How Do I Start A Blog? What You Need And How To Do It

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Ok so you’ve done all the research, you’ve read all the great stories from successful bloggers, you’ve committed yourself, you’re finally ready to take the plunge. Now how do you start a blog?

Well there are several different options, some free and some paid, but in reality it isn’t to expensive to run a blog. I have 4 different sites and each year it costs me less than €100 to run them all. You can run a blog for even less, in fact you can run a blog for free, but it has it’s drawbacks.

The Free Options

First off the best free options would be to use Blogger or Wordpress.com

They’re both completely free and you even get your site hosted and a domain name for free. However, the domain names aren’t proper domain names like www.techinfo-4u.com . Instead they are sub domains, so say you were going to call your blog “booktips”. Your domain name would be booktips.blogspot.com or booktips.wordpress.com, provided the name is available.

You will also have your site hosted by these services, but you have limited storage and customization options. Yes WordPress and Blogger have different themes you can choose from, but you can’t compare it to the power that you get from being able to host and design your own site.

Aside from that, both Blogger and WordPress have a great support community to help you along the way. If I had to choose one, it would be wordpress.com, because it has more customization options and I know from experience that the WordPress platform is the best going. The only thing is WordPress will display some ads on your site every so often to irregular visitors.

With WordPress, you also have to option to upgrade to premium options which include extra storage, the ability to add your own domain name to your account, videopress (videos on your blog) and the chance to edit custom CSS code if you’re that way inclined.

So that’s the free side of things, now what about the paid options?

Well the paid options, if you’re anyway serious about blogging you really need to have your own domain name and your own host. While people have been successful online with using free services, none have been as successful as those going the paid route. If you’re anyway serious, you should see your blog as an investment and at the end of the day, you will find that your blog should easily pay for itself.

The blogging platform that I and most other bloggers use is WordPress.org, it’s by the same people who developed WordPress.com but you download and install this platform on your server and the customization options are limitless. There’s literally thousands of themes, free and paid on the web which can be installed via wordpress which gives you a template for a site that you can use straight away or perhaps you may want to customize it. You can do just about anything to your site as you have full control and access to CSS and HTML code, if you know what your doing. If you don’t that’s fine, as you can run a blog without any knowledge of it, however it helps. WordPress.org also has a great support forum as well, full of people ready to answer your questions.

While there are other platforms such as “typepad” none of them can match WordPress which is a clear leader in the blogging industry. WordPress has a great CMS solution (content managment system) which lets you easily write,publish and manage posts as well as installing themes, designing your site and adding additional plugins.

So now that you know what platform you are going to use, you need a web host and a domain name.

It can be tricky picking a domain name since so many of them have already been registered, your domain name is generally going to be your site name. Normally a .com .org or .net domain wont cost any more than $10, (if it does then shop around) but if it’s been pre-registered and someone else already owns it, you may have to enter an auction for it or make an offer, that’s even if it’s up for sale. But generally you should try and find a domain that hasn’t been previously registered. Try the likes of Godaddy and Blacknight or just Google “domain names”

The next bit, finding a host can be tricky. There are so many different hosts out there it’s very hard to choose. The best way is to go online and do a bit of research and see who is the most reliable, who has the best customer support, the best price and bandwidth etc…

Once you factor all these things in you can go ahead and sign up for your hosting package, you shouldn’t really find yourself paying much more than $70 a year for your first blog, it will generally be a lot less. However as your traffic grows and your blog becomes more and more popular, you may have to upgrade your host to a higher, more expensive package, but that will also mean you are making more money, so I wouldn’t be too worried about it.

So once you have your domain and host you can go ahead and install wordpress (only takes 5 minutes) and away you go, your first step to blogging success.

What blogging platform do you guys use? Have you opted for the paid or free route?

Let me know in the comments below

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