Setting up a blog is a vital early step for any article writer. You need it for many reasons, including links and as another strand to earn money from.

Setting Up a Blog

There are three ways of doing it, free, nearly free, paid

The Free Way of Setting Up a Blog

There are many sites that offer free blog hosting, including blogger.com and WordPress.com.

Free is not always best however. The biggest downside to setting up a free blog is that your blog only has a sub-domain address, eg yourblog.wordpress.com or yourblogtitle.blogspot.com. Your blog can be shut down in seconds with no notice whatsoever at the whim of your host. There is little right of appeal and once it has gone, all the time you invested in  promoting it has effectively been wasted.

Any host can close your site down for spamming, hate or pornographic content, but if you stick within the rules this will not happen. If you own your domain name you can take it somewhere else. If you have a sub-domain name, your domain dies.

Many people attach less credibility to free blogs. I work on the principle that if someone is not even prepared to invest $20 a year in their site then they are not serious.

There is also the problem of people remembering your blog’s name. The longer it is and the more dots, hyphens and underscores there are the easier it is to forget. The easier it is to forget the harder it is to make your blog make money.

The Nearly Free Way of Setting Up a Blog

There are two ways of getting a blog for next to nothing.

Buy a domain for $10 and use Redirects to point the name at a free blog. This will annoy some people who find themselves on a Blogger blog unexpectedly. Redirects are very easy to set when you buy a domain, just ask Support to set it up.

WordPress.com allows you to use your own domain name, bought through them, for $17 a year. This is a better option. You have more choices and it is less obvious and annoying than a Redirect. Just enter your desired domain name when you set up your blog at WordPress.com. It should be obviously related to the subject of your blog.

Each extra blog at WordPress.com will cost you $17 a year

The Paid Way of Setting up a Blog

This is the conventional way of setting up any website. You buy hosting, most hosts include a free domain name. A good web host package will include unlimited domain names. Each extra blog costs you $10 a year for the name, but usually no extra hosting.

A package like this will usually cost about $85 a year. You have to install WordPress on each domain, but this is literally a couple of clicks and your host’s support team will help if necessary.

Which is the Best Way of Setting Up a Blog?

Hosted blogging solutions are heavily marketed because the host uses a referral system. If you followed a link I gave you to Thinkhost I would earn $105 if you sign up. Every website will recommend the option that benefits the owner rather than the one that is actually best.

Most of my sites are on paid hosting, but if I was starting now, I would use WordPress.com and pay $17 a year for each domain. My next blog will be on there.