Don’t get put off starting a blog

Fairy Blog Mother

So, you’ve been told it’s a good idea to start a blog, and you go online to learn more about it.

It seems that everybody is recommending WordPress, but further investigation halts you in your tracks because it all sounds so complicated.

That is because the majority of advice out there starts from the wrong end. The kind of people who are writing about how wonderful blogs are, already have whizz-bang versions of their own. They are quite happy to bang on about the bells and whistles you can get with a blog, without sparing a thought for the poor, intrepid beginner who, until only a few days ago, hadn’t heard much about blogs.

Blogs are, of course, complicated things if you don’t understand them. Even a game of chess is complicated unless you’ve been playing it since you were a child. So reading what these ‘experts’ have to say will certainly put anybody off who doesn’t understand all the jargon being banded about so freely.

So my advice is to start at the shallow end. Find out and create a WordPress.com blog: free, easy to use, simple to set up – a perfect medium to get you started.

You won’t need to have an expensive web-developer to set it up, because WordPress have done all that for you. All you need to do is to decide on what you want your blog to be called, what you’re going to write about (i.e. its niche) and half an hour to spare to press some buttons.

Once your blog has been set up, the idea is to practise. You can’t break anything, so don’t worry about making mistakes – except those within your posts. Explore a new facility every time you go in to publish something. Let your curiosity take over, and you’ll soon learn all the helpful things WordPress have made available to you to make your blog wonderful, all at no extra cost.

Eventually you’ll get the hang of this blogging activity, and you’ll be ready to move on. Great – that is exactly what your objective was at the beginning. Now you can contact a suitable web-developer to set up a WordPress.org for you (if you don’t fancy having a go at it yourself), and your blogging world will start to open up even more!

But remember, without your chance to learn about blogging on WordPress.com beforehand, venturing straight into the world of WordPress.org from the beginning would have been a very daunting exercise indeed. Oh – and you can very easily transfer all your old posts over to your new blog at a drop of a hat!