The Joy of Blogging

A few friends have asked how to go about starting a blog. So here is a post looking at different blogging platforms which you could start on.  I’ll touch on some helpful tools and some mistakes I made which will save you time. 

REASONS TO BLOG

There are multiple benefits to blogging, not least in developing a writing practice and networking. But one of the biggest benefits is that there are no gatekeepers. You don’t have to convince someone to give you a commission. You don’t need to collect rejection slips. You are making a direct connection with your readership.

It’s easy to start blogging. There are platforms where you can get up and running in no time at all. You can choose what the level of public access is and there are a whole range of reasons people do it – from private reflective journals, developing your personal brand, to running multi-writer commercial publications.

BLOGGING PLATFORMS TO CONSIDER

I tend to think of blogging platforms as on a continuum. At one end of the continuum, you can start writing immediately for no cost at all. Usually the app or site has its own audience of readers and you are on a subdomain of the site ie. yourname.bloggingsite.com. That company’s branding is prominent on your blog.

At the other end of the continuum, you have your own domain. Your site is customisable, it has your own branding and name on it throughout. You do, however, have to find your own audience. 

And so, an important question to consider is, where do you want to start out on this continuum? Bearing in mind that you can change at any time (with a bit of work.) 

Do you want to blog where there is already an audience, but the platform’s branding is prominent and the company includes calls-to-action which take people away from your writing?

Or do you want full control over the platform, and are happy to do the extra work to develop and audience yourself?

If you’re not sure, the main thing is to start writing. Make a start and you can decide to change platform if you like, as your blogging presence develops.

Here are a few platforms/models/approaches which are worth considering.

MICRO-BLOGGING

You can do ‘micro-blogging’ on any number of social media sites. These are usually shorter posts, but they are eminently shareable. 

However, these sites aren’t built for longevity of content and your writing won’t be discoverable in Google search results. There is also no system of tags and so your content isn’t very searchable.

It’s a good way to be discovered, though. Platforms like Facebook like native content, so the algorithm will throttle your reach if you’re just linking to external sites.

WRITING ON LINKEDIN 

Starting a newsletter on a site like LinkedIn has benefits as it comes with an audience. It is basically a simple blog which you can share to newsletter subscribers, or in posts.

LinkedIn doesn’t give you access to the audience you are building i.e. you can’t export the list of people who have signed up. It’s also not customisable and LinkedIn stats are basic. You can’t ‘monetise it’ – although arguably, it might lead to you getting a job.

Depending on your goals, LinkedIn newsletter posts might be just the thing to create relevant content, which develops your profile on that site. 

WRITING ON MEDIUM

Medium was founded by Evan Williams, who also co-founded Blogger and Twitter. After leaving Twitter he wanted to start a platform for longer form quality content.

It’s easy to get started and has a nice interface. Writers can make money by writing content which is just for Medium subscribers. 

The downside to this is that, being behind a paywall, your writing is not discoverable on Google search. You’re going all in on Medium. Likewise, you don’t have access to information on your subscribers. 

WRITING ON SUBSTACK

A more customisable platform would be something like Substack. Substack is an email newsletter platform first and foremost, although you can publish posts without sending them to your email list. 

You can start off for free, they’ll give you a sub-domain with yourname.substack.com on it. You can pay $50 to use a custom domain i.e www.yourname.com

You can export your email list if you want to move. You have a certain amount of customisability.  But you can’t add any code very easily and it’s not great for search engine optimisation (SEO). It’s a bit slow, when you look at its performance in Google Lighthouse, and there’s not much you can do about that. 

I like writing on Substack. Here is my bilingual Substack blog - gaelic.blog.

WRITING ON WORDPRESS - com and org.

Wordpress is a very well known name in blogging. One thing to bear in mind is that wordpress.org and Wordpress.com are different. The .org is where you go to get the files to set up your own Wordpress site on your own web domain. 

The .com is a separate company, owned by a company called Automattic. You sign up, pick a plan and they host your site – they have free or paid plans.  

Web Developers are very used to working on Wordpress, in the main. 

WRITING ON THE GHOST BLOGGING PLATFORM

An interesting blogging platform I have been trying is Ghost (ghost.org). Ghost was formed by ex-Wordpress employees who didn’t like how it shifted focus from blogging to being a website builder. There’s an argument that these changes (like large numbers of plug-ins from third parties etc) affected speed and performance. 

It has some similarities to Wordpress. You can set up your own site using ghost as the back end. Or they have different tiers of paid packages (Ghost Pro). 

Ghost has a great interface for writing and has lots of great features. It has a lot of functionality which really supports you as a blogger. You can also get support from a real person. It’s thoughtful when it comes to SEO. It also has newsletter/email sign ups built in.

But – this is an important thing to be careful of. It’s very easy to make small changes to a Ghost site which propel you into a higher tier, and they make it very hard to go back to a cheaper tier. You can’t just find how to do it on the site, you have to go through customer help. 

There are some new developments in Ghost, like analytics and being part of the Fediverse, where your blog can be found across multiple platforms like Threads and Mastodon. It kind of has it’s own personality and presence across the Fediverse. 

SELF-HOSTING 

You can choose your own domain and (fairly easily) have a blogging set-up which you have control of the back-end of. This starts to become important as you try improve the performance of your site, work on your SEO, changed the theme to have it exactly as you want… but you have to be happy to develop your own audience. 

Once big plus is that you can use various tools, for example Google Search Console, to organise your site and try and improve how your blogs rank in Google search. I think Google tools for blogging deserves a post of its own. 

KEEPING ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF GOOGLE

One very important thing to note, is that Google doesn’t index everything. Google is a little like a very strict librarian who trained in accounts at the BBC in the fifties. Say you have a post which stands on its own on your website, on a different subject, with no internal links. Hmm, Google might not index it.  You include a sound file without much text. Google might not index in. You do a short, hot take on something, with not much of a word count.  Google might decide it doesn’t provide enough value to the reader. 

WHY NOT WRITE FOR ALL PLATFORMS?

Google likes to know what version of a blog is the ‘canonical’ version. In some sites, like Ghost, you can point to a post as the canonical one. But Google is the final arbiter of this. 

So if you write a piece and put it up in multiple places, there’s a chance Google will not make the one you want the canonical one. 

Which takes us back to the main questions at the start. The main thing is to start writing. You can always move your writing from one blog to another, and there are ways on Google Search Console to mitigate this so you keep your ‘link juice’, but it’s all worth considering at the beginning. 

There are lots of other blogging platforms which I haven't touched on here - blogger.com, Tumblr and so on. It's worth checking out a few.

It’s nothing to worry about though. The main thing is to start writing, seeing how people respond to it and enjoying yourself. 

 END.