PUBLISHING YOUR BLOG - Blogging: The Super Simple Guide On How To Make Money Blogging in 2016 - Stop Working and Start Blogging (2016)

Blogging: The Super Simple Guide On How To Make Money Blogging in 2016 - Stop Working and Start Blogging (2016)

Chapter 3. PUBLISHING YOUR BLOG

When it comes to publishing your blog content, there are literally hundreds of applications and online-based hosting services you can choose from. They range in price from free to charging a certain hosting fee per month, depending on your needs. Some are well-known, owned and operated by huge online companies, like Google, while others are much smaller operations.

There are many books, websites, and even other blogs devoted to helping first-time users get set up with each of the popular services and applications. Also, each service typically provides extensive instructions for getting started.

Because each offers a different array of services, features, and functionality, your best bet is to carefully define your needs first (based on the goals for your blog or vlog), then contact each service’s website or technical support department to learn about the latest feature offerings, and for instructions on how to begin using their respective service or application.

Consider Hiring a Freelancer to Help You Get Started

If you have no graphic design or website design experience, consider hiring a freelancer to help you initially set up your blog and then customize a blog template for you. This also applies to branding and customizing a YouTube channel.

Working with a freelancer initially will help to ensure everything gets set up correctly and that you launch your blog with a unique and personalized appearance (layout and design) that’s based on your specific needs and that will appeal to your target audience.

No matter which blogging service you ultimately use, once the blog is set up and the template you choose has been customized, as the blogger, you can then create and publish new posts to the blog easily and from virtually anywhere that includes text, photos, and/or video using a computer, tablet, or smartphone.

While a freelancer with expertise in graphic design or website design can initially be used to help you get started, based on your skills as a writer, you might also consider hiring a freelance editor to edit your blog posts before they’re published. This will ensure the content is free of spelling and grammatical errors and that it’s easily readable using language that caters to your audience.

It’s essential that your blog convey a sense of professionalism in order for you to build up credibility as a blogger and to build and/or maintain the reputation of the company the blog will be representing.

Thus, the blog’s layout and design should look professional, and the content should be well-written and free of errors. You also want to make sure that it conveys the right attitude and is properly branded.

Likewise, if you plan to incorporate illustrations, artwork, computer graphics, photography, or video into your blog, you can hire freelancers who can inexpensively create this content from scratch. This will help to ensure your blog’s content is unique and that you don’t accidentally violate anyone else’s copyrights by using content that doesn’t belong to you.

Community Blogging Services

As blogging continues to grow in popularity, many online social networking sites that originally didn’t offer blogging services have begun to do so. For example, anyone can create a blog for free using a personal Facebook page or create a separate Facebook page for their company, group, or organization.

If you use a service like Facebook as your primary blogging platform, keep in mind your options for displaying ads in conjunction with your blog are limited to the opportunities Facebook offers.

Your ability to directly sell themed merchandise or products through a Facebook page is also limited. Yet, Facebook does offer a robust set of tools for creating a personal or company Facebook page that allows you to maintain a blog and then utilize Facebook’s free and fee-based tools for attracting followers to it.

Regardless of which service you use to host your blog, when it comes time to promoting it and building your audience, you’ll definitely want to utilize Facebook, Twitter, and the other popular online social networking services.

Anyone can design, create, and publish a free blog using a service like Blog- ger.com very quickly.

However, if the features offered by this or a similar service, combined with the widgets available for the blogging platform, aren’t customizable or robust enough to meet your needs, consider using one of the more advanced blogging services, such as WordPress.com (which ultimately requires more of a learning curve from the blogger’s standpoint, due to its more advanced and customizable features).