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Can you immediately start blogging?

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Can you start blogging immediately

Can you start blogging immediately

Yes, and it depends.

The starting part is not difficult.

Whether you want to host your own blog under your own domain or you want to use one of the existing blogging platforms, and depending on your Internet speed of course, you can start blogging within the next 10 minutes.

You can start both business blogs or personal blog based on your preference.

You can start blogging immediately in two ways:

  1. Install a blogging platform such as WordPress under your own domain name.
  2. Use a third-party blogging platform by simply opening an account with them.

Immediately starting a blog with WordPress

Installing the WordPress blogging platform may seem like a daunting task because it involves “installing”.

WordPress is a set of PHP files that you need to first download from WordPress.org, and then using an FTP program, uploaded to your web hosting server.

But it doesn’t have to be this complicated.

Most of the web hosting companies allow you to install WordPress on your server with a single click.

Well, single click is just a way of putting it; it takes a few clicks.

But the interface is quite friendly and even if you have never installed WordPress on your server, you can install it and start blogging immediately.

Web hosting companies like GoDaddy also offer dedicated WordPress hosting services.

If you opt for a WordPress hosting package, WordPress comes pre-installed.

Once you have made the payment, you are given a WordPress username and password.

You can immediately log into the dashboard and start blogging.

You don’t even have to install anything.

You don’t need to deal with FTP servers.

You don’t need an FTP program on your computer.

You will simply need to go to the URL recommended by the web hosting company and once you are on that URL, you will be able to log into the dashboard and start blogging immediately.

Don’t you need a custom WordPress theme to run a blog?

Not necessarily.

Yes, a theme matching your main website does look good, but the focus of my blog post is telling you how to start blogging immediately and for that, I’m going to skip the part of installing a WordPress theme.

The default installation comes with standard themes that you can use to display your blog.

After logging into the dashboard, you can use one of the default themes.

After that, there is a very neat WYSIWYG editor that you can use to write and publish blog posts.

There are many tweaks that you can make to your WordPress installation, but right now that doesn’t matter.

What matters is, how fast you can start blogging.

Even if you want to start a business blog and you don’t want to waste time getting a custom theme designed, the default theme is sufficient enough.

The important part is creating content.

It may take two or three months to get a nice theme but in the meantime, you should start writing and publishing blog posts as soon as possible, and this is the quickest way.

Don’t worry about the theme yet.

The content is the important thing.

Just set the ball rolling.

Immediately starting a blog with third-party blogging platforms

I’m not going to discuss multiple blogging platforms because that becomes confusing.

The difference between a self-hosted blogging platform and a third-party blogging platform is that when you use a self-hosted blogging platform like WordPress, it is under your own domain.

A self-hosted blogging platform like WordPress is good for your search engine rankings.

With a self-hosted blogging platform, when the traffic begins to build up, it comes to your own domain name rather than another website.

The only problem is that it may take you many months to build decent traffic.

This brings me to the topic of third-party blogging platforms.

One of my favorite third-party blogging platforms is Medium.com.

You can immediately open an account with Medium using your Twitter account or Google account.

In fact, it may take less than five minutes to start writing a post on Medium.

One of the biggest benefits of publishing your blog posts on Medium is that you can get exposure faster, unlike a self-hosted blog.

The Medium platform is ready-made.

People can follow you and receive notifications whenever you publish new blog posts using Medium.

You can build traffic faster on your Medium blog, but the only problem is that most of the traffic comes to your Medium blog instead of your own website.

For building faster visibility, Medium is a great platform.

If by chance your blog post is picked by their editorial team and featured on the homepage, your blog can get massive exposure in terms of hundreds of thousands of views, in a single day.

It also makes it easier to immediately start blogging.

What about other third-party blogging platforms?

LinkedIn allows you to publish articles using its platform.

Publishing LinkedIn articles or blog posts is a good way to build your leadership over the professional networking platform.

It is said that LinkedIn promotes blog posts and articles published on its own platform more than the usual smaller updates.

Aside from Medium and LinkedIn, there is also a WordPress.com, but somehow, I have never liked it.

It doesn’t look professional.

If right now you don’t want to immediately start blogging under your own domain the best options for third-party blogging platforms are LinkedIn and Medium.

You can use LinkedIn for professional blogging.

You can share your thought leadership blog posts using LinkedIn.

LinkedIn these days also allows you to run a newsletter.

This way, whenever you publish a post over LinkedIn, your newsletter subscribers immediately receive an email with the contents of your blog post.

Medium too has such a facility.

What do I recommend if you immediately want to start blogging?

If you ask me, I would highly recommend the self-hosted WordPress blogging platform.

It may seem difficult in the beginning, but it will be worth the effort.

Your search engine rankings will improve if you publish regularly.

All the traffic that your blog generates will come to your own website.

You will own the content – all the blog posts are stored in a MySQL database and anytime you can take backup of this database and store it locally on your computer.

Even for self-hosted blogging platform, you don’t face many hurdles.

As mentioned above, WordPress hosting is available with every hosting service these days.

All you need is access to the admin/dashboard, and you can immediately start blogging.

Third-party platforms definitely have their benefits, but I would recommend that you first publish your latest blog posts on your own, self-hosted blog and then share them or syndicate them on the third-party blogging platforms.

So which is better for your business, a business blog or a personal blog?

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personal blog or business blogA long, long, long time ago when people started blogging, it was completely personal. Many blogging services called themselves “journals”, for example, Livejournal. People wrote about personal stuff. Yours truly had a blog on web design, and I used to manually upload the HTML pages in an “articles” folder and then manually update the index file.

Search engines like Google gladly lapped up blog posts because people created them in droves and soon blog posts began to rank higher than the website. This is because the search engines have this insatiable hunger to crawl and index and then rank as many links as they can find. The more links there are in the world, the happier the search engines are. To their great delight people observed that blogs enjoyed better search engine rankings than conventional business websites. It was not that the search engines preferred “blogs” over websites, it was just that for their algorithms, the content arranged by blogging platforms was more amenable. Because basically, what do search engines like?

  • Lots of content.
  • Constantly updated content.
  • Topical content.
  • Relevant content.
  • Socially promoted content.

All these traits were found in blogs.

This, was the inflection point where people started publishing blogs for their businesses to get better search engine rankings. They actually did. Business websites with business blogs got better rankings than business websites with no business blogs.

Now, almost every business has a blog. The question these days is not whether your business should have a blog or not, the question is, how to fare better than other blogs.

So life has come full circle. Blogging started with personal blogging, and it’s again being asked if you should have a business blog or a personal blog.

Both have their place in the world, and whether you should have a personal blog or a business blog depends on what you are trying to achieve. Are you developing a personal brand or a business brand? Does your audience want to connect with you or they don’t mind interacting with a nameless entity as long as they’re getting the information they seek?

Although it has been more than 15 years since people started blogging (in contemporary sense) – this is 2017 – it is still considered as one of the best inbound marketing tools. Have a look at the graphic below from SmartInsights:

blogging and content marketing

In more than 95% of the cases, if there is content marketing, if there is digital marketing, then a thriving blog is always there in one way or another. As you can see in the above graphic, 81% B2B marketers prefer to rely on blogs for content marketing and inbound marketing.

What are the similarities between a personal blog and a business blog?

  • Both personal and business blog are used to regularly communicate to your customers and clients.
  • Updates are arranged in a chronological manner with the latest update appearing at the top.
  • Content is arranged sorted by date in descending order.
  • Personal business blogs are theme-oriented.
  • Both personal blogs and business blogs are good for SEO.
  • A personal blog as well as a business blog can be developed into a platform with a huge audience that can be used to convey important messages or introduce new products and services.
  • Personal blogs and business blogs can be used to publish important content that does not fit into the main template of your website.
  • Communities can be created around personal blogs as well as business blogs.

What are the differences between a personal blog and a business blog?

  • As the name suggests, a personal blog may be used to promote a personal brand and business blog can be used to promote a business.
  • A personal blog can be more informal. You can write about your personal experiences, your personal opinions, your personal tastes and whatever catches your fancy (while sticking to the main theme of your blog). On a business blog there is less scope to be informal because your business blog does not represent an individual: it represents an entire organization. You have to be careful when you publish content or your business blog because it reflects on the entire company.
  • There is more engagement through a personal blog because your visitors personally know who is publishing the blog posts and what’s the basic philosophy of the person behind the blog.
  • Personal blog can be totally personal where you try to explain why your cat leaves and comes randomly and sometimes makes weird faces. A personal blog can also be a business blog, for example this blog where, although I write in a personal style (mostly in the first person) all the time I write about my business. I don’t talk of my political beliefs here; I talk about content writing and content marketing.
  • People normally stay away from controversial topics on their businesses blog because they don’t want to offend the customers and clients. On your personal blog, if you want, you can piss people off. But then again, if you use your personal blog to promote your business, you have to exercise discretion (if you want to, that is).

 

If you want to decide immediately without much data, research and experimentation, then a personal blog works better than a business blog merely because blogging is meant to be personal. It’s, mostly, a linear collection of thoughts, opinions, rants, or nuggets of wisdom around a particular topic, in a conversational, personal tone. This is the key…conversational, personal tone. This tone is more human, more personal, and ultimately, more approachable. There are many big companies that, although, have business blogs, for example Google and Facebook, they also encourage their employees to maintain their personal blogs.

But then again, in the end, what matters is, what sort of audience you are catering to.