the first thing you have to do.
Three Best Blog Platforms For You.
1 Wordpress. I’m going to take a leap and assume you’ve heard of WordPress, and this is the platform I advocate. It’s massive. Wordpress is by far one of the biggest blogging platforms in the world, with countless plugins and add-ons and almost infinite ways to design and layout your blog. More than 80 million websites are hosted on this platform. Sounds good!
There are other alternatives however, and they are listed below:

2. Blogger. This is the next best alternative to WordPress. It is quite a beautiful platform. One interesting thing in Blogger is that it absolutely free to create a blog. There are more than 60 million users of Blogger.

3. Tumblr. Tumblr is a half social network, and shall blog. Interesting, and very simple to use. You will like it for its beautiful themes and designs.

Even though WordPress is bigger (and probably better) than those two, here are my reasons why you should still go with WordPress:

Super easy set-up and is free to use
Tons of free themes and layouts (I’m not kidding, there’s gazillions).
There’s a massive support forum in case you get stuck (you won’t, but it’s nice to have it there if you need it).
Your blog will be insanely fast and it’ll also look Functionality and form – perfect!
People can interact with you easily. Your content can be shared, commented on, and so on.

Step 2 – Choosing your Blogging Platform (Self hosting or a free alternative?)
This is the biggest decision you’ll have to make before we go any further. You need to decide whether to pay for your blog or grab a free one.

WordPress, Tumblr and Blogger all offer free blogs for anyone. Awesome, right? It’s perfect for those of us who aren’t super serious about blogging. But it does have downsides:
1) You won’t be able to get your OWN domain name
On a free blog, your blog’s web address (your URL) will be butt-ugly. Like, really ugly. In short, create a free blog with any other the above free blog services and it’ll look like this:

yourblog.wordpress.com
yourblog.blogspot.com
yourblog.tumblr.com

2) Limits and more limits

There are some limits to free blogs. You can’t fully monetize it, and you don’t have the possibility to upload all those videos and images you want to show everyone – it’s all limited. Worse still, you won’t even have access to the free themes offered by WordPress.

3) You DON’T OWN your blog

It might sound silly at first, but you don’t actually own your blog. It’s hosted on someone else’s web property and they can delete it if they want to. They have done so in the past, and keep doing it in the future. Which means all your hard work on your blog, all those countless hours of writing blog posts might be vanished within seconds. Really sad.

On the other hand, with a self-hosted blog on your own domain name – you are the REAL owner of your blog. You’ll be able to name your blog whatever you want, for example “YourName.com” or “YourAwesomeBlog.com. You can end it with .com, .co.uk, .net, .org, or virtually any other web suffix. Add to that unlimited bandwidth for videos, images and content plus the free themes and you have a winning combo.

So how much is hosting and a domain name? Not as much as you’re thinking, fortunately. It usually works out to about $5 to $10 per month, depending on your hosting provider which is less than a couple of coffees.

If you still have questions, here’s some further information for you to look at:

Should I Choose a Hosted or Non-hosted Blogging Platform?

Step 3 – Start a blog on your own domain (if you chose self-hosting and a custom domain)

wordpress blogging platform

I’m going to push ahead based on the premise you’ve chosen WordPress, and if you haven’t, you should. Seriously, it’s the best.

If you’re still a little confused by what a self-hosted blog is, allow me to explain and how you can go about setting one up for yourself.

You’ll need to come up with a domain name you like and also choose a hosting company that can host your blog.