The first thing to consider – after you’ve found your niche – is which blogging platform you’ll publish your content on.
You have some choices my friend.
Basically, those choices come down to whether you want to do your blogging with no charge attached, or you want to pay to host your blog site with a hosting service under your own business domain.
If you do a search for free blogging platforms you’ll find a number of pages with links to platforms to choose from. Some of the better known free options are Blogger, WordPress.com, and Squidoo.
If you decide to go with a self-hosted site the most popular option is WordPress.org.
So the question is what option (free or self-hosted) is best for you?
And while you’re pondering that question think about why you want to publish a blog in the first place.
If you’re blogging plans are for personal entries – or diary/journal like – then a free platform will most likely be fine for you. Free platforms have a few other useful purposes too.
But if you plan to build a blog for your business, and intend to monetize that blog site, then your best action is to publish on a self-hosted site with your own business domain.
Why? I say that because of two reasons:
You have little control over your site if you place it on a free platform.
You won’t be viewed as a professional and you won’t be taken very seriously.
On a free site you’ll always be at the mercy of the platform owners. They can change their terms of service (TOS) at any moment and then declare that your site is in violation of those new TOSs. They can shut the whole platform down at any time – there goes all of your published content.
And every bit of the income you were enjoying from that blog site – if you had any customers who didn’t care if you’re a pro or not.
With a self-hosted blog site, you control everything from your hosting dashboard. You also get a certain level of authority from the very start and your perceived authority increases as you add content to your site.
People take you more as an entrepreneur who is a serious business owner.
Successfully blogging on a self-hosted site is very simple once you move through the learning curve. There are plenty of courses online you can take for training. Here’s a free course at Udemy for you to check: Udemy – Blog For Business.
The important thing to begin with is to find a good hosting service, create an account, and get a domain name. Then you can control everything right from your dashboard. The most popular hosting uses cPanel to give you the controls you need for your site.
For hosting I recommend either Hostgator or Namecheap. (Namecheap is currently my personal choice and it’s slightly cheaper but both are good choices and both have very good customer support.)
And you can get your domain name from the same service that you host with.
Now it’s time for you to go take that course and start learning how to blog. While you’re at it choose a domain name and get your hosting service set up.
And watch for my next article where I’ll talk about setting up your blog site. To help you succeed at blogging you’ll need a blog theme and some plugins.
And you’ll need to know how to work with your widgets too.
