This is a question I have been asked many times! And you do not need to be confused when you want to find out how to start a blog. If I got a dollar for every time I was asked this question I could be a wealthy person by now. There is no one answer for this question as there are many options available. The quickest and cheapest way to start a blog is to signup to a blogging website such a Blogspot, Wordpress or iBlog (which is specific for South Africa). All these websites (platforms) offer you similar feature whereby you can log into your blog account anytime and write new posts and respond to comments left by your visitors.

I am personally not a fan of these sites as I do not like the idea of your blog having a rather long name e.g. randmediacom.blogspot.com and there are certain features you can not do on platforms such as Blogspot and iBlog which you can do on your own dedicated blog.

I will explain to you how to go about setting up your own dedicated blog with your own domain name. The first step would be to choose the domain name you want for your blog e.g. MyName.com (be sure to check for availability first as by now most .com domains you can think of have been taken up). Once you have chosen your name you now need to register it and pay a fee which will allow you to have that domain name for one year and then you pay an annual fee every year. This is not a high fee at all as some would expect, it is very affordable at an average cost of about R100 ($12). I can not stand companies out there that charge R300 for a domain name registration that is totally ripping off the client!

Once you have your domain name then you need to get a hosting provider who will host your blog. There are various deals available depending on the how big your blog will be and how much traffic you anticipate to get on your blog. Generally if you are just starting up your own personal blog without a lot of content then you do not need a large hosting package, you are looking at paying about R50 a month. Yet again, be careful and do not go and signup for a large hosting package which will cost you R300 a month and all you will be needing is hosting a simple blog. You just need to make sure your hosting package has the ability to host Wordpress blogs, which brings me to my next point.

The best platform I have found to host a blog is a platform called Wordpress. Wordpress comes with most, if not all hosting packages today. Wordpress is very simple to use and one can easily administer their own blog once they get the hang of Wordpress.

Wordpress also has the added feature of being able to have your own theme for your blog. The theme is basically the look and feel of your blog depending on how you want it to look in terms of colours, graphics and layout.

Once that is setup you are ready to go and start blogging on your own .com domain name.

So to sum it up, you can either have your blog hosted for free at a place like Blogspot or iLogic or if you want to spend a bit of money you can have your own blog on a Wordpress platform hosted with your own domain name.

Fell free to contact us for any assistance with setting up a blog with Blogspot or any another free blog provider. If you would like your own blog for personal use or company use with your own domain name, you can also contact us and we will be more than able to assist you with the whole process from domain name registration, hosting your blog and helping you setup and get you blog going. And even design a custom theme for your blog according to what you want it to look like.