Today on PageHub you'll learn how to make a blog for free. But before learning to create a blog, which doesn't cost you a penny, you must be clear about - what is a blog? This is important because this will help you decide whether you really need a blog or a website or some other content management system. We will discuss about it later in this article.
What is a blog?
A blog is simply a list of posts or articles posted at various times by the editor of the blog. There can be a different owner and editor of a blog but most times they are same. A blog usually contains articles, also known as posts, that are arranged chronologically or reverse chronologically (in case it is written as step-by-step guide). Blog usually concentrate on single topic but it is not uncommon to find a blog that has postings on varied subjects. This blog is example of a blog with posts on variety of subjects (or topics).
Difference between a Blog And Website
What is the difference between a blog and a website? A blog is actually a subset of website. A website can have a blog integrated in it which allows it to publish a fresh content. A website usually contains finite number of pages. A blog of a website then delivers latest news or happenings about the business that website represents. Having said this it will be wrong to assume that blog should exist only inside, as a part of, a website. There are many blogs that exist on their own. They are accessed by typing the URL in a web browser in the same way a website is accessed.
Making a free blog
Creating a professional looking blog is not at all expensive these days. In fact one create them for free. This is possible due to presence of free blogging engines like blogger, wordpress.com, and tumblr. Of course, these are plenty more but these are most popular among the masses.
Making a blog with the above mentioned blogging platforms is a breeze. They require user to signup, choose a blog title. After this much - all is needed is to create some posts and publish them.
You would be wondering -why free blogs are provided? Everything comes by spending money in modern world. Why would anyone be providing free blogging service to users in this day and age?
Free blogs comes with limited features. The free blogs are provided to actually gives you a taste of real thing. Real thing is not free. In free editions there are limits like number of posts that can be published, maximum storage that is allowed per blog, limited number of templates.
Having said that, the free blogs you create by using the blogging platforms, especially those mentioned here, have some very rich features. These include multi level comments, comment moderation, facility to label and tag posts(to allow them to get found easily by search engines), built in text editor to create articles and upload pictures and videos, and buttons to share blog posts.
Why people go for paid version then using free blog?
This question makes sense. When everything is available for free why pay extra money? To answer this I would like to ask you one question - Would you like to create a popular blog that is best in world or just a blog - just to have one? A free blog is a kind of "just a blog" while a paid blog is a "real blog".
Free blog limitations
To start with - a free blog is accessed using a subdomain address. For example http://pagehubs.blogspot.com has a blogspot in its address which is introduced by blogger in its free version. You can pay for a domain name to have this blog accessed as http://pagehubs.com (looks and sound more professional). Don't underestimate the importance of professional looking URL. Studies shows that people visit the professional looking blogs more than those hosted as sundomain's. So the first reason to get a paid version of a blog is to attract more users. This is actually what every blog creator wants. Not many want to create blogs just for themselves. Blog provides opportunity to you (the creator of blog) to reach new audience - to make more friends. This helps you grow your business or make more sales.
Second reason is that a free blog is unreliable. You never know about free services. They exist today but they might cease to exist tomorrow. Image if you have an award winning blog with hundred thousand audience (it is possible,there are many blog with much more followers ) and you make plenty of money by selling products using affiliate links or you make money using Adsense ( Advertising by Google) and suddenly one day you find all your posts deleted or in some cases your blog is banned because someone has reported a suspect activity ( something illegal or not in sync with policies of state where you live). You will be poorer in no time.
Third reason for avoiding a free blog is because they don't give you an identity. What I mean by Identity? Let me explain it to you.
We make a blog so that we present ourselves (in case of personal blog) or our business (in case of niche blog) on the web. Problem with free blog is that it has so many look alike's. These zero cost blogs come with same looks i.e same look and feel, same theme, same colors, same widgets, and since they are free there are many of them. This makes it very difficult to standout among the crowd.
Also imagine if someone owns a big business but chooses a penny-less platform to create a blog, thus his blog looks same as blog of someone who is bankrupt - what impression would it leave on visitors?
Finally most important reason why people don't consider making a free blog is because they are difficult to rank. Which rank I am talking about? Does someone rank blogs as well? - Yes!
Search engines, like Google, which allows us to search a thing on world wide web, rank articles based on some sophisticated algorithms. No one actually knows what the ranking algorithm is but there are unofficial rules and guidelines, much adapted across the world by webmasters, which if applied and taken care of while designing a blog can help optimize our blog to get the higher rank when search engines apply algorithm to our blog to list them on SERPS(Search Engine Result Pages). This process is called SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Paid blogs comes with features,and are designed so from the start, that makes them easy to rank well. Free blogs, on the other hand, require plenty of tweaking to optimize them for ranking well and it requires plenty of technical knowledge about web development and blog development.
Making Free Blog's Summarized
Step-1 - Go to any of the mentioned free blog engines in the article.
Step-2 - Sign up for free.
Step-3 Choose a title, template, and theme (if available) from dashboard.
Step-4 Start creating posts and either save them (for reviewing) or publish immediately to make blog come alive. Use pictures and videos inside your posts to make it look attractive.
Step-5 Popularize your blog by sharing it on you Facebook timeline. by tweeting on twitter, and by updating status on Google Plus.
Step-6 When your blog gets popular, consider switching to paid version to attract more traffic and to rank well by search engines.
I hope you enjoyed reading this article. Do share with your friends. I will be posting lot more on blogging and related topics. Don't forget to visit again. Bye!
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