Blogging is not a new phenomenon – not even under this artificial name. People have published their thoughts – maybe not as detailed as today – for decades, in the form of pamphlets, newsletters, and so on. Today’s online blogging phenomenon has its roots in the bulletin boards of the early 1990s, and the forums that became popular later. The term “blog” was introduced over a decade ago, in 1999 – and since then it has turned into a worldwide craze. Today everyone can start a blog, using free tools and resources to do so.
Starting a new blog in 2015 is not as easy as back in the day. Today the internet has millions of weblogs, many of them on free platforms like Blogger and WordPress, and millions of others that are self-hosted. The variety of topics covered by these blogs is incredibly diversified – from gardening to agriculture, from technology to recipes, from modern art to adult themes… if you can think of it, there is a blog about it somewhere. This makes deciding to create a new one so difficult.
The first step toward creating a new blog is to decide what the blog’s topic will be – and this is the hardest part today. With millions of blogs, it’s hard to find something to be excellent about. For a blog to be popular, it needs to have a topic of interest for potential readers. It can be destined to be read by a wide audience, or a restricted one (niche blog), but it has to offer something extra over all the information already available to be worthy of attention. Whatever you want to write about – the impact of the Fukushima leak on the scales of ocean fish or the latest winners at the au.redflushcasino.com, you need to offer your readers something unique, something memorable, otherwise your blog is destined to disappear into oblivion.
The rest is as easy as one-two-three. You can either go with a free blogging platform, like the above mentioned Blogger or WordPress, or go with a self-hosted solution. Running a self-hosted blog was a burden for finances back in the day, but today it’s cheap and easy – a shared web hosting package enough to run a blog costs a few dollars a month, a domain name is also cheap, and creative and appealing blog themes can be found free of charge all over the internet.
To create a blog that will stand out it’s important for it to offer value to its readers. With millions of people publishing online, this is not an easy task, and it’s not something to take lightly. Also, this is the hardest part of blogging today.