Table of contents
You might wonder why I am writing about starting a blog for free in 2021! The other day, an aunty who is close to my mom’s age connected with me. She wanted to start a blog, but wasn’t sure if she could go through. She wanted to understand if she could handle the technology requirements, was it too expensive and many other similar questions. Talking to her made me realize that I was at a similar place around 5 years ago, when I was just starting out.
The fear of the unknown can be crippling for many. It might make many take a step back even before they truly understand the medium and its requirements. So, I decided to do something about it!
Here I am creating byte size training for all those interested in starting a blog in 2021. This will be a small read with a simple task at the end of the day. I will try and include video’s if possible, but I do not guarantee anything, considering that video is a medium I am still exploring and acing.
Getting back to the training, let us look at the things you will be learning in this basic start a blog for free course.
Things you will learn in this basics to starting a blog series
- Finding the best blogging platform
- Choosing a blog topic you love
- Designing your homepage
- Creating a long term content strategy
- Important essentials other than writing
- Are you ready to go self-hosting?
I hope to help the many out there who are wondering if they should blog or not. For this tutorial I will be looking at free blog hosting and creation. I am doing this to help people overcome the first barrier to entry.
Difference between writing on social media and a blogging platform
The aunty that I was talking about earlier has been writing on social media platforms and she was comfortable doing that, before my mother told her about my blog. She asked me why shouldn’t she just continue on social media and I completely understand her thought process. Writing on social media automatically updates her followers and there is instant initiation of conversations. After all, that is the aim right?
While all this is true, it is important to realize that social media algorithms change regularly. If your content is visible to 100 people today, it might be viewed by just 20 tomorrow. You do not own the platform and hence any changes or closure of the platform would result in loss of content. We have had examples of Orkut and G+ so it is important to safeguard the content. Another aspect is the search ability of content. Older posts are hard to find on social media. Your content might go viral today, but it will be a task to find it again after maybe a year, whereas a blog maintains each content piece as a separate web address which is easily accessible.
Is blogging expensive? How about we start a blog for free!
Every time someone talks about blogging to me, the first thing they ask is how expensive is it?
The simple answer to this question is – you can start a blog for free and that too under 30 minutes. The blog platforms are simple enough to help you follow the step-by-step guide and get on-board. Even if you decide to move to self-hosting over time, you can easily migrate all the content that you have to the self-hosted domain. The only thing you might not be able to continue is the blog design, but that is a small price to pay.
I started free. I was on a free platform for more than a year before I decided to migrate to self-hosting. There is no pressure to move to self-hosting immediately and you can do it when you think the time is right.
Another important thing that people worry about is do they need to write in English?
No! You can write in almost any language that you want to. I have a blog that is in English and the other is in Marathi. As the focus on regional languages and speech search grows NLP (natural language processing) will be the driving force for pushing native content. Even if the platform that you choose to blog does not offer the language, there are multiple software’s which help in setting up virtual keyboards. Another way is Google input tool. This is a simple tool that can help you type in the language that you want. Speech to text is also a software that you can explore to write in native language. The possibility is endless, so don’t fear and take the plunge.
In the next post, we will be discussing about choosing the right platform and setting up a free blog on wordpress.com
I am writing this post as part of BlogchatterA2Z challenge
My blogging journey started 10 years back. It was an impromptu decision to store my thoughts in the online world. That time I had no idea about statistics, I just wrote and to connect with blogging community.
I am learning all about blogging relating to stats, engagement, etc in recent 5 years. Your post will be helpful in learning in depth to me and to newbies.
These are some really good inputs! I started off as a free wordpress, and took the leap to make it a self-hosted one once I started raking in some earnings for the blog. I think for anyone who is starting off with blogging, its best to start for free, but buy a domain name in case they want to make the shift to a self hosted version.
This series of yours will help so many people who want to start blogging. Great theme. Love your writing style – lucid and conversational.
Starting a blog is easy these days. Many platforms offer free domains. Your series is going to be interesting:)
Great start Neha! I blog for just writing for fun and am still on the free platform. Looking forward to the series
Thanks Neha. I am looking forward to your posts. I am an occasional blogger and need all the inputs I can to get this right!
This is going to be the holy grail for all those who aspire to make a career out of blogging. Great start to the series!
Your blog posts are always full of information Neha. Looking forward to learning more you like last year.
You’ve addressed some pertinent blogging-related questions. Social media and blogging are different since we own this platform.
Wow, Neha, as usual your posts are informative. Any newbie reading this post would be tempted to try his/her hand at blogging. You have simplified the basics so well. Look forward to tomorrow’s post
I too get asked often about starting a blog and what’s the difference between wiritng on social media and having a website. This blog of yours is very informative and helpful for people who want to enter the blogging world.