A blog is a short form of the word weblog and it is used for personal, Non-profit and business purposes. Many people use it as a diary, to record their daily events, interests and hobbies. Businesses use it to promote their products and services. It is a very useful tool for creating awareness for businesses, events, organization, politics, etc. According to wpvirtuoso, as at November 2013, there are 152,000,000 blogs on the internet. These blogs are on different topics such as Politics, entertainment, Marketing, Celebrity, Weight Loss, Relationship, Business, News etc.
Ease of Creating a new blog
Creating a new blog is not as difficult as it used to be. In those days, you cannot create a blog without knowing how to code or write programs. These days, you can create a blog if you know how to move your mouse around. It is now an easy task to create blogs and as many as you want.
Cost of creating a new blog
There are free and paid blogs. If you are just starting out with blogging, you can experiment with the free ones and then move on to paid platform. Below are the list of top 10 free blogging platforms:
1. WordPress
2. Blogger
3. Tumblr
4. Medium
5. Typepad
6. Postach.io
7. Square space
8. Posthaven
9. SETT
10. Ghost
The most popularly used free blog platforms are WordPress and Blogger. However, I love blogger because it is easy to use, customize and it ranks better on Google.
How to create a free Blog on Blogger
1. Type www.blogger.com into your browser
2. Sign in with your Gmail address
3. Click New blog
4. Type in the name of your blog, your blog address and the template (design) you want for your blog. The name of your blog can be your business name, hobby, interest, event, organization etc. For example, if you are into cake baking, you can call it – bakeacake.blogspot.com.
5. Click on “create blog“
6. Click on “Start posting“
7. Type in the title of your post and the post in the space provided below
8. When you are done, take a look at the right hand side of the screen, you will see the post setting box as shown below:
9. Click on the label to provide tags for your post. Tags are keywords related to your niche/topic. They are the words internet surfers will /may use to find your blog.
For example, I created a blog for relationship matters. My tags include dating, relationship, love etc. When you are done, click on “done“.
10. Now, move down to “Schedule” if you are not ready to post immediately.
Select the date and time you will like your blog to go live and click on “done“. Sometimes, you may want to write post and schedule them for posting later, especially when you are going on holidays or when you envisage your schedule will be tight. This will keep your blog fresh and lively.
11. The next item on the list is the “permalink“. This is important if you want to get the page address of your blog post. This is the link you will submit when you want to promote your blog, ping your blog etc.
Click on “done” and head over to “Options“.
11. This is where you set the options for the post page. The options here includes: whether or not to allow people to comment on your post, to show html or use tags. You can leave the options as they are.
12. Click on “done” and then scroll to the top of the page to click on “Publish“. When you do that, you will see a box displayed asking you whether you want to share your post on google+ or not, if you don’t have a google+ account, simply click cancel, if you want to share it, click “share“.
13. On the next page shown, click on “view blog” to see how your blog look like.
14. You can now see your new blog.
You have to keep it fresh and lively by posting articles on it on a regular basis. If you don’t know how to write articles, enroll in my free article writing course and download the free e-book on writing articles. It will help you a lot. In my next post, we will take if further by looking at paid blogs. Keep it a date with me.
