Learn about how to start a blog here! There are a number of ways in which you could start a blog:
Since we are Blogger and WordPress fans, we’ll be discussing how to start a blog with Blogger and WordPress, but feel free to explore other blogging platform options too.
1)
You can start a blog totally free with Blogger. Most people will find a free Blogger blog easy to use. Your “website address” or URL will end in blogspot.com – you won’t need to register and pay for a domain or get and pay for hosting for your blog, but this also means it is not really your own blog. If you are an Adsense publisher, you can monetize a totally free Blogger blog with Adsense ads, but I am unsure if many or all other ways to monetize your blog with ads are allowed too.
2)
You can start a blog totally free with wordpress.com – but last time I checked you are not able to monetize a free wordpress.com blog by displaying adverts on it, like Adsense ads.
If you see website packages where you could add your own content and manage the site yourself, it is a Content Management System and you could use that website as a blog.
Our favourite blogging platform is WordPress, but it’s the type of WordPress where we can monetize our blog in any way we please to
– so to do this includes registering a domain, getting hosting, installing WordPress and putting in a WordPress theme (there are more than 1 500 free WordPress themes available at wordpress.org) or even installing a customized wordpress theme into the hosting we got for our blog.
We are able to design customized WordPress themes ourselves, so this is a handy option for us if we want our own WordPress blogsite with its own domain name and its own hosting, but don’t want to use one of the free themes available at wordpress.org
This site you are viewing right now (tant.co.za) uses a free WordPress theme. We registered the domain (tant.co.za), got hosting, logged into our hosting, installed WordPress, and installed this free theme. We have only slightly customized the theme. It took only a few steps to get set up to start (scroll down on that post a bit for the steps) adding pages and posts to our site.
Two other ways to start a blog if your existing site is not a Content Management System (like WordPress is):
1)
Add a WordPress blog to your existing site, which can be accessed by people visiting your existing website by a navigation tab called “News” or “Blog.” Your site’s hosting needs to have at least one database to do this.
2)
Change your existing brochure (can’t access yourself to make changes or add new pages, and is informative only) website to a WordPress-powered site, so you would have a same or similar look as before (or perhaps consider a new look entirely!), but now also with an area in which you can write your own blog posts or news. Changing your site to WordPress would also mean you could access all pages of your site yourself, so that you could make changes or updates yourself, without having to hire a web designer or other knowledgeable person to do your changes for you.
If you didn’t design your existing website yourself, and don’t know too much about website coding, designing websites, registering domains, hosting, and uploading site files to hosting, then for both of the 1) and 2) options directly above this paragraph, you would probably have to hire a web designer or somebody knowledgeable in these things to assist you or to get everything ready for you.
Once you have your blog set up and ready to use, starting to blog is all that’s left to do. You should learn the difference between pages and posts: Pages are static pages of general information that usually do not become stale or old – example your standard home, about, products, services, terms and conditions, disclaimer, privacy policy, meet us/about us/our history, portfolio, testimonials, gallery, contact etc pages. Posts are more for writing news, or for writing articles that relate to your business or site’s domain name, or for writing about anything else that you would like to write about.
With both Blogger and WordPress, you simply go to “add a new post” within your dashboard area, write what you want to write, and click publish. You can upload images to your posts too. Start a blog!
© Copyright Teresa Schultz 2014
