Blogging 101 – How to Start a Blog
We announced a Blogging 101 series a few months ago to help new bloggers launch and grow successful sites. After spending the summer preparing this series, we’re ready to answer your questions and guide you through each step. Thank you for joining us.
Note for experienced bloggers: While we’ll begin with setup basics, upcoming posts will cover advanced topics like ad networks that pay best, effective ad stacking to maximize revenue, optimizing blog structure to increase pageviews, which social platforms are worth your time, and search ranking strategies. Stay tuned for deeper lessons.
For many readers, starting a blog can feel overwhelming, so we’ll take a hands-on approach: we’ll build a new blog alongside you. Each post will walk through what we do so you can follow and create your own site at the same time.
1) What should you blog about?
Think about topics you already know well or subjects you’re eager to learn. Passion and curiosity make strong foundations for consistent content. For example, I started with little baking knowledge, but experimenting and engaging with the food-blogging community taught me skills that continue to be valuable. Choose something you can sustain and enjoy writing about.
2) Choosing a name (domain)
Your domain is the web address people use to find your site (for example, www.example.com). Availability will guide much of your choice, so have several options in mind. Aim for a simple, memorable name—two or three words, no hyphens, special characters, or numbers. Prefer .com when possible. Your content will ultimately drive traffic more than the name itself, but a clear, brandable domain helps with recognition across social platforms and communities.
3) Self-hosted or free platform?
Your blog lives on a server — a computer maintained by a hosting company that keeps your site online. Free platforms like Blogger and WordPress.com are good places to test ideas because they cost nothing and are easy to set up. Many bloggers start this way and learn the basics before investing further.
However, free hosts often limit monetization and may display their own ads on your content. They may also control your content and have the right to suspend or remove your site. If you want to grow a business, make money, or work with ad networks and industry partners, a self-hosted site is usually necessary.
Self-hosting means you pay a hosting provider to store and serve your site. That gives you full control over your content, design, and monetization options. For these reasons, this series will emphasize self-hosted setups and show how to make the transition. In retrospect, many successful bloggers regret delaying the move to self-hosting, because it can be more efficient to start with ownership from the beginning.
That said, if you just want to try blogging or learn the basics first, free platforms are a valid starting point. We began that way too, and you can always move to self-hosting later.
Ready to start? Follow our hosting tutorial to set up your site and get hands-on with the practical steps we’ll outline throughout this series. We’ll cover domain selection, hosting setup, installing WordPress, choosing themes and plugins, content strategy, basic SEO, and initial monetization options in upcoming posts.
Join us as we build a new blog together — one step at a time — and learn practical, proven methods to grow and monetize your site.