Here’s the good news: there’s still plenty of room for successful blogs. And blogging isn’t nearly as hard as you might think.
In fact, one of the great things about starting a blog in 2024 (instead of 2012) is that blogging software has become easier and easier to use each year.
If you can send an email, you can start a blog. You don’t need any specialist knowledge and you certainly don’t need to understand computer programming or anything complicated.
If you’ve already dipped into the world of blogging, you might have come across some challenges, like choosing what to write about, naming your blog, and figuring out how to get your blog online and publish your first blog post.
You might have got a bit further than that—maybe you gave up blogging because you couldn’t figure out how to grow your audience and make money.
I’m going to take you through everything you need to know, in plain English. There are a few technical terms about blogging that you’ll need to know as we go along, but don’t worry, I’ll explain each of these as we get to them.
Because this is an in-depth guide to blogging, you might want to keep it in a safe place to come back to. The simplest way to do that is to share a link on your Facebook page, pin the post to a board on Pinterest, or tweet a link to it.
That way, you can easily go back and find it again. (Plus, you might just find that some of your friends have secret blogging ambitions, too.)
Here’s what we’re going to cover. Just click a link to jump straight to that place in the article:
WordPress came on the scene in 2003, built by two college students, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. After that, things moved fast:
- 2003 – Blogs started to be monetized through ads, with Google’s newly launched AdSense
- 2004 – “Blog” was Merriam-Webster’s word of the year
- 2005 – YouTube and video blogging began
- 2006 – Huffington Post and BuzzFeed launched, bringing together news (factual content) and blogging (opinion-based content)
- 2007 – Twitter (and “micro-blogging”) took off
- 2009 – The White House launched its blog
- 2012 – Medium was launched, offering another way for bloggers to publish content online
- 2015 – LinkedIn’s blogging platform, Pulse, became available to all users
- 2016 – WordPress launched the “.blog” domain extension
