Step by step guide on how to start your own blog

This is part one of the two parts how to guide, in which I am going to show you, how you can start and run your own blog and make it a success. In this part I am going to discuss about why you should start your own blog, what you should blog about, whether to go with a free blog service or a paid one and which blogging software to use.

Why you should start a blog

Blogging has become the in thing on the internet with not only computer professionals and academics starting their own blogs, but also normal people like you and me and even companies and government jumping into the foray.

The reason why blogging has become so popular is due to the fact that you are free to talk about what you want and how. With a blog you can share your ideas, thoughts, knowledge and opinion with the world and you can even use it to raise awareness about a particular subject!

Blogging has also become a good source of revenue for many people with popular bloggers earning millions every year!

So whether you are thinking of starting a blog as a hobby or to earn money or even both, blogging should help you fulfill that goal.

Decide what you want to blog about

First thing you need to decide before you start blogging is what you are going to be blogging about, that’s right you need to decide the theme of your blog, before you start one.

It could simply be a personal blog like mine, where you can share your ideas, thoughts, knowledge and aspirations with rest of the world or it could be a niche specific blog where you blog about a particular niche that interests you i.e. motorcycles, cars, travel, cooking, gardening etc.

Paid vs. free

Once you have decided which topic you are going to blog about, next thing you have to decide is whether or not, you are willing to spend money to get your blog hosted on a paid hosting account and want to buy your own domain or if you want to get a freely hosted blog.

While with a freely hosted blog you don’t have to take care of server administration, software updates etc. and you have the added advantage of not paying a single dime for anything.

Paid hosting ensures you have much more options to customize your blog based on your own needs and you have the option start other sections on your blog like a photo gallery or even a forum. A domain name would ensure that your blog is not dependent upon a webhost and you can move to another webhost at any time without changing your blogs address.

With the domain only costing a few dollars a year and good hosting packages also available for few dollars a month, I feel paid hosting and domain is the way to go (like this blog you are currently viewing).

Which blogging software to use

How you blog ultimately looks, behaves and performs is also dependent upon the blogging software (scripts) you use. While there are several paid and free scripts available in the market, my personal favorite is wordpress. Which is what I use for this blog and the best thing about it is the fact that it is available for free, yet it offers functionality that is far superior to most paid solutions and at the same time it is vary easy to learn even for people who don’t know a thing about programming or who are new to the internet.

It also has an active development community behind it, which not only ensures that any reported bugs are fixed in a jiffy and there are also several plugins and themes available to enhance your blog’s look, feel and functionality. Due to this fact, majority of the big and popular blogs run on wordpress.

Though wordpress is mainly a solution for those wish to host their own blogs, you can find several companies which offer free wordpress hosting. With such hosts you can get the functionality of wordpress and that too without paying a single cent for it!

Do visit this blog again tomorrow for the part two of this guide, in which I am going to talk about various other aspects that come into play once you do start your own blog.