If you are a financial expert or just someone who enjoys finding ways to save money and get more out of your budget and has some useful tips to share, then starting your own finance blog can be a great idea.
As well as having fun coming up with interesting things to cover and writing your own interesting take on finance, your blog can also be a way to engage with other people who are interested in the same area of finance as you, build up your reputation as an authority on financial matters (if you’re a professional in the industry), and even make some extra money. Plus, owning and running a successful blog can be a great addition to your resume, and may even help find you financial writing work if you are interested in doing this.
So How Do You Get Started?
The first thing to do is make some decisions about what niche you want to cover, and what your blog will be like. Here are some questions to ask yourself to help define the type of blog you want:
- Do you want mostly text articles, or are you interested in making video posts as well?
- Do you want everything to be in your own voice to showcase your writing skills, or do you want to use good guest articles from other writers to give you more content?
- What is a good name for your blog and how can you create a brand using your blog name and site appearance?
- What categories will you cover? All things financial, or limited to one niche such as thrifty tips, investing, or financial products?
Once you have a concept in terms of the type and tone of your blog, you can start building it!
Setting Up a Blog
These days, you don’t need any coding or web design experience to set up a professional looking blog, and you can do all of your customization and content addition through a comfortable web interface.
The easiest one to learn to use is WordPress, as it is hugely popular and there are lots of great resources to help you, and also an abundance of themes to choose from to base your site’s look and feel on. Check out this one, Man Sar, for an idea of what a theme is and how you can customize one to suit your chosen branding.
Making Your Blog Live
Once you have designed your blog and added some articles or other content to it, it is time to publish it, so people can see it! Most people who want a professional looking site, buy a web hosting package and a domain rather than publishing for free on a WordPress URL, which is restrictive. You can buy hosting on the cloud very cheaply, and domains are also inexpensive unless you want a domain name that there is a lot of competition for. Remember that you will normally have to renew your domain annually.
So, there you have it – setting up your own finance blog is cheap and easy, and can lead to some great things!