Starting a blog, where to start and go?

I'm sure this has been brought up before, but since things progress, I figured starting a new discussion isn't a bad idea.

So SWMBO wants to start a blog.  Something simple- she has some essays and some thoughts she would like to publish.  Maybe a picture or two- but that's not the focus at all- it would be more for background of the subject.  So it's all about writing.

We've found wordpress and wix and I've done some searches that found other things.  But for a beginner like us, it's pretty confusing.

We *think* she want's her own domain name, so we have to establish that.  Not sure where to go to get a reasonable cost domain.

And then something to make the site and publish it.

Given the focus, I see no way in heck she's going to write 1 GB of stuff.  I've got 50 books on a nook, and it still has most of it's memory left.  So having a lot isn't important.

And we want some kind of exposure- like doing a search for some key words might come up on google, or if not that, a host that has a bunch of reader/writer users that would be interested in reading her essays.

It *seems* like we will use the wordpress app- she has a keyboard for her ipad, and she enjoys typing on it.  But I really don't know where to go from there, at a reasonable cost for what she is going to do.

This guy has a pretty good blog, and this write up is thorough:

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/01/17/how-to-start-a-blog/

I'm badly behind the times. Although not as badly as one might guess given that the first thing I thought to do was to check whether Blogger is still owned and hosted by Google (it is). While the default is [yourblog].blogspot.com, you can point your own domain at your blogger blog, so it's just [yourblog.yourTLD] (Just to clarify, I could've sad "yourblog.com", but of course Top Level Domains are pretty open these days, and there are any number of reasons you might not want .com or .org)

For someone who wants to focus on writing, I would definitely look hard at services that don't require you to maintain your own Wordpress installation. For *any* of those types of things, all it takes is a few update cycles, maybe a plugin of some kind, and all of a sudden the "automatic" updates don't apply cleanly and you've got a technical mess on your hands.

This is my unresearched gut notion. I've half a mind to get another blog set up (I really wish all my friends would do this instead of FB), but haven't gotten around to it yet.

There are two versions of WordPress

I picked WordPress.org, thinking that having my own hosting options would be better. It's a ridiculous pain in the ass for a casual user. When my bill comes due, I'm going to try to mIgrate back to WordPress.com or somewhere aimed at a more casual user.

There are some great plugins to help with search engine optimization and getting found as well. 

As I'm sure you've found my now, searching for information about this is kind of pointless. Every site says the same thing and they've all power ranked their way to the first page of Google. The thing is, that works. If you're trying to attract enough attention to monetize, pay attention to what they say, and more importantly, how they have everything setup. 

You can buy and move domains pretty anywhere at any time, but be careful. If you search for availability and don't buy, it will cost as least twice as much when you go back to it. 

I wrote one off and on for a couple years on Wordpress. It gets virtually zero traffic.

I'm of the opinion blogs are past their popularity date. I rarely come across them in searches of my own.

In reply to ddavidv :

Did a canoe bump this thread?

As an update, the blog comes and goes.  Maybe next May when we finish working will it become something more frequent.

Yeah, someone canoed the thread earlier today. 

ddavidv said:

I wrote one off and on for a couple years on Wordpress. It gets virtually zero traffic.

I'm of the opinion blogs are past their popularity date. I rarely come across them in searches of my own.

I know this is a necro thread, but the blog question still comes up with people I know...I agree with David on this though: I feel like it's dead and you're unlikely to get much visibility. My wife wants to make a blog and I'm in that delicate position of attempting to dissuade her without crushing dreams. 

It depends on the niche. "Mommy bloggers" are still a thing, and people that work the social media angle along with the blog still have a attention grabbing and money making presence on the 'net. The days of the average person posting here and there and doing no promotional work but getting thousands of hits are probably long, long gone.

It's not a torrent, but I'm seeing some hopeful signs on the blog front as people feel the effects of the big platforms owning their content and audience.

I think The Oatmeal (why, editor? Why do you deselect the "Oatmeal" part as soon as I type the space?) has a succinct summary of why he's going back to blogging/email, without even wading into the other problems with social media.

And I've seen a few other folks do this too. I set up a WordPress blog as well, though it's not in any way a professional venture, and is pretty much there for the random thoughts that had no outlet after I gave Facebook the boot. I do think it's a much better medium for sharing a coherent thought, though obviously for now it gets less shared.

Some people just want to write- they don't care if anyone reads it, but if they do, bonus.  They are no real different than film people doing vlogs- just a different media.

I've never been a blog reader at all, but that does not mean it's "past it's prime" or any other kind of waste of time.

alfadriver said:

Some people just want to write- they don't care if anyone reads it, but if they do, bonus.  They are no real different than film people doing vlogs- just a different media.

I've never been a blog reader at all, but that does not mean it's "past it's prime" or any other kind of waste of time.

This is 100% why I have a blog. I just checked and it's had 136 views this year so far. 

One of the big benefits for me is that it gives me a place to store some of my samples, which I then can link when applying for paid writing positions. My blog is weirdly personal, and I kinda hate it, but I doubt I'll ever get rid of it. 

Oh, its a wordpress site and I pay for my domain. 

People don't blog what they feel anymore, they spew it off in 90 second burst on TikTok

Given the earlier conversation about the technical end of things, I should add that I went with a managed WordPress installation at my hosting service. So far I've used it very little, and every time I check in some of the platform or plugins has updates available, and they all seem to update just fine when I hit the update buttons... Apart from digging around a bit for a theme I liked I did virtually no customization, nor have I researched much the things that were included in the installation. My host did, I think *their* basic installation package, which isn't a totally bare-bones WordPress installation, but sort of opts into what I assume are generally good default plugins for things that are useful (e.g. spam comment protection).

All this to say, I wouldn't want to manage one on my own, and even speaking as a software developer there's a nontrivial amount stuff to get one's head around to really understand a WP installation. I wouldn't be remotely inclined to manage my own installation; definitely a case where having things as automated as possible and having support are good things.

It's my intention to update fairly regularly, so I don't ever have one of those "oh crud, I'm six versions behind this plugin and five behind WP generally" moments where the updates break everything.

captdownshift (Forum Supporter) said:

People don't blog what they feel anymore, they spew it off in 90 second burst on TikTok

This is exactly why I started blogging again, and would like more people to do so, even if I'm only seeing a little bit of it. It's clear that TikTok, FB, et al are terrible places to actually express a meaningful idea. If you get over a paragraph on FB, you need a TL;DR.

I'd rather read a full page of something written by someone who thought about it enough to do a proper blog post.

I certainly wasn't against trivial posts, and actually enjoyed seeing what a friend had for a weird airport dinner every now and then. But that's no substitute for complete thoughts fully explained. I'm still on Instagram, and appreciate that most of the time it's literally just a picture and a little explanatory text.