How to start a blog - From the perspective of a starter
How to start a blog? Is it still worth starting a blog? Do I need to write well to start a blog? What would I even blog about? And so, the list goes on.
Although, I cannot answer these questions for you, I can take you along my journey that took me from thinking about starting a blog to starting a blog. At the time of writing this I have yet to post an article. My thoughts were to write about the entire process of getting started while the process is still fresh in my mind.
One of the first things I did when starting out was to simply google how to start a blog. Although that would seem like a reasonable and logical thing to do (for the most part it is). It is also extremely overwhelming. There is a mountain of information, mostly good, some less so. Do I know which is which? Not always.
However, the biggest downside on this over availability of information is the paralysis that come with it. People talking about which platform to use, how to select a niche, marketing your blog, SEO, selecting a domain, email lists, etc. For the most part very little of that actually matters! At least at the start.
Why do I say that? Wel, simply because it mostly does not matter or can easily be changed at a later stadium. I will explain my reasoning in a bit. Firstly, I would like to highlight what does actually matter. And… can you guess what that is? Posting a blog. Spending your time creating and putting your work out there. For that you only need a domain, a hosting service, and the content that you write.
Of those I would only spend some time thinking about the name of your domain as you usually reserve that for a year, although it is generally not expensive it is not something you want to change often. Especially if you were to get people following your blog and suddenly you are posting at a different website. There are also ways to deal with this, although I will not pretend to know much about that. However, if the time would ever come then I can simply learn to do it.
Now why did I say all the other topics this does not really matter. Let us take your niche (What you blog about) for example. Today you feel like writing about blogs, tomorrow you are inspired to write about the you amazing trip to Greece a few months ago. So, the list goes on. If you write about all those things and post them at worst, you will have content that you posted. As you write more, certain topics will naturally come up more. Then you can start to bring focus to your blog and find your niche. YOU CAN ALWAYS DELETE SOMETHING THAT YOU POSTED. If you find that you already know exactly what you want to write about that is also great.
Similarly, when selecting a hosting service. It is always possible to switch your domain over to a new hosting service if you want to do that in the future. It is not permanent. There are also truly trivial differences in functionality when comparing the most major hosting platforms. Remarkably comparable results can be achieved using any of them. Yes, there will be more extreme cases where on platform has a bit of an advantage one way or another depending on your needs. However, this will be so little, especially initially.
Another term you will come across often is search engine optimization (SEO), together with marketing, advertising, email lists etc. If there is almost no content to market/advertise, it does not make sense to spend time optimizing for it. Therefore, don’t worry about it and don’t let it stop you from starting. Obviously, there is no problem in learning about those things, but so often (me included) that is an extremely easy excuse to not start.
You can spend forever researching every single aspect of blogging, but you are only a blogger if you actually post blogs. So, as my first post I hope this finds you well. Hopefully, it is a little bit of inspiration and just the voice you needed to hear. Don’t worry too much and start creating. You will learn through the journey, and I can’t wait to see what you end up writing.
