How To Start A Blog For Free (Blogger, Wordpress And Tumblr)

Whether you want to promote your business, or want to make money online, or just write about what's happening in your life, blogging is one of the very useful tools. One of the most widely used ways to make money online is blogging, which is kind of easy if you have passion or interest in a topic (or niche). For those of you who don't know what a blog is,

Yeah, 😁 I just did a screenshot of Google definition. This isn't something that, I think, I have to elaborate on. It's just about regularly posting or updating a blog, just like you post status updates on Facebook, or tweet on Twitter. Twitter is a micro-blogging platform by the way. What we are discussing here, is writing articles, or long contents, just like this one.

Why do I need to start a blog?

Well, if you are planning to start a blog, you should ask this question to yourself. Do you think you can write a lot of content about something? Do you have something to share with others that you think others will find it worth reading? Or you just want to write about events happening in your life. It depends on you. 

How could blogging be useful for your business?

So you have a website for your business, but you barely get any traffic to your website via search engines. You could use paid advertisements but that kind of costs you a lot. So, blogging is your lifesaver in this case. Blogging, as it means, is just updating your website regularly, which is very beneficial for your website if you want your website to rank higher in search engines. Posting new and updated content also helps you get discovered by new users as people share your content on social media if they find it interesting. 

Can I Make Money Online Via Blogging?

Of course, there are a lot of ways to make money online via blogging if your blog starts to get enough traffic. One of the oldest ways to make money online by blogging is just placing ads on your blog and sell the traffic, but there are other various ways you can make money online with blogging.

Okay, Enough about blogging, tell me how to start one.

There are many platforms where you can start blogging right now, but I'm gonna talk about the free ones here, as the title says.

1. Blogger:

I am putting Blogger before Wordpress because I think, when it comes to free blogging platforms, blogger is one of the best platforms. Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was developed by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Blogger is one of the simplest blogging platforms with simple UI. You can easily get around with the UI, once you start using it. So, let's look at how you can start a blog for free right away in blogger:

   Step #1: Go to blogger.com:

   

   

   Step #2: Sign in to blogger using your Google account. If you don't have, create one.

   

   

   

   Step #3:  After you sign in to blogger using your Google account, you will land on this page:

   

   

  

   Step #4: Now click on New Blog at the top left corner, and this will pop up. Type in the name of the Title (Name) of your blog and address as you wish. For now, choose default theme, you can always change it later and click on Create Blog!

   

Congratulations!, you have just created a new Free blog in blogger. Now let's talk about the User Interface of your blogger blog.

  1. Posts: You can see all your posts here. 

  2. Stats: Here, you can see the stats of your blog. This means the pageviews, traffic sources, the geography of visitors and so on.

  3. Comments: All the comments published on your blog posts.

  4. Earnings: After publishing enough posts and gaining enough traffic to your blog, your blog will be eligible for Adsense, which is a way to monetize your blog.

  5. Campaigns: Here, you can promote your blog using Adwords which is Google's advertising platform. If you want to gain new readers via advertising you can easily set it up from here.

  6. Pages: Pages are not like posts. They are static and not updated that frequently. For eg: About Us, Contact Us, Terms of Use, Privacy Policy and so on.

  7. Layout: Here you can change the layout of your blog. You can add widgets provided by Blogger or you can create your own widgets if you know HTML and other languages.

  8. Theme: Here, you can change the look of your blog, like fonts and colors to be used, size of the blog columns and many more.

  9. Settings: As it says, you can change the settings of your blog. You can change title, description, address and many more.

To write a new blog post, simply go to Posts and click on New Post and start writing.

2. WordPress

WordPress is one of most widely used blogging platforms. It claims to power 30% of the internet, which is huge. One of the things that I found myself confused about when I was first introduced to WordPress, was the wordpress.org and wordpress.com. So, I am gonna clarify it here. There are two versions of WordPress that you can use for your blog.

One is WordPress.com, where you won't have to host the software yourself, no need to register domain name anywhere else, everything you need will be there but of course you will have to pay for it. 

The other is WordPress.org which is an open source software, that you can download and host anywhere you want.

Both the blogging platforms are same but it depends upon you what you'd like to do. If you don't want to be involved in buying domain name, hosting and setting up the website yourself, then wordpress.com is perfect for you. But if you want to do it yourself, then just download the software from wordpress.org and host it anywhere you want.

In this article, since we are talking about free blog, I am going to show you how to start a free blog in wordpress.com.

  Step #1: Head over to wordpress.com

  

 Step #2: Click on Get Started.

  

 Step #3: Fill up the form that comes up. 

    

  

 Step #4: Type in the keyword that you want to be used in the address of your blog and select the free one which is a subdomain of wordpress.com.

  

   

Step #5: It's time to choose the plan. Since we are starting a free blog, choose the free plan.

 

Step #6: Create an account using your email address or just click on continue with Google.

 

 Congratulations! You free WordPress blog is now ready.

 

First off, I recommend you to complete the to do list of the dashboard. It includes, uploading favicon, blog logo, writing a short description, etc.

Now that your WordPress blog is ready, let's talk about the User Interface of WordPress dashboard:

1. Stats: As before in blogger, stats, here also, means the information about the visitors to your blog. You can see which post got the most pageviews, the geolocation of the readers, traffic sources and more.

2. Site Pages: Just like in blogger, Pages here too, mean the static pages like About Us, Contact Us and so on.

3. Blog Posts: Here is where your blog posts will be. You can edit the view them and publish them from here.

4. Themes: There are a lot of beautiful and elegant themes available for wordpress. You can choose one from this section and apply to your blog.

5. Plugins: Plugins are like widgets in blogger. They are apps that you can use to enhance and better your blog. You can choose from a whole lot of plugins that are very useful in your blogging.

6. To Instantly start writing click on Write button at the top right.

7. Want to see how your blog looks like to other visitors? Click on visit site and see your beautiful blog.

3. Tumblr

Tumblr is also one of the best platforms for blogging. You can create free blog in Tumblr and can also add your own custom domain for free. You can follow other blogs, like their posts, reblog their posts. Reblogging is one of most useful tool here. This can help you gain more followers as people can easily reblog your content if they find it interesting. 

You can post seven types of content in your Tumblr blog:

Now let's go through how you can easily create a free blog in Tumblr.

Step #1: Head Over To tumblr.com.

Step #2: Click on Get Started.

Step #3: Fill up the Email Address, password and username.

Also complete the next form and click on next.

Step #4: Select any 5 or more topics that you are interested in and click on next:

After this, you will be taken to your dashboard. Here you can post your own articles, read others', like them, reblog them and comment on them. 

Click on your avatar to edit the appearance of your blog. 

So these are the 3 free blogging platforms that I have used and I find these platforms very easy for beginners. Once you start hanging around these platforms, you will get used to them very soon. 

Final Words??

 Whichever blogging platform you may use, the main thing that matters is the content. If your readers find your content useful and worth reading then you are good regardless of the blogging platform you choose. ☻