How to get started with blogging

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I’ve had a lot of comments and messages on Facebook lately asking me how to get started with blogging and how to make money from so I thought I’d write a small series of posts on the topic and see if we can get some of you on the blogging bandwagon!

I’ll start off by saying that there are two ways to approach blogging – one way is free and the other will cost you a bit of money to get going.

For the sake of keeping things simple and budget friendly I’m going to be talking about the free way today, this is perfect if you’ve never blogged before and just want to test the waters – if you don’t like it then no harm done from trying and if you love it and want to step it up and start making money from it you’ve already got the basics down!

First things first…

What are you going to blog about?

This is probably the hardest part of staring a blog, you either have no idea what to write about or so much you could write bout that you don’t know where to start.
The quickest way to tackle this is with good old-fashioned pen and paper and start jotting down subjects that you love or know a bit about that you could share with others. Once you have a few down you could add in any sub-genres (maybe you like crafting, a sub genre could be knitting or painting), don’t be afraid if you think your hobbies or likes are too niche you can literally blog about anything and there will be readers out there for you!
I’ll give you an example of what my list would look like for this blog

Money

Saving
- Savings Accounts
Debt
- Debt Snowball
- Closing accounts
- Motivation
Making Money
- How to sell on eBay/FB Marketplace
- Side Hustles
  - Etsy
  - Reselling on eBay
  - Blogging

Ok, now we need to…

Decide on a name

You can name your blog whatever you like. The main thing you need to avoid is use of copyrights (so no ‘Louboutin on a Lemonade Budget’ or ‘Disney Diva’) and you want to try to make it easy to read/memorable so no made-up words or ‘LisasBlog99’. You could name it after yourself, your hobby, make it a play on words – the only thing to remember is that if you decide to get serious with blogging you will want to buy a domain to host your blog on, if you find a name you like check to see if the .com/.co.uk/.info of it is available.

So, we’ve got our topics and our name, now we just need to…

Choose a platform

There are a lot of blogging platforms on the internet but the most popular two are Blogger and WordPress. I’m going to come straight out and say I hands down prefer WordPress and won’t recommend anything else to anyone wanting to try out blogging. The main reasons being that it has a lot more functionality/design options and if you decide to take your blogging to the next level and go self-hosted (put it on a .com/.co.uk/.info domain and start making money from it) it’s a lot easier to do on WordPress.

To start a free WordPress blog go to here and enter your details, on the next page choose the name you’d like your blog to go by (blogname.wordpress.com), select the free option and then on the next screen select the free package.

And just like that, you have a blog! Your own little corner of the internet to write about what you wish. The easiest way to learn how to use WordPress is to play around with it, you can’t break it so don’t worry about making mistakes. WordPress have a library of free video tutorials to show you how to get your first posts and images uploaded on their support pages.

Hopefully that gives you enough information to get started and create your blog – give it a go and then come back with any questions you have, I’ll be happy to answer them as best as I possibly can for you!