What is a blog

Whether you are an IT professional, an engineer, in the medical profession, educationist or any other sector OR you have passion about sports; golf, baseball, hockey, cricket, tennis and other OR you have passion to watch the movies and you feel you should write something about this for your personal satisfaction and / or share your experiences with the friends or public (anywhere in the world) you may start thinking to make a blog.

The first question comes after identifying your interest to write, how do I start a blog? “I am not a web designer or developer or have any programming experience” ( a non-IT person) then where should I start a blog?

This guide will help you if you have some IT background or a non-IT person, how to start a blog in simple steps.

How to start a blog

Starting a blog of your own is made quite easier over the period of time. You can virtually start writing a blog within 30 minutes with no background knowledge like the HTML, CSS, PHP or databases.

There are many blogging platforms available these days where you can sign-up for free and immediately start writing your thoughts. The WordPress is the most popular blogging platform across the world. So more references are WordPress based in this guide.

Starting a blog free of cost

You can start a blog free of cost. Even no domain name needs to be purchased. However, this comes with certain limitations. For example your domain name will be a sub-domain that looks like:

Yourblogname.blogplatform.com

Yourblogname.wordpress.com

Also, you can’t do everything freely like installing the plug-ins, monetizing your blog with different ways that end up with certain limited features that otherwise you would like to have in the long term.

To start a free blog in a blogging platform, we have written a step by step detailed guide. Please go here to learn about it.

Starting a Self-hosted blog

A self-hosted blog is the one where you will have your own domain name. You will host it to your hosting account where you can use all the monetizing features freely and install any plug-ins or add-ons required over the period of time. In order to start a blog with your hosting, follow these steps:

Register a domain name

First of all you will need to buy a domain name from a domain registrar to make a blog. The domain should reflect your niche or topic or your brand. Once you have published a lot of content (posts or articles, images, videos etc.) and you are getting good number of visitors it becomes hard to change the domain name or regain its authority that you have established. So think carefully and decide what the best choice for your domain name is.

Choose a web host

The next step is, where you should host your blog? The web hosting company is the one who will save all your content (your written articles/posts, images, videos etc.) to their web server.

As mentioned earlier, the blogging has become so mature that hosting solutions are also very handy to help you create a blog quite easily. The web host mentioned below offers a free domain name along with the hosting plan. Once you have registered a hosting plan the admin panel (details come to your email after completing the registration) has links to install blog at just one click.

You have to specify your blog name, login/password and click “install WordPress blog”, and you are done!

On the basis of experience, pricing and customer support we are mentioning two blog hosting companies that you may choose to go with to start a blog:

The Bluehost company is one of those with a special WordPress blogging features.

The other you may consider is the iPage that also offers a free domain name along with the “one-click blog installation” feature.

Marketing your blog

If you have set up your blog as the private only then of course this is written for yourself and probably for your friends or known persons whom you tell specifically. However, if you made it public (that in the most cases are) you may want to be found by many people, across the Globe.

If you want to make money with blogging then it needs traffic/visitors. To bring traffic to your blog you have to work out traffic sources that send visitors to your website. On top of it comes the search engines. The Google is the main search engine that can bring visitors to your website. To rank well in the search engines, you need a good SEO performed for your website that follows the guidelines provided by the search engines especially the Google.

Similarly, you can use the social network like Facebook/Twitter etc. to bring traffic to your blog. You can create a page in the Facebook and post links there, share with friends and spread the word.