How to Start a Blog for Free
How to create a website - the free and easy way (well, almost free)
There are different ways to start a blog.
Blogger itself is 100% free. You only need a Google account, which you can connect to your blog. Getting the basic blog online took me about 15 minutes. I already had a Google account, so I could jump straight into creating the blog and choosing a default theme.
I spent roughly another hour playing around with the layout, fonts, colors and other settings. It's still deliberately simple for now. The main focus is on writing and creating content, and I'll worry about making the website prettier later.
Getting my own domain
I wanted something a little cleaner, so I bought my own domain, rawndom.com, through Porkbun for around $11 USD per year.This part is completely optional. You can run a perfectly functional blog using the free blogspot.com address. I just wanted RAW’ndom to have its own little corner of the internet.
Connecting the domain to Blogger turned out to be slightly more complicated than simply buying it, though.
Connecting a custom domain
Blogger makes this fairly easy, but there are a couple of extra steps if you want to use your own domain.
First, you enter your new domain under Settings > Publishing > Custom domain in Blogger. Blogger will then show you two CNAME records. One connects your domain to Google, while the second is a unique record used to verify that you own the domain. Both have to be added to the DNS records at Porkbun.
DNS changes can take up to 24 hours to take effect, although in my case everything worked after just a few minutes.
There was one more thing to fix: I wanted both rawndom.com and www.rawndom.com to work. When I entered rawndom.com, I would usually end up on Porkbun's parking page instead of my blog.
The redirect is a setting in Blogger, but you also need to add four additional A-records to your DNS settings. I also had to remove some of the existing Porkbun CNAME and A-record entries that were interfering with the setup.
DNS changes can take several hours or even a day to take effect, although in my case everything worked after just a few minutes.
The domain was connected and the redirect worked. The exact process depends a little on the domain provider, you can find googles instructions here.
Blogger vs. WordPress
Another way to start a blog is WordPress, which is a very powerful platform with lots of different options and possibilities.
One option is the free plan on WordPress.com. It is easy to get started with, but the free plan comes with limitations. Your site also has WordPress branding and advertising.
Another option is WordPress.org. The WordPress software itself is free and can be downloaded and installed on your own website. The difference is that you need web hosting, or you can host the website yourself. In most cases, this means additional costs and a little more work to set everything up.
For RAW’ndom, I decided to start with Blogger. It gives me everything I need for now, is free and lets me concentrate on the actual reason I started the blog in the first place: writing.
How much time and money did it take to get RAW’ndom online?
- Setting up Blogger: 15 minutes
- Playing around with the design: 1 hour
- Domain setup and DNS: 2 hours (mostly because I had to figure things out)
- Google Search Console & indexing: 1-2 hours (more figuring things out)
- Writing the posts: between 1 hour and several days - depending on the topic
Money spent: ~ $11 USD for the domain.
Worth it?
Totally. I wanted to see if I could actually stick with blogging before spending a bunch of money on hosting, themes or other fancy stuff. For now, Blogger does everything I need, quick and easy.
I'll probably come back to this article later and add another update. Maybe I'll still be using Blogger. Maybe RAW’ndom will have moved. We'll see.
