In this article, I will share the five best places to start a blog for free.
If you're planning to start a blogging site and you don't want to pay for the domain and hosting, then I would show you five such sites, which top the popularity list and are easy to use.
You can also get a wider audience for the post that you write since it's SEO-friendly, and also it is cost-free.
Let us start listing them down one by one :
WordPress : Everyone must have heard of this site, you can create a free blog. This site started out as a content management system, it still remains open source which makes it popular among developers and website hosting. The best part is you can host your own website or use the templates provided by the WordPress engine. If you are a newbie to the world of blogging,
it advisable to use the built in themes and templates. Once you turn a professional blogger and would need to host your own blogging site switch to self hosting which may involve installation on your PC or even go for an upgraded plan. All this may cost you a bare minimum compared to the revenue you would generate from blogging. The downside is customization can get complex.
Blogger : Google owned free blog maker, which is also very popular among bloggers due to its integrations with google plugins. The site is a content management system, which lets you post your blog under a subdomain. While most themes and templates are free you are also provided with third-party tools and templates which may be paid. You are not self hosting your site, but you can connect to a custom domain to increase the domain authority. Though Blogger is easy to use, the options to customize are limited when compared to WordPress or any other free blog hosting platform. The downside is you will not have a customized look for your site.
Medium : This is more of a forum based blogging site. You have a built-in audience for your content. No requirement of hosting or customizing your blog. It's all managed by the platform. It is more suitable for writers who are not worried about integrating advertisements with their blog. Though you can still earn good income on the platform depending on your content and followers.
It also maintains a partner program which allows you to generate revenue from blogging.
LinkedIn : This is a social networking site but also provides a means to blog. You don't need to worry about customizing, hosting or even promoting content. Since the article gets posted on a social networking platform, its easier to generate traffic for your content. Your articles will be easily detected by search engines. The downside being you cannot generate revenue from the traffic.
You may have to redirect the audience to your blog site within the article in order to generate income.
Wix : This is a website builder platform without self hosting which makes it simpler to build websites. It provides free themes and templates along with easy configurations to third party plugins. You can leverage the benefits by upgrading your plan which lets you integrate your blog site with custom domain just like other blog hosting domains do. It also allows you to import pages from WordPress and Blogger sites. It is fairly easy even for a non developer to build a professional website. The downside is most websites will repeat the templates.
Here is table of Benefits :
I hope this read will let you decide which site you want to pick for your first blog post. Though not all sites have features to integrate advertisements which is the major source of revenue for most bloggers. It is advisable to pick the platform which most suits your need. The general rule of thumb would be for a new blogger traffic is the need and for a professional blogger advertisement is the necessity.
You can also find the demo of these blog sites on my channel Digi Marketer Online.
Happy Blogging!
