Starting your own blog
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One of the things I’ve learned about making websites, is that making a blog is a great way to deliver content that you care about while also taking far less effort to create pages than with a traditional HTML coded site such as my first website, Easy Online Money Making. Blogs are an effective and technologically current way to share your opinions, sell products, advertise things, etc. I’ve had quite a few people ask me how to start a blog, etc. so I’ve decided to create this little tutorial.
There are basically two options for blogging, self hosted blogs and free (supported) blogs. Personally, I use both to cover all the bases as I see fit. There are many different places to get “free blogs” from in which advertisements will allow companies to provide the webspace/bandwidth. My personal favorite is Squidoo which allows you to build “lenses” on specific topics. Rather than having to come up with an overarching idea for a cohesive blog this allows you to simply write a single detailed page about a topic that you are an expert in (or at least in your mind) and you will get a cut of the profits (50% of Squidoo’s profits will go to the lensmaster, 5% will be donated to charity, there is also an option to donate your money straight to one of the charity funds so that your knowledge can also help those less fortunate). For some examples of “lenses” that I’ve written check out Online Butcher and Consummate Webmaster. I use Squidoo for any topics that I don’t really see as fitting for my website or for this blog as I like to write about many different topics, and this site is already getting a little bit too generalized as I constantly add new categories.
If you’d like to sign up I’d recommend you do it via the banner below, if you do you will receive an additional $5 into your account upon hitting $15 (I’m around $15 now and now I’m angry that I didn’t use the banner provided by the person that introduced me to Squidoo). For more information on Squidoo check out get paid to write which happened to be my first post on this blog. For those looking for an easy way to make money without a big time commitment, enjoy!
Now for those looking to make more money off advertisements and get better search engine placements hosting your own blog is the way to go, for this you will need a webhost and domain name. The best option for experienced and unexperienced users alike is to use the Wordpress blog platform which is an open-source highly user friendly environment. It literally takes the same level of technical knowledge as a word processor requires, I write things then press save or publish and it just loads a template with all my AdSense ads etc. The actual installation on your own webhost can be quite difficult and it will only work on webhosts providing php and MySQL databases, for this reason I used Bluehost. which comes with the platform pre-installed on your server. Having your own website is nowhere near as expensive or difficult as it may sound. For $6.95 a month I get 15TB of bandwidth, excellent customer support, 2500 email addresses, etc. This much bandwidth will support a couple million visitors a month so I will never have to upgrade plans, switch hosts etc. and this domain is free thanks to Bluehost for as long as I have their plans. Honestly there is nearly no effort required in starting a self-hosted blog, all said and done as an 18 year old with limited experience with web design etc. it took five hours to create this blog and start posting since everything was pre-installed; therefore the time spent was just signing up billing information and finding a nice template for my blog (I chose one that placed AdSense ads on my site for me to make it easier due to literally zero PHP experience). If you’d like to give Bluehost a try check it out below.
Hopefully this was helpful, good luck with your future blog!