There are a baffling number of people, organisations, company’s and probably, truth told, charlatans, around offering an equally bewildering number of courses, e-courses, support groups and the like, all with the aim of telling you how to blog. As though it’s somehow an arcane/complicated/mysterious endeavour.
The truth is of course a little more mundane.
Have you ever typed an email? Can you click a button on a computer screen?
If the answer is yes to both of those, the chances are you’re equipped with all the necessary skills to be a blogger. It’s not difficult, even if you have no idea how spell-check works.
You don’t need a course or a certificate or the approval of others to put words onto a screen and hit a publish button and if you think you do, chances are you probably shouldn’t.
All the major blogging platforms like Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, and Tumblr are very easy to sign up for and have excellent help on how to use the more advanced features (and by “more advanced”, I mean adding things like photos to posts, not editing the CSS or anything).
Equally, it’s not difficult to purchase your own website address and redirect it to your blog. You’ll see people refer to this as a “vanity URL”, but all the main platforms let you do it from their dashboard, without any difficulty because they want it to be easy for you to do.
Frankly, the biggest challenge you’ll have as a blogger isn’t anything remotely to do with the technical aspects of setting up or running a blog*, it’s keeping it up and maintaining an interest in writing things. Otherwise you’ll end up posting to the odd photo meme or following prompts, and if that seems like a chore, you’re better off staying on Facebook and share photos and the like there.
*although it can get as complicated as you want it to. You just have to want it to be complicated. It’s not mandatory or anything.