Love the idea of having a blog, your own place set up on the internet for your musings, photos and storytelling…but blogs are needy, they need constant feeding. Before you go building a blog, it may pay to check that you are really committed and in love with writing. Then, there is the small issue of whether people are actually interested in your musings (if that is important to you).
For that reason I suggest you start out with a content publishing platform. If you think you would like to write but not sure about how much time/money you want to invest until you see if you like it, then try Medium. Here you can set up and an account and start writing and sharing your stories. You can share your stories through Facebook / Twitter but you also share with everyone else. It is a good tool as it lets you see how long a read you are writing (as you are writing) which is good. I use this too – you can see my stories here.
Another option for more business related content is Pulse on Linkedin. This is a simple way to start writing and publishing out to your network. If you already have a profile on Linkedin you can just get started writing and be published in minutes.
But maybe you are not sure what will resonate best with your readers. You can use tools such as Outbrain to publish your stories to a wider audience and see what works. Outbrain appends your stories to the bottom of related publisher content. Trial different headlines or approaches and watch in real time to see what your readers like. There is a cost to use Outbrain but it can be very helpful in helping you find your right angle and tone of voice.
If you decide to come to the dark side and write your own blog, here are a couple of publishing options:
1.Wordpress Blog (which is what I have used). WordPress can be hosted by WordPress or self-hosted on your own server and offers an immense amount of control. I have a digital company so we built it ourselves. The theme that I am using is a WordPress blog theme and you can download the template and customise it to how you would like it. There are options as to whether you host the blog yourself or WordPress can host it. The theme is called Avada. There are lots of themes on Themeforest to choose from, but they do take a little bit of work to set up. Let me know if you are interested in us helping you set it up.
2. Hosted Blog. The alternative is to use something that is hosted and you just sign up and pay for it through the one subscription (much easier) but you are tied to the subscription. Some good examples of this are: Tumblr or Squarespace.
Thanks Natalie for the Q
