How to create a blog

So you've heard about this 'blogging' lark? and you think you want to give it ago, but are not quite sure where to start?

Well there are loads and loads of helpful sites around who can help you with everything you could ever want to know, and lots and lots of people wanting to offer their advice on how to blog.

Infact almost everyone who has a blog, quite likes to, at some stage, talk about blogging, up until now I had always avoided the whole 'heres how to blog' style posts, but due to the increased amount of people asking for some help and tips I thought it doesn't hurt to post what I know, and hopefully it may just help someone.

So I have put together some basic informative posts to help you learn about Blogging and to start with I'm going back to the very beginning...

How To Create a Blog

Creating a blog is really very simple, there are a couple of free blog hosting sites to help you along.

Blogger - thats who I use to host my blog, and Wordpress.

Both of these are free to use and allow you to get a good feeling for blogging.

I personally find Blogger to be the more user friendly and easy to understand, and for this reason I have always used blogger for the majority of my blogs, but many people recommend starting with WordPress as this is the one that if you get serious, and want to eventually buy your own web address and hosting package for your site, will be the option you will more than likely use.

But before you make your mind up on which platform you wish to blog with, there are a couple of things to think about.

The most important thing is to find which platform  you feel more comfortable with, and the one you feel you can navigate around easiest.  If blogging is not easy to do then it will loose its appeal pretty quickly.

Both Blogger and Wordpress have very similar options but both have their differences too.
Take a look at the screen shot below, on the left is blogger and on the right Wordpress the top two screens are the 'create new post' screens and the bottom two screen shots are the  display of published posts. This hopefully gives you an idea of the similarities/differences between the two.

click to enlarge

Other differences between WordPress and Blogger are the customisation options, and the way in which to set up and move around the items on your blog, I will cover more detailed tutorials for customising your blog in another post, but here is a couple more screen shots to see if either platform instantly appeals to you.

click to enlarge

The next important thing to think about is The Terms and Conditions.  Both platforms have their own set of Terms and Conditions to take note of when you are using their services.

Wordpress.com state that whilst you are using a free wordpress site you can not accept review items or money in advertising. This may not be something you are interested in to start with but it is worth keeping in mind Read through the full Terms of Service for WordPress.com here

If you decided you do want to venture into making money from your blog, then the way to go from wordpress.com is into self hosted. This is where you pay a hosting company such as TSOHost or GoDaddy a monthly or yearly amount for the space your site is using on the internet, and register your own Domain name. This service can vary in price depending on how much traffic you are expecting and what features you require  but basic packages are often all that is needed for a personal blog and these are normally less than £5 per month.

Blogger hosted Blogs are free to use and do not hold the same rules about review items and money from advertising, but as Blogger is part of the google group the terms of service fall part of the Google regulations found here and the specific content policy can be found here

A blogger blog can be given what is called a 'vanity' url, which is where you can register your own web address, that normally costs around £10 per year, to give your blog the professional look, but you are still using bloggers servers to hold all your information.

Once you decide which blog platform you would like to use, then you simply have to sign up for an account, think up a name and start posting!

This Post is part of my Bloggingtips  Series for more Blogging help and advise about all things from finding the perfect topic to making money via blogging then please check out the rest of the posts by clicking on the badge below.