Having a click-worthy domain name is essential because it increases the chances of getting more traffic and ranking on SERPs. A good domain name represents your brand identity, giving your blog more credibility and appearing more professional. A short and simple domain name lets visitors recognize and remember your blog much easier.
Ideally, it should contain only one to two words. After registering your domain name, decide on a web hosting service to host your blog. Consider picking a web hosting service that suits your needs and budget. After your hosting plan is activated, point your registered domain name to your web hosting, and you are ready to build a blog.
A CMS is a powerful platform to manage and store your blog content. Conduct some research and select which CMS best suits your needs. Install your chosen CMS to your web hosting panel when you decide which one to use. After CMS installation is complete, you are now ready to customize your blog. Prioritize on completing the essential parts first. Say you are designing your blog using WordPress.
Here are some essential steps you will have to take before having your blog accessible online:. To make a lasting impression on your visitors and entice them to return to your blog, focus on creating quality blog posts. This means creating content that is engaging , valuable, and easy to understand. Schedule when and how many posts you will share on social media platforms. For example, two posts per week are good to keep consistency.
Also, integrate social media platforms into your blog to create easy access for visitors to connect to your blog and share the content on their social media accounts too.
It can seem demanding to consistently publish content, promote it on social media, and monitor the blog performance. You will have to make sure your theme and plugins are compatible and up-to-date.
Otherwise, they can disrupt the user experience or break your site. Other maintenance tasks like finding and fixing broken links, updating the core software, and optimizing your database will also be your responsibility.
This can be difficult for site owners who don't have the time or technical expertise to regularly maintain their site. Tech Crunch , one of the largest and most popular technology news blogs, is powered by WordPress. Take a look at this WordPress website example below. Best for: Design. Squarespace is an ideal blogging platform for businesses and individuals creating image-rich content. With Squarespace's award-winning designer templates and integrations with Getty Images, Unsplash, and Google AMP, you can create visual content that's engaging and shareable.
While Squarespace only offers about templates, they are all mobile-optimized and fully customizable so you can create a blog that looks the way you want it to.
Finally, after publishing your blog posts, you can connect your social media accounts to easily promote them. Squarespace offers even more features , from audio files support to newsletter signup forms, but ultimately it's limited in functionality.
That's because it supports less than 30 extensions, so you're mostly limited to the features Squarespace provides out-of-the-box. Since they lack some feature that bloggers needs — like an auto-save feature, for example — Squarespace is not the ideal platform for everyone.
Squarespace does allow some bloggers to create beautiful sites, like this lifestyle blog below. Best for: Fast Setup. Wix is a popular blogging platform for beginners who are looking for hosting and blogging tools in one place and who prioritize speed and design over functionality. With Wix, you have two options for creating your blog.
Using the Wix Editor, you can start by selecting from over pre-designed templates that any blogger can use, whether you own a retail business or run a food review website. Using Wix Artificial Design Intelligence, on the other hand, you can fill out a quick questionnaire and have a blog created for you.
After you've picked or created your template, or had one selected for you with Wix ADI, you can begin writing and editing posts on desktop or mobile, embed Wix's stock photos and videos or your own media, and organize them into topics. Once you're done writing, you can configure your SEO settings to boost your organic reach, push your content to your subscribers with Wix's email tool, and share them through your social media accounts. You can further foster a sense of community among your readers by letting them become members.
While Wix is more versatile than other hosted website builders, it lacks customization options and content management features, particularly when comparing Wix vs WordPress or another CMS.
This process can be intimidating for beginners, particularly when compared to the ease of installing plugins on WordPress. It's post editor also isn't drag-and-drop, which might frustrate some bloggers. Take a look at this Wix blogger's site below for an example of a stylish but relatively simple blog. Best for: Ease of Use. Weebly is another popular blogging platform for bloggers that want everything they need to launch a blog in one place, including website building tools, templates, and hosting.
More specifically, Weebly is best suited for creating blogs with lots of content but more basic functionality. Weebly is affordable and easy to use like Wix, but differentiates itself in multiple ways.
The editor supports drag-and-drop functionality for both posts and pages, for example. You can create more complex layouts by adding elements like forms and image galleries as well. You can also add more sub-levels to your navigation menus, which allows you to organize larger amounts of content. All Weebly templates are also mobile-optimized, which means you won't have to do any additional editing or rearranging for mobile.
While Weebly offers more functionality than most website builders, it does lack flexibility when compared to WordPress or another CMS. These restrictions do make Weebly easier to learn and use than most platforms, but they can frustrate more advanced users.
There's also been some pain points since Weebly was acquired by the ecommerce company Square. A prime example: users who select that they want to create a website will see the standard Weebly editor, whereas users who select that they want to create a website with an online store will see a completely different editor called the Square Online Builder.
This has caused some confusion among users. Take a look at this Weebly blog below, which is content-rich but not feature-rich. Best for: Customization. Craft CMS is a blogging platform designed for developers, designers, and web professionals.
With Craft's personalized content modeling, powerful templating, and option to edit your source code, you can completely control the appearance and functionality of your site — if you have the necessary experience.
Craft CMS also offers an image editor, collaboration tools, and a localization feature that can translate your content to specific languages. You can now also manage multiple blogs from within a single Craft install. If you have the web development experience to fully leverage the power of Craft CMS, you'll be able to create a complex blog with custom post types, like this travel blog below.
Best for: Enterprise Content Marketing. That being said, it really does deserve some attention! In short, LinkedIn just works as a platform where you can get exposure, and this makes it one of the best free blogging sites of them all. From a technical point of view, publishing on LinkedIn is easy. If you want to learn more about how blogging on LinkedIn works, read this in-depth guide. Weebly is another website builder that you can use not only to blog but also to sell products or showcase your portfolio.
If you want to add a certain button, you can simply drag it to the page and customize it. The same happens with photo galleries, slideshows, and any other multimedia element.
Weebly provides sidebars, media boxes, forms, ad spaces , social media icons, newsletter subscription, and many more. Moreover, the platform comes with built-in analytics and lets you use your own customized domain for which you need to pay. Medium is a multipurpose platform tackling diverse topics, where anyone with an account can write.
But the downside is that all your content is on Medium. Read this post for more on the differences between WordPress and Medium. This is another WordPress-like blogging platform. While the Ghost software can be downloaded for free , you need paid hosting for fuel. DigitalOcean is a great service that supports Ghost: it is cheap and comes with a bunch of nice features to get you started. To create a post in Ghost is easy once you set up your website.
The editor is simple and minimalist, and it offers a live preview of your text on the right side of the screen. Near the editor screen, there is a sidebar with settings, where you can choose your preferences. It works just like the other hosted platforms: you need to create an account first in order to use it. After you create it which is simple , you have to pick one of the default themes and you can start writing your thoughts down. Blogger delivers a bunch of themes to choose from, each providing different skins, advanced color filtering, and various minimalist gadgets aka widgets.
But nothing too fancy or any advanced design customization. In general, Blogger has simple appearance options, so the focus stays more on the writing part. A nice part about this site is that it comes with ad spaces that you can place within your content pieces. Tumblr is one of the original free blogging sites on the web. Unlike the rest of the platforms that are mostly created for publishing purposes, this one here is more oriented to multimedia or social media-like content.
Just like a regular blogging platform, it provides multiple post formats for different types of content. With social media, you can network with other bloggers and people in your industry or niche. Then, when the article is live, you can share it on social media and tag them. Another social media strategy you can try is to find online forums and discussion sites e. When you first start, we recommend publishing a minimum of one blog post per month, although many bloggers suggest publishing at least three posts per week.
The answer here really depends on your schedule but remember to prioritize quality. A few awesome blog posts a month are better than several low-quality blog posts a week. The first thing you can do to find content ideas is head over to other popular blogs in your niche and look at their top articles.
That can be a good source of inspiration, but avoid just copying content. Just use this to find ideas and understand what the main topics are in your industry. If you find inspiration, consider using the same topic but making it into a different content format to make it different from what already exists.
For example, you might find that your competitor posted a YouTube video that went viral. In that case, you could take the same or a tangentially related topic and create a long-form article or a listicle blog post. First, you can try typing your niche or broad topic in Google Image Search and see if you find any ideas. But since most of these are paid, consider using free tools when first starting.
There are many ways you can use these tools to uncover keywords to create blog posts. However, we recommend starting off by targeting relevant keywords with low keyword difficulty. This will give you a better shot at ranking in search results. To get your keywords to rank better, and to create an intuitive blog structure for both users and search engines, you can create content clusters.
Your pillar content can be a broad keyword with high search volume e. The topic clusters, on the other hand, should be more long-tail keywords with less search volume, but that you can rank for e. You will then use internal links to properly connect the pillar pages with the individual topic clusters. One of the easiest ways to find content ideas is to see what your readers think and talk about, and what questions they have about your content. Reading comments can help with that, but an even more direct way to hear from your audience is by asking them.
You can do this through social media or email. Just find a popular podcast in your niche and scroll through the episode titles and descriptions. Pinterest is a great resource for uncovering unique content ideas. You can also use Pinterest to find ideas for visual content that you can add to your blog posts. Finally, you can use Buzzsumo to find keywords, stories, common questions, and more around your topic.
What makes it different from other tools is that you can easily find content that has the most engagement on social media platforms. You can also find common questions in online forums, write an article about it, and then go to the forum and link to your article.
If you choose to get the paid version, you can also monitor trends and comments, and find influencers in your niche, along with other features for content research and discovery. Try playing our two content brainstorming games with some friends, colleagues, or even by yourself to come up with the best article titles for your blog.
If you change your mind and think that blogging is not for you, you can always cancel the hosting service. Many providers offer a day money-back guarantee. There are many different blogging platforms that you can choose from, like Wix, Joomla, and Blogger. To blog anonymously, avoid using your real name, photo, and email address.
We suggest you create an anonymous email account, along with a blogger identity. Then click on the drop-down menu Display name publicly as and choose your nickname.
This will protect you from spam and other unsolicited emails, phone calls, and mail, as well as identity theft, fraudulent domain transfers, users including competitors being able to look up your domains, malware, and SEO blacklists.
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