Many people out there wonder how to make a blog because they are new at it, don’t really know technology, or they hear this term “blog” or “blogger thrown around. This and that hip person has a blog or blogs… It makes anyone want to know about it since bloggers write about things. They sometimes set agendas. They break news stories before the news organizations. They get things done.
It’s the new media.
Bloggers are also known as the “pajamas media” since you can literally be sitting in your pajamas with a laptop and internet connection and publish thoughts for the world to see.
Many “regular” people are impressed by this, and rightly so. A well designed blog is a special thing and it’s really a skill that many people want to build.,
Maybe you’re one of them.
Some bloggers make big money, others are broke but do it for the pleasure and the satisfaction.
Okay, so how to make a blog.
You can start a blog for free on any of the free blogging services, but those are mainly for novices and hobby bloggers.
You need to know that up front. The best one of those is WordPress.com. You use the famous WordPress blogging platform, which is the premier blogging platform that all the rest are measured against. You get to use real WordPress, and unless you map your own domain to it with their expensive charges, you will have a sub domain name that comes before the wordpress.com. So if your name is “”thebestblogever” then your domain would be thebesblogever.wordpress.com, unless you pay their exorbitant fee to map your own domain name to the blog.
The main drawback here is that you are using a service, and this applies to most “services”, you might have to censor yourself to stay within their Terms of Service, you accept that they can cancel your account and remove your content at will, and you do not get to use the many WordPress plugins that you can use if you hosted your own WordPress installation on your own web hosting service.
The same goes pretty much for every free blogging service, from Blogger to HubPages to whatever.
Okay, so you can make your blog by having your free hobby blog on some free service.
Real quick, the other two main options are hosting your own blog on your own web hosting service. This option has some more freedom but it costs in that you have to pay a hosting service (monthly) in addition to your own domain name, and you have to install and administer your own WordPress installation. It’s not that hard because the hosting services have it all ready to set up via their “back office” software that is part of their hosting accounts, but it does take some more technical know how than most people out there have. Also, you have to be up on security, keep it updated, and know how to handle plugins and more specifically SEO and security plugins. It can be a real bear, and your blog can get hacked and ruined. I have my own hosted blogs and I have had them hacked at times, and attacked frequently, so I speak the truth here.
The other option is a paid blogging service that is built on WordPress that has the strengths of WordPress, but it’s hosted by a company and they handle the security for you. If the paid blogging service wraps their blog together with a ready to go monetized system that lets you collect commissions on advertising conversions that happen when lots of people visit your blog, then that is another incentive to go that route. Click the banners around this blog to learn about that.
Okay, so how to make a blog…
Once you have your type of blog service picked out ( third party hosted commercial blog or self hosted and installed WordPress blog) and the basic format and design of the blog (the visual theme or skin) set up, you need to create a niche theme that you are going to write about. You should have a theme like this because you don’t want to write about radically different subject matter in the same blog. You don’t want to write about race cars and flower gardening, for example. That will make it tough for the search engines to classify and quantify your blog and categorize it well within their search index.
Another thing that you want to do when you are out to make a blog is to blog daily. You want to train yourself to write every day about something in your niche. This creates discipline, and you want to keep adding fresh content to your blog so that signals are sent out that it’s a living and growing thing. Search engines love lively blogs.
Se is another thing you have to learn the basics of when you make a blog. You have to learn how to know what people are searching Google for, and you do that by learning what SEO is. You also need some keyword research tools to help you learn what people are searching for so you can tailor your posts around that. This will draw in visitors as time goes by.
You need patience when you are out to make a blog. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither will your blog be built in a day. It takes some time to build a body of good content and get it noticed by the search engines and other people. You have to syndicate and share your content and create some kind of buzz around it.
Add all of these things up when you are considering what it takes for how to make a blog work. You need to put some thought into it and plan it out. Plan what you want to write about and then create lots of quality content for this masterpiece of yours. Over time you will get visitors who are interested in the information that you are providing. I am providing an article like this to help out the newbies who need to learn the basics. I seek to provide value with it, which leads me to…
Provide value when you learn how to make a blog post. Put value for the reader into your post.
Teach them something.
Convey that you care about your subject matter.
If your blog is WordPress or WordPress based, then it’s just like using a word processor, except that it’s done through a web browser. You create your title and the body of your blog post, which is just like creating an offline document. You can bold words, italicize them, underline them, and do all manner of text editing and formatting. You can create bullet or numbered lists, format paragraphs, etc.
You can update your posts later too. You can save the draft before it’s ready to be published which means you can work on and craft it until it’s perfect. There’s even a spell checker.
WordPress lets you add inline images just like I have done to this post. You can hyperlink words or images to other documents. I refer to other blog posts that I have written right in this document, and that is using the power of the World Wide Web. There is no point in rewriting content that you have already written, in every new document. Simply hyperlink to it!
You can categorize and tag your posts as well. Social sharing buttons can be added and people can comment on your posts if you enable that or leave that enabled.
Even non WordPress blog software has pretty much the same mix of features, but I like WordPress the best, and I loved the Kalatu service, which was WordPress based, just with the powerful earning potential added. Alas, that service was discontinued, but Power Lead System stepped up and gave us the Power Blog.
I care about what I am writing about and I hope that it came through to you.
Okay, now that you know how to make a blog, get with a blogging system that will bring you dividends for years to come.
Contact me if you have any other questions.
