Blogging is an inexpensive way to share your thoughts. People blog to promote their brand or to simply share what they think with the outside world. There are a billion blogs on internet.
Blogs range from being personal diaries to corporate businesses that make money. Here is a picture depicting the types of bloggers. This is for you to figure out what kind of blogger are you. Are you a doer or a thinker? You wana blog Emotional content or rational content?
source:link
Here are things you need to start a blog
1.The passion to write
Some people love to travel but not exactly to write about it. Its fun to post pictures on facebook after your trip but spending time writing about it needs passion and persistence.
Find out what you are passionate about. Most people blog randomly about things they do on a day (more like a personal diary) or about how they feel about life. It is fine to do so but be specific on what you want to blog about. Be it a travel blog or philosophies on life :Be clear!
Start small. Write an article or two and find out if you can continue writing. Sometimes what you want to do might not be something you are really passionate about. Passion is putting what you want to do into action over and over again even when there are no return.
2. A blogging platform
A blogging platform is a template to start your blog. Most common ones are wordpress, Blogger by google and Wix.
It has prebuilt themes and plugins you can use. You do not have to build a website from scratch. I started with wordpress where I opened an account chose a cubic theme and started writing. It gives a space to write and sharing buttons to share on FB, G+ .
Don’t jump into purchasing a theme for 50$ until you experimented on the free themes and gotten hold of page navigation in your blog. According to the platform you choose you get to change the background of your blog, set up menus( Home, About, Destinations), Include plugins like ‘Archives,Calendar’.
Some simple blog terminology
Header: Your blog’s header is at the top of your blog and is usually the first impression visitors to your blog get.
Blog post: These are what you will be writing
Pages: Pages are basically posts but pages can be hierarchical, which means a page can have sub pages, for example a parent page titled “About us” can have a sub-page called “Our history”. On the other hand posts are not hierarchical.Pages can be used to form the Menu
Menu: It is the drop down box on the main page.( Home, About me, Destinations). You can simply add Pages to the top Menu and posts to the submenu.
Example: Destinations is a page, where as the blog posts come in drop down menu.
Plugins:A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. Dont worry about the backend of it. Just add it to make your blog fancy. For example: I have added these plugins – “About me”, Instagram, FB page, Social icons, Search, Archives.
Sidebar: Your blog’s sidebar is along the side and is the place to display important information, ads, links.
3. A domain
This is the tricky part. Almost everyone has a wordpress or a blogger website. But purchasing a domain involves money. Domain is the unique name of your website. Example.com
How do you get it? By registering your website Name on hosting websites like Godaddy and Blue host. You purchase a name which is available and link it to your wordpress site. This features directs people to your wordpress site.
For example: I purchased a domain on Godaddy : Exploringthelife.com. My wordpress site was https://lalithasblog.wordpress.com/. I set ‘Forward’ on Godaddy. So when I type the url Exploringthelife.com , my website https://lalithasblog.wordpress.com opens.
But you dont want to just forward your domain name to your website, you want to mask your wordpress site under your domain name.So you need to change the nameservers in Godaddy.
For linking your domain you again pay on wordpress. Change the name servers on godaddy to those of wordpress and your website will be linked.
- Cost of purchasing a domain: about 800 Rs for a year
- Cost of linking the domain with wordpress: 900 rs for a year
With this if I type Exploringthelife.com my underlying wordpress site opens. If I press a link in my wesbite say ‘About me’ the url is still masked ” Exploringthelife.com/aboutme’
4. Advertise
There is no difference between your personal diary and your blog if you don’t advertise it. Share your posts on Facebook and google+. Be welcoming to feedback and make alterations accordingly.
If you think spending 2000 rs on getting custom name to your website is costly you can settle for the wordpress name you setup (https://lalithasblog.wordpress.com/).
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Exploring Life.. 
It’s hard to come by knowledgeable people about this topic, but you seem
like you know what you’re talking about! Thanks
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Thank you 🙂 Glad you enjoyed it
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i love it also check out my blog treschic 99.wordpress.com and vogues newest magazine
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Awesome blog u got!
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