How To Start A Blog, Part 1: Why Blog?
Today is the start to my series on how to start a blog. I’ll post every few days – many steps will take more than a day, and time to think is always a good thing when starting a new venture.
Blogging is fairly easy to start – the hard part is earning a living at it. You have to work at it and give it time. But as home businesses go, I think it’s a pretty good model to try. There are many good reasons to blog.
Low Cost Of Entry
One of the simplest reasons I recommend blogging is the low cost of entry. You can do it for free, although I don’t recommend going that way. You’re better off paying for hosting through a company such as HostGator. I’ll get into the reasons for that in another post. Still, blog hosting doesn’t have to cost a lot per month. It’s very budget friendly.
Flexibility
Blogging is an extremely flexible home business. You don’t have to tell your boss when you need time off. You don’t have to keep to a schedule. You don’t even have to keep the kids quiet most of the time.
The one thing you have to do is find time to work at it. Blogging won’t work for you if you don’t. Depending on your family’s needs, you may need to get up early or stay up late. You may have to ask the kids to give you some quiet time so you can work, or have your spouse keep them busy.
That said, setting a schedule for yourself is a huge help. It’s too easy to slack off if you don’t give yourself some sort of a schedule.
To Build Your Business
If you have a home business, blogging can be a good addition to it. It’s not the end all, be all solution to your marketing problems, but it can benefit your business. A blog can be a place to show off how you use your products, share things your company has done for your community, and give customers a way to interact with you. It can also be a more personal presentation of your business, if you like.
Blogging also builds your authority as a business. Your blog content can help potential and current customers with problems that relate to what your business offers. If they trust what you say on your blog, they’re more likely to trust your business.
To Show Off Skills To Potential Employers
Blogging can help you demonstrate your skills to potential employers. Writers can build a portfolio of articles on their blog. Photographers can show off their work. Anyone can use blogging to demonstrate their knowledge in their career field. A high quality blog makes a great resume.
To Find Others Who Share Your Interests
Blogging is a great way to share your interests, and that means you’ll find people who are interested in the same things. That’s a part of what makes it fun. Blogging can be a great networking tool, both for hobbies and your career.
To Help Others
Back when I started Home With The Kids, I was a medical transcriptionist. I was always being asked how to get into that, because so many people want to work at home, especially moms. I got to a point where it made sense to me to start a website on the subject of working at home, so I could simply direct people to my answer there, as there are so many more ways to work at home than just being a medical transcriptionist, and so many hazards to watch out for.
Things rather took off from there, and I’ve had a lot of people be grateful for the help I’ve been able to give them. Start your own blog, and you might help others in ways you aren’t expecting.
To Learn
Blogging is a great excuse to learn new things. You need to keep learning just to keep up with your blog. There’s always something new to learn about whatever you’re blogging about, so you can share it with your readers.
You’ll also learn about how to run a blog. The basics are pretty simple. I’ll walk you through how to install WordPress in a later post. Even doing it the hard way is pretty easy once you know what you’re doing. There’s a lot more to running a blog than just installing WordPress, of course.
The next step is to figure out what you’re blogging about. This may give you even more reasons to blog.
Read More
- How To Start A Blog, Part 1: Why Blog?
- How To Start A Blog, Part 2: Brainstorming
- How To Start A Blog, Part 3: Starting A WordPress Blog
- How To Start A Blog, Part 4: How To Get Traffic and Followers
- How To Start A Blog, Part 5: How To Earn Money From Your Blog
- How To Start A Blog, Part 6: Should You Add Video Or Podcasting?
- How To Start A Blog, Part 7: What Else Would You Like To Know?
Non-technical people will ask how to put up an operational blog. I think you should suggest them a few blogging system like WordPress, Blogspot, Tumblr or Medium.
All of them are free to use. A such powerful tool like WordPress can expand their works into something really big.
That’s in a later post. I recommend getting your own hosting, not using Blogspot or other free hosts if you can help it. You don’t have enough control if you use a free host, and paid hosting can be quite affordable.
Actually I’m using hosting of Godaddy. It’s quite good for the small budget. HostGator is kinda expensive for me. Btw, your advice is really helpful. I will come and read more about this series. And about blogging, Wix is not a bad choice.
The prices aren’t that different when I look at them, but when I look at sites that test speed, Host Gator wins. There are faster hosts than Host Gator, but costs keep going up.
Hi Stephanie,
Maybe the costs are not different. But I found that Godaddy has sale off so I got it much cheaper than HostGator. Btw, I rarely find sale-off or discount on HostGato.