Although all the blog hosting sites are a little bit different, they share many of the same features and all are fairly easy to figure out even if you are not especially experienced in creating web pages or blogs. WordPress is the most popular and provides the most tutorials and learning tools, so from this point on we will be focusing on using it as the site to create your blog.
If yousimply want to create content and not worry about selling ad space, then you can also use WordPress to host your site. There are a lot of benefits to this. First, it’s free. You can create as many blogs as you want and you are not limited in what you can write about. WordPress will publish and manage your blogs, handle your comments and even provide you with a vast array of in-depth analytics to help you track how often your blog is being visited, who is looking at it, and even where in the world they are located.
With a WordPress hosted blog, you can select any domain name you want as long as it is not already being used by another WordPress-hosted blogger. Your address will then include “WordPress” as the center part. For example, if you want to call your blog “Cooking with Tim” and that name is available, your URL will be www.CookingWithTim.wordpress.com.
The downside of letting WordPress host your blog for you is that it limits the amount of money you can make because you are not allowed to sell ad space, promote affiliate products or use other monetization techniques. In fact, WordPress will advertise on your blog page and you will not receive any of that revenue. That is the cost of using the site to host your blog.
Yet you can still use nearly all of WordPress’ free tools – including any of hundreds of free themes – to design and create your blog, then host it on a separate website that you own. Then you can do anything you want with it.
WordPress also includes thousands of plug-ins, mostly free, that you can use to customize your blog, enhance the features you offer, and make your blog as interactive as possible.
Because the ultimate objective of this guide is to show you how to create the best-looking, most popular blog you possibly can while still being able to make money from it, this is the option we will be exploring from here on out. If you simply want to create a WordPress hosted blog, providing content without worrying about monetization, don’t worry. Nearly all the steps are the same. You just don’t have to spend any money.
