by Perhaps one of the most difficult parts of any task is the GETTING STARTED.
Despite the plethora of information available on the internet, blogging can still be quite overwhelming for beginners especially if they don’t know how to start, which tools to use, how much to spend or which strategies to follow.
The key to overcoming this is by taking things step by step. Here’s a Comprehensive Tutorial on How to Start a Successful Blog for Beginners.
Blogging is a form of digital publishing. And with digital publishing, you’ll need a RELIABLE platform where you can easily share your content to potentially millions of people around the world. That’s the beauty of digital publishing, it’s borderless and there are no limits as to what niche you can tap into.
Free vs Paid Blogging Platforms
It’s important to determine your GOAL as to why you’re foraying into the world of blogging.
Do you want to blog simply because you’re passionate about something and you just want to share it to like minded people? Or do you want to blog because you want it to be a passive income or a side hustle that could help your earn money in the long term?
If it’s the former, using a FREE blogging platform might be a great jump off point as you won’t have to shell out money for your hobby. It is a great experimental tool where you can unleash your creativity without hurting your budget. You can still get your content out there but keep in mind, getting traffic would take longer as free blogging platforms don’t have an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) advantage. Not having an SEO advantage basically means that it will decrease your chances of ranking on the first page of search engines like Google search, Yahoo or Bing search.
Moreover, FREE blogging platforms don’t offer full-functionalities that are needed to boost your website. You won’t be able to customise your themes, install different plug-ins, and your monetisation options might be limited as well.
With free blogging platforms you’d be limited to a subdomain that looks like this for example:
http://nameofblog.bloghost.com
With PAID blogging platforms on the other hand, you’ll be able to create your own website that is highly brandable. Your website will look like this:
http://nameofblog.com
Not only is your blog easily remembered, but it is also shorter, and most importantly, your website will be SEO friendly.
With paid blogging platforms, the sky is the limit. You can pretty much tweak your website according to your liking- install plugins and themes and monetisation options are limitless. You’ll have a higher chance of getting more traffic and you can earn more from it.
But of course, paid blogging platforms might shy away beginners because it requires an upfront capital to start and maintain your website. Most paid blogging platforms charge monthly and that might be costly for those who are just in the experimentation phase.
When choosing a free blogging platform, it’s important to ask yourself what your plans would be if your site takes off and your traffic grows exponentially.
Would my current platform allow for a seamless integration and transfer to a paid blogging platform?
It’s imperative to consider a platform that allows for flexibility so if you later on decide to switch to a paid blogging platform, you won’t encounter headaches because your current host doesn’t allow for it. Even if you don’t have any coding knowledge, your current platform should be able to help you transfer your content and assets into a paid platform.
Here are the Best Free Blogging Platforms for Beginners in 2020
1. WordPress.com
WordPress.com is the best and the most popular blogging platform out there. Not to be confused with WordPress.org, WordPress.com is free but you can later on upgrade to a custom plan so a seamless integration is very much possible.
There are hundreds of available themes for your free WordPress site and what’s great about it is that you can enable ad monetisation, plus you can add widgets and it’s mobile friendly too!
Of course, the downside of WordPress, just like with any free blogging platform is that you won’t have custom domain name like .com, .org or .net, etc. Also, you won’t be able to upload plugins.
2. Wix.com
Wix.com boasts itself as a professional website builder that allows you to easily create a stunning blog in just a matter of minutes. Over 160+ million people use Wix.com as their preferred blogging platform and it’s still growing in popularity.
There are hundreds of free HTML themes and customizable templates to choose from and you can simply just drag and drop the features that you would like to see in your website. What I love the most about Wix is that their themes and templates are aesthetically modern and even if you have zero coding knowledge, you’ll still be able to pull off a professional looking website. Not only that, plugins and widgets are available, plus their templates are also optimised for mobile so you wouldn’t have to worry about tweaking anything at the back-end.
3. Blogger
Blogger is a blog publishing platform owned by Google. It is perhaps one of the oldest publishing platforms out there and when i first forayed into the world of blogging, I used blogger to create my first ever blog. Back then, my website url looked like this:
http://websitename.blogspot.com
It has come a long way since then, and i still highly recommend it if you want to start blogging without spending a dime.
The interface is still pretty easy to use and there are still a hundred of themes that you can choose from to customise your website. However, using a free blogger website didn’t really do much for SEO. It really took me a while before I was able to get traffic for my blog but it required countless of hours of promoting on social media.
I couldn’t stress this enough, if you want to rank high on search engines, free blogging platforms wouldn’t be on your side. Your best bet is to go for paid blogging platforms. Monetisation is pretty limited with blogger unfortunately.
My concern with blogspot, however, was that I found it a bit difficult to transfer my blogspot blog into a custom domain because I didn’t have prior coding experience.
Again, blogger is perfect for hobbyists, amateurs, or for those who just love to write.
4. Weebly
Weebly is a drag and drop website builder perfect for beginners who wants to start blogging. Weebly was recently just acquired by Square and they have over 12 million + subscribers worldwide.
When you want ease of use and extremely efficient features that allow you to optimise your website I’d recommend Weebly. Their drag and drop feature is my personal favorite, plus their simple themes are highly responsive and can be optimised for mobile.
Of course, since it’s a free blogging platform, a weebly ad will show at the footer of your blog. It’s not that much of an eye sore but if you don’t like ads showing up, you can just simply upgrade to their premium plans.
Widgets for galleries, videos, and other types of media are available and you can also put banner ads for monetisation.
For free plan subscribers, SSL security is free, and you’ll be given a 500mb storage plus a domain name with the Weebly brand.
5. Tumblr
Tumblr‘s user base skews towards the younger demographic. Tumblr can be considered as a social networking site in terms of high content shareability amongst its users, which is always a good thing because tapping into your niche should be any content publisher’s goal.
Compared to other free blogging sites, Tumblr is a highly visual platform where most artists captivate their followers through visually aesthetic edits, pictures, gifsets and videos. The key to having your content share worthy is by posting high quality media. Tumblr is known for fandoms where passionate fans of celebrities, singers, actors, movies, etc., come together to “stan” (slang of the words stalk+fan). If you want a highly engaging community with a passionate fan base of young, enthusiastic and creative people, Tumblr is the way to go.
The downside of Tumblr is that it’s not SEO friendly. Ranking on search engines can be difficult as images, gifsets and videos in your content might not contain keywords that would help your rank. But you can run Google adsense in your site so you can monetise your content .
There are hundreds of themes created by the tumblr community, though you can’t really upload plugins and widgets to fully customise your site.
Also, your domain will look like this:
https://websitename.tumblr.com
6. Jimdo
Jimdo is an underrated gem of blogging platforms but it has built over 25 million websites in almost all countries in the world since its inception in 2007. Its primary goal is to empower small businesses into having a digital presence so they could expand and grow their sales. Jindo is perfect for those who are looking to create a professional blog for their business and brand.
You can start out with Jindo’s basic features for FREE. With their free plan, you’ll have 500 mb of storage, 5Gb of bandwidth and up to 5 website pages all encrypted with the latest SSL/HTML security to keep your website safe and secure.
Your website won’t be ad free though if you’re using their free plan; and SEO optimisation is pretty much limited so it might hurt your chances of ranking in search engines.
You have the option to upgrade anytime you’d like to be able to utilise Jindo’s full-functionalities.
7. Linkedin
Linkedin is more popularly known as a social networking site where professionals and companies can connect and explore employment opportunities.
But it’s more than just a resume showcasing / job hunting site. It has a special feature that allows people to share content regarding their field of expertise. It’s called Linkedin’s Pulse.
Pulse is a publishing platform for professionals, experts and thought leaders. Just like with any other free blogging platforms, it’s perfect for getting your content out there to as much as many people while building reputation, credibility and establishing brand authority.
Your content gets shown in your network’s feeds and that will increase your reach. I highly recommend Linkedin as a free blogging platform as it’ll provide you a very insightful statistic of the demographics of your readers- their job, title, expertise, field, age, etc.
8. Medium
Medium is a great publishing platform for writers or content-creators. Anyone can pretty much sign-up and post their content immediately. It has wide range of reputable authors and a growing number of readers. As of now they have over 120+ million active readers so signing up is a great way to increase your visibility as a brand or just as a content-creator.
It’s great if you’re sole-purpose is writing articles and sharing your knowledge or experience about anything, but blog-wise, you can’t do much customisation in terms of themes, widgets, and plug-ins. Even if you put as much keywords for SEO, it doesn’t in any way guarantee that your content would rank very well in search engines like Google (same with any free publishing platform).
Still, with Medium, you can gain backlinks for your website if you’ve created it, or it’s a nice way to build reputation so if you want to create your own website, your most avid readers would sure follow you there.
You can’t place banner ads with Medium, but you can, however, monetise by becoming a Medium partner. As a Medium partner, the higher the engagement rate per your post, the higher your earnings will be.
