There are over 100 million blogs online to date and this figure is growing rapidly as new bloggers emerge on the scene everyday. If you don’t currently have one of your own, you probably will decide to set one up sooner or later.

Most people blog casually with no real intent of generating an income. If you think this profile fits you, there are a number of free blog hosting services out there. The popular ones include Blogger, Blogstream, TypePad, WordPress.com, LiveJournal and Blogsome. The set up is very simple for all these services. Just choose a user name, enter your particulars and you can start blogging in minutes.

If you reckon you can keep your blog updated often enough and would like an upgrade, you can move on to the next level by getting your own hosting. This is a no brainer for those who want to make some serious money from blogging.

Basic hosting with your own domain address will cost you approximately US$65 a year. There are definitely cheaper hosting available but more often than not these services are not very reliable and will cause you headaches in the long run.

After selecting your hosting, you will need to set up your blog publishing platform. The platform of choice is WordPress. It is a free download but you will need to install it to your host server. For those who are not savvy on the technical aspects, fear not. Just remember before hand to select a host that offers Fantastico or Simple Scripts. This provides you with pretty much a one click installation for WordPress without having to get into the coding and what not.

A good host for blogging activities that include the above features is BlueHost. I recommend it highly and it is what I am currently using on my blogs. It took me less than half an hour to sign up and install WordPress on BlueHost. Very quick.

Once all that is done, you can start posting articles while you gradually learn how to customize, personalize and optimize your blog. It’s a bit more complicated than setting up a free blog host but once you’ve completed the groundwork, you’ll thank yourself for it.

What Next?

Sign up for a free blog:

Blogger
Blogstream
TypePad
WordPress.com
LiveJournal
Blogsome

or consider your own hosting and domain name at BlueHost.