Do you want to start blogging for free? If so, you’ve come to the right place! There can be some expenses with blogging, but you don’t have to pay them right out of the bat. Whether you know exactly what you want to blog about or you just know you want to blog, this post is for you. So let’s talk about how to start blogging for beginners.
This post contains affiliate links. Thank you for supporting Kate the (Almost) Great!
How To Start Blogging for Beginners
You might be asking yourself, “Kate, haven’t you written about starting a blog before?” And I have – but never to this degree. This is real, you-want-to-start-a-blog-but-don’t-know-where-to-begin beginner shit. I’ve written before about What I Would Do If I Started a Blog Today and Starting a Chronic Illness Blog: Tips for Blogging with Fatigue and Pain. Those are more about lessons I’ve learned than how to actually start blogging. Today, we’re going to talk 3 essential things you need to get started (a platform, a purpose, and a name) as well as my 3 biggest tips (just start, reserve social media, and familiarize yourself with laws).
Ready to go?
How To Get Started Blogging
Choose a platform
A blogging platform is the place where you do your blogging.
It is probably the place where you will spend most of your blogging time. That is where you write your blog posts, unless you are writing your posts in Word and copying and pasting them into your platform.
Your platform is not your domain name. It is not your blog’s host (although theoretically it could be).
The platform is so basic to the blog that it is difficult to explain.
Essentially, it is where everything happens.
My blogging platform is self-hosted WordPress. WordPress is available in two versions: free (.com) and self-hosted (.org). Free WordPress is, well, free. In that case, WordPress is your host. Self-hosted WordPress means that I use WordPress as my platform, but it is hosted somewhere else: Bluehost for me. Most importantly, self-hosted means that I am the owner of my content.
If you’re just starting out, I recommend starting with free WordPress or Blogger. Yes, you’ll have to deal with a .wordpress.com or .blogger.com account, but they’re free. Once you know that you’ll stick with your blog, you can sign up for a paid account with the one you picked or with one of the other platforms.
Learn more about blogging platforms in this post.
Choose a purpose
There are a lot of reasons people start blogging. Sometimes it’s because they’re just interested in doing it, but sometimes it’s because they have a specific purpose in mind.
When I started blogging, I was the former. I needed something creative to do, I’ve been a writer my whole life, and I was bored. Technically, I started this blog in 2012, but I really consider 2013 the start because that’s when I started regularly posting. I had graduated from college and had 2 months before I permanently moved to Nashville to start teaching. I had almost no friends in Boston and had nothing to do other than get ready for moving and the school year.
So I started blogging.
I knew that I wanted to do some advocacy work, but I also didn’t want the entire blog to be advocacy. After all, this was back in the day when blogging was maybe 200 words per post and you posted 5+ days a week.
Over the years, I started posting less frequently and more about health. In 2020, I started doing things the way they are now: 1-2 posts a month and the main focus is health.
Blogging isn’t as popular now as it was in 2013, and I think that also means that more people know what they want to blog about when they start. But not everyone does, and you don’t have to stick with your initial topic even if you do.
If you don’t know what your blog’s purpose is when you decide to start, you should try to find one, if only to make the process of everything else easier.
Additionally, unless you already have a massive audience on a site like Instagram or TikTok, your blog is not going to have much of an audience at the beginning. Use that to your advantage!
Try posting about a couple different things in the beginning and see which ones you most enjoy. And there’s no shame in changing your mind in the future.
How To Use Social Media Effectively for Your Blog
Choose a name
This could be something punny or just your name. There’s no pressure here; you just literally have to name it something when you sign up with your platform.
This is one of the many reasons why I don’t think you should start with a self-hosted blog; it’s very expensive if you need to try a few different names.
If you’re not sure what your purpose is going to be, I recommend just naming it your name or something punny or alliterative. I have the great luck of a name that rhymes with a lot, which made Kate the (Almost) Great™ work.
(I get asked sometimes why I went with that name. The answer is that I’ve heard “Kate the Great” my whole life but meaning a blog that felt self-absorbed.)
30+ Strategies for Growing Your Blog
Tips To Starting a Blog
Just start; don’t wait for things to be “perfect”
This is my absolute biggest piece of advice: just start.
Blogging is an ever-evolving industry. If you wait for everything to be perfect, you’ll never start because just as you get everything just right, something else will change.
This advice also applies to people who already have an audience, by the way. Especially because just because you already have an audience does not mean that you need to tell them about your blog.
Just start. Press publish before you have a blog post written or after writing 1 post. Don’t wait or else you’ll never start.
Tips for Successful Blog Posts + Blog Post Prompts You Need
Of course, this depends on a lot of factors. If you don’t have a lot of social media sites but you’ve known for a while that you want to blog, you definitely need to take this step. If you’re interested in trying out blogging but aren’t sure if you will keep it up, then you probably don’t need to do this.
And if you already have a big audience, you have probably already done this. Full disclosure: I sometimes sign up for new social media sites primarily to reserve the account name. After all, nothing says you have to post on those social media networks. But one of the problems of having a brand is it becomes easier for people to pretend to be you.
Research Tips for Health Bloggers
Familiarize yourself with applicable laws
There are a couple key laws that are necessary to know, although this is not an exhaustive list.
No matter your niche, you need to have a cookie notice. The GDPR law in the EU requires you to tell website visitors when your website uses cookies (which is most). If you don’t have readers from the EU, this isn’t necessary, but this is the Internet, so you probably do. I have the Cookie Notice plugin, which “allows you to elegantly inform users that your site uses cookies and to comply with the EU cookie law GDPR regulations” (CN).
While this isn’t really about a specific law, you should also have disclaimers as applicable to protect yourself.
This is especially true if you’re a health blogger. Because people might be taking health advice from you, if you’re not a licensed medical professional you need to say this in any posts with health advice. For example, at the start of my health posts, I write some version of “I am not a medical professional of any kind.”
A Self Guru, who is a lawyer, says that disclaimers “limit your liability surrounding the content that you create […] a proper blog disclaimer lets your readers know that the information you are providing is for informational and educational purposes only and includes language in there to reduce your legal liability in case of harm to the other person” (x).
You also need to have disclosures of affiliate links, ads, and sponsored posts. When I have affiliate links or paid product placement, my disclosure is after the blog post’s introduction. When I have a sponsored post, the disclosure is at the very top. This is non-negotiable.
The distinction between sponsored post and paid product placement is in what I am paid for and how much of the post the sponsored content contains. For example, some of my gift guides have paid product placement. In those, the vast majority of the post is about other things and there’s a paragraph or two about the product. However, as part of the Etsy affiliate program, I have the option to write a sponsored post featuring only Etsy items. Since the whole post is a promotion for Etsy, I put the disclosure at the very top of the post.
Another non-negotiable is nofollow links. I’m pretty sure these are a law or a policy, but since Google won’t show me in search engine results if I don’t use them, it’s essentially a law. Google takes this more seriously than the federal government, and Google is King of the Search Engines.
“Nofollow links” are links with the attribute “nofollow” in the HTML. These instruct search engines to not follow the links when crawling, aka that they shouldn’t count the link towards the destination’s search engine ranking.
Basically, Google wants to make sure that companies are not artificially inflating their search engine ranking by paying people (like bloggers) to have them on their page.
If a company pays you to write a post about them in any capacity, you need to use nofollow links.
As another example, let’s say that a restaurant provides you with a free meal in exchange for a blog post review. In that post, even though they are looking for people to go to their restaurant and not necessarily to raise their search engine ranking, you need to use nofollow links.
11 Things You Need for a Good Health Blog
Want to learn more? Check out my ebooks! You can get all of them in this bundle for $20.
Social Media for Chronic Health Bloggers – This $5 ebook contains tips and tricks for managing your social media as a chronic health blogger. It includes a checklist for optimizing your social media networks, Instagram prompts for chronic illness patients, Twitter prompts, and miscellaneous resources for managing your social media.
How To Use Pinterest for Blog Traffic – Get this $5 ebook if you want to learn what I do that brings over 70% of my traffic from Pinterest. Once you’ve learned that, it also includes how to get the most out of Tailwind for Pinterest.
Promoting Blog Posts – This $5 ebook has everything you need to know about promoting blog posts. It has how to promote new blog posts, how to promote older ones, and the resources you need to promote your posts.
Finally, my ultimate resource! Chronic Health Bloggers: Take Your Blog (And Income!) to the Next Level, my $10 ebook.
This ebook has:
- List of weekly blog tasks
- 49 chronic health blog post ideas
- 30 health blog post title formulas
- SEO checklist for bloggers
- Blog post promotion checklist
- Social media optimization for bloggers
- 25 chronic health Instagram prompts
- 26 chronic health TikTok/Instagram Reels prompts
- Tailwind checklist for Pinterest
- Tailwind checklist for Instagram
- 100 inspirational quotes to share on social media
- 60+ Christian quotes to share on social media
- Media kit template for bloggers based on mine
- 54 ways to grow your blog
- Blog set-up checklist
- My favorite resources for blogging
- How you can make money from your blog
Get all of this for just $10 here.
Like this post? Share it! Then check out:
Be a Pro at Blogging: Best Practices You Need, 27 Tricks To Increase Blog Traffic You Need, 17 Things Needed for Making a Blog Successful, Blogging 101: Terms You Need To Know
Kate Mitchell is a blogger, chronic illness patient, and advocate who helps people understand chronic illness and helps chronic illness patients live their best lives.
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