Introduction
Having a blog online can be an exciting journey and many will loved to start a blog, whether to express one’s idea or to share one’s life, maybe to start a business with the blog. However some decision need to be clarified and determined before you start a blog so that your blog will prosper and grow.
One, Name your blog
Names are very important and so your blog’s name is vital. you may need to consider the name of the company operating the blog too as all the blogs income need to be operated under some business unit, not the blog’s name. So you need to name your business unit and your blog, and you need to also determine your domain name.
Domain Name?
Domain name is the name of your online presence much like your address in the online world. There are 2 parts of a domain name, a name and a TLDs. For example, baby.com, .com is the TLDs while baby is the name. a TLDs is a online naming convention for the ending of a website. so most will choose .com, .org as a common TLDs. sometimes you cannot find your name when you use .com or .org, then you may choose .net as the third choice. there are a lot of TLDs but most people only uses .com, .org and .net, the others will need much more effort to communicate.
Naming standards.
There are some common naming methods that will work for most cases like :-
(A) Keep the name simple, don’t choose a name that has more than 3 syllables. moreofyou is better than moreaboutyou. and if you are using foreign names please check the local meanings, as sometimes what sound s ok in english may sound bad in their local tongue.
(B) Don’t use generic words, like marketing.com often has high value in traffic but the quality of traffic would be very bad. in another words, those traffics aka people who viewed do not convert to sales very well.
(C) Use trademarked words, copy-protected words carefully, and if possible, just avoid them as far as possible. unless you are the owner of those trademarks and copywrite words.
Two, Choose a platform with your needs
There are typically two ways to host a blog, one, is to host it free in a platform such as wix.com, wordpress.com or sqaurespace.com. There are other platform, even AI ones that will host your site for free. however you have to beware of the costs of free.
Costs of free
(A) Your site is going to be forever stuck with your platform and you will have high migration costs. and when your platform is down, you are down. the case of GeoCities happens now and then.
(B) Your site is not free to install anything and may not be free to integrate with certain services. That is you have to pay for such services when you need it.
(C) Your site may not be optimized to service you viewers at the highest speed. when there are millions of site on your server, your site will not get the highest speed. a server is like a road with certain number of lanes. when the road has too many cars, every car will have to slow down.
Three, Functions maybe restricted behind paywall
When you want to sell products, most platform would require you to upgrade to a high priced level to sell some products. You have limited ways to work around if you do not like their price too.
Conclusion
When you choose one platform to start, I suggest starting with wordpress.com. when you are ok to step up, you could just migrates to a WordPress site with a migration plugin.