How To Start a Blog in 2022?

Published in

Writers Guild

6 min readSep 28, 2021

What Is a Blog?

A blog is an informational website. People share their thoughts, views on various topics or teach some skills they are good at. But these are just a few examples. If you are good at writing and you have the skill to share or have something to say on any topic you can start a blog.

Why Start a Blog in 2022?

Starting a blog in 2022 is more lucrative than ever, the world is facing a tough time due to Covid-19 and many businesses are shut down. Many companies have joined the work-from-home approach and people are at home all day long. They cannot work from a coffee shop.

But this time of depression has brought an opportunity for internet content creators because the almost whole world is getting bored at home and they need something to read, learn and watch every day.

In this time, creating a blog to share your thoughts or teaching anything you know like cooking or knitting would connect you, real people, out there plus you will earn some real bucks. Nowadays you can write about anything and get paid for it. You can even write reviews on books, products like gadgets, makeup items.

Let’s learn to start a blog the right way!

What Is a Niche?

Before starting a blog you need to decide on a niche. A niche in easy words is a topic that you are highly skilled at or you have specialized knowledge.

For example, if you are a web developer you can teach programming languages, you can share which language is more popular, which language is best suited for small or large-sized websites.

If you are a cook/chef you can share recipes of delicious dishes you enjoy and you get praised from your customers or friends and family.

How To Find a Profitable Niche in 2022?

To decide on a niche you need to find your inner passion. What is one thing:

What you are passionate about?
Do you have more knowledge to share than an average Joe or Jane?
What do you love doing in your free time?
What you are obsessed with?

Answering the above questions will help you find a niche. But how would you know if it is highly profitable or not? You don’t and you won’t unless you start writing and give yourself six to twelve months and I’m confident that if you put heart and soul into it will much more profitable than naysayer’s expectation.

I had been finding a profitable niche for a quite long time, but I concluded that any niche is equally profitable or in-demand. It’s not about the niche it’s about your knowledge, skills and urge to share or teach others, and last but not least your writing style. These all make the recipe successful.

If you choose a random niche just because someone else is making more than a living from their blog and you are not fully into it, you won’t earn a dime.

How To Choose a Domain Name That Will Rank?

A domain name is an address of a blog or a website like medium.com, twitter.com, google.com.

So, you will have to choose a domain name for your website that should tell people about the content they will find on the website.

If you choose to write a blog on the financial topic, you can try names like personalfinance-blog, learnfinance, etc.

A domain name shouldn’t be either too long or too short. Try using two to three words and you can also include the “blog” word in the domain name to clarify that the website is a blog.

Is Dot-Com a High-Ranking TLD?

TLD is short for Top-Level-Domain. TLD is a component of a domain. If your domain “medium.com” the “.com” is a TLD. And you will find tons of TLDs like .net, .org, .me, Uk, etc.

But the .com (dot-com) is the highest selling and the most popular TLD yet. It was introduced in 1985 and since then it is in demand.

Though you can choose any domain because Google has mentioned that they treat all TLDs equally while ranking pages, however, people usually add .com after a website domain name. So, if you have a choice to select the “dot-com” and it is available with your domain name then go for it.

How To Create a Website for a Blog in 2022?

Creating a blog website was never easier than today. In past we had only one option that was hiring a web-developer, purchasing a domain and hosting.

Today, you can create a blog yourself and you do not need to hire any web-designer or web-developer.

You can either choose blogging platforms like:

Medium.com: A blogging platform founded by Co-Founder of Twitter. Medium for writers is available in free and paid membership version. Fee for medium is USD 5/month.

Medium provides a publishing platform with millions of readers every day. In my experience publishing on Medium is the fastest way to start earning from writing. Medium has built-in SEO.

Ghost.com: Ghost is similar to the Medium.com but relatively expensive. Ghost is also blogging and writer’s focused platform where you could create a blog with your own domain name. You can charge your readers through a subscriptions model.

Pricing for Ghost starts from USD 7.99/month.

Or create your own website with:

Wix
Squarespace
WordPress.com
Self-hosted Open Source WordPress.org website

These services provides no-code and low-code website building editor and options to choose a theme from a wide range.

You also go for Self-hosted WordPress website option if you are comfortable configuring domain, hosting and installing WordPress, themes and plugins. With this option you’ll have ample choices in themes and plugins.

Which Option Is the Best?

To choose a best option you need to evaluate and answer some questions:

Are you going to write on blog very often or rarely?
Do you have any expertise in web development?
Do you want to steer clear of any technical issues and only want to write?

Answering to the above questions would help you decided the best option for you.

Which One Is the Quickest To Create a Blog?

If you wish to start writing blog posts right away, then go for either Medium or Ghost. With these two platforms you would not have to deal with any technical stuff like domain, hosting configuration or installing any addons for SEO or editor.

I like Medium’s editor better and I prefer to use it even if I’m not publishing on Medium. In those cases, I mark my post draft and do not publish the stuff but I really enjoy writing on Medium.

And this is a best place to test your chosen niche and your writing style to find out if you are attracting enough audience or not.

Which One Is the Easiest To Create a Website?

The easiest way to create a website in my opinion is with open source WordPress from WordPress.org because the open source version has benefit of installing any theme and plugins of my choice which isn’t the case with WordPress.com, Wix and Squarespace although those services are also great and provides tons of tools to easily build a website without any coding.

Which One Is the Easiest To Monetize?

You can monetize all of them quite easily but with Medium your blog posts would start earning right away after you are enrolled in the Medium Partner Program.

You Have Finished the First Sprint

Running a blog is a marathon but starting a blog isn’t. And if you have finalized a niche, website name, and domain TLD, and chosen the blogging platform you have completed your first sprint.

The next step is to learn to monetize your blog so that you can earn some money from it.

I will share tips on monetizing your blog in another blog post and will share it’s links at the end of this post soon.