We have discussed the first step to learning how to start a blog in Nigeria in 2020. Up next is how to choose a blogging platform based on your budget, so I am guessing you have a niche that you find interesting, so let’s move.
How to choose a blogging platform based on your budget
Most of us actually start blogging for the fun of sharing what you love doing, giving opinions on topics and so on. So, therefore, we don’t want to spend much on it, it is ok to do that but it isn’t the best practice.
When I say it is ok to do that, I meant there are lots of free blogging platforms out there with a free subdomain name for you right as you register, examples are Bloggers, Wix, WordPress (.com) and many more.
Naijatech360 runs on a paid hosted platform which is the .org version of WordPress which is open-source software that runs on a remote server and managed by our host partners.
Either paid version of a blog or a free one, I will discuss how we can do well and also make money with both.
Blogger is the most popular free blogging platform because of its amazing and cool features like adding multiple blogs on a single account, adding authors to write on your blog, 50+ free templates/themes which are mobile responsive and so on.
Moving to the paid version of a blog, a hosted blog is what we call it. Like I stated above, Naijatech360 is a WordPress hosted blog, we pay some amount of money to our hosting company to keep the blog alive every year. About 58.7% of the sites on the internet are WordPress because it is easy to install and managed.
What is the advantage of WordPress hosted blog over Blogger?
With Blogger, you are limited to so many blogging features while WordPress has everything you need to blog with.
If you want to choose the WordPress platform, I will suggest you watch a youtube channel on how to set it up or give the job to a web designer to help you set it up and give the blog a nice design.
To do this on your own, you will have to choose a hosting partner, pay for the service you choose, buy a domain and in most cases, you will be given a free domain of your choice. for example .com, .ng, .com.ng and many more. Install WordPress, watch how to design and install a WordPress blog theme on youtube.
This will cost you a minimum of 5,000 Naira for a year if you host with a Nigerian Hosting company like Qserver for a starter pack, you can check up other hosting companies for their prices of hosting a WordPress site, Google is your friend.
NB: Domain is different from sub-domain.
For starters, I recommend you start with a Blogger platform, so you can experiment or have enough time to gather funds for WordPress. Moving a Blogger blog to WordPress without losing your content is very easy, so yeah, moving is possible.
Since you have your niche and have learned how to choose a blogging platform based on your budget, you can go ahead and do what I call “Blog name research”. Are you the only one with the name idea you have on your niche? I guess you should ask Google to see if someone already took the name.
Type your preferred blog name, for example, “toohotfashionblog” to see if the name/domain is taken, apparently, that is available for taking. This is done to avoid changing your site name when it is time to get a custom domain (for as low as 1k per year) that matches your site name to make your site look more professional.
If you agree to start with Blogger, cool, so here is what you have to do to get started;
- Create a unique email that matches the choice of your blog name
- Go to Blogger web page to register >> Blogger.com
- Use the email you created to sign up
- Make sure you are using a Chrome browser (the best for blogging)
Once you have signed up, you might see a page like this or something similar to this because they are upgrading their site.
Insert your blog name with space after each word as seen above, choose a random template, we will get a better one, hit create blog! button. Now you have a blog and googles Blogspot sub-domain name. To check/view your site, click on view blog.
You have learned how to choose a blogging platform based on your budget, Kindly go through your new platform and try out some of the features as the next topic will be How to set up a blogger account the right way.
Please, whatever you do, do not save any settings on your Blogspot dashboard.
