Starting a blog can be an intimidating experience—especially if you’ve never built a website before.
Fortunately, starting a blog can be simpler than you think. In a couple of hours, you can go from having never built a website before to having a fully functional blog.
In this article, we’ll show you how to find a blogging niche, how to choose the right blogging platform, name your blog, choose a hosting provider, build out your site, publish your first post, and more.
A blog is a website that focuses primarily on written content. Each of these pieces of written content are known as blog posts.
You’ll find blogs on basically every topic imaginable—ranging from personal blogs to business blogs, and even blogs that are the center of big media businesses, like Buzzfeed. Blogs stand out from other websites in that they’re primarily made up of blog articles.
A lot of successful online businesses have been built off the backs of quality blogs. Blogging has the advantage of allowing you to build up a targeted readership, which you can then sell products, services, or courses to. With the right web hosting package and content, you have the potential to turn a blog into an online brand.
There are a multitude of reasons to start a blog. Whether you’re looking to generate traffic for your existing site, share your perspective with the world, brand yourself as an expert, or gain enough of a following to monetize your blog via ads or affiliate links.
To start a successful blog you don’t need to have Faulkner-level writing skills. And actually, Faulkner’s writing style wouldn’t be a great fit for blogging, where the simpler and more conversational you write, the better. People don’t turn to blogs to read textbook-like prose or great literary writing. Instead, they want down-to-earth practical information that’s based on real-life experience.
If writing isn’t a strong suit now, consider trying out some tools to help you write like a pro or finding a writing course or coach to help you build your skills. Writing can be learned, and you’ll inevitably get better as you get more practice (just ask any successful blogger how they feel about the earliest posts they wrote
