How to start a blog for free, step by step

Step 1: decide what the blog is for

One sentence: who it is for and what they should do after reading. "Help homeowners in Leeds decide whether to repair or replace a boiler, and call us for a quote" is a blog. "Share thoughts on heating" is not.

That sentence decides the platform, the topics and how you will know whether it is working.

Step 2: pick a platform

The free platforms compared covers fourteen in detail. The short version:

Whatever you choose, check first that you can export your posts later.

Step 3: choose your address

Every free platform gives you a free address, such as yourname.wordpress.com or yourname.substack.com. It works, and it has one lasting cost: every link other sites give your posts builds up the platform's domain rather than yours. If you move later, those links point at the old address.

A domain of your own avoids that. A .com cost $11.81 a year at Porkbun when we checked, with renewal at the same price. If your platform needs a paid plan to connect it, decide now whether the blog is worth that; moving later is the expensive option.

If you already have a business website, the best address is yoursite.com/blog, so the blog strengthens the site you are trying to grow. Few free platforms can do that without technical help; blog.yoursite.com is the usual compromise.

Step 4: set up the essentials, and nothing else

• An about page that says who writes the blog and why they know the subject.
• A way to reach you, even if it is only an email address.
• A clear name and one-line description, the same as on your other profiles.
• Readable on a phone. Every modern template is; check yours.

Leave the design until you have ten posts. Nobody reads a blog for its template.

Step 5: plan your first ten posts

Each post should answer one question your readers actually search for. To find them:

1. Write down the questions customers ask you, word for word.
2. Put the main topic into the keyword generator and read the questions Google suggests.
3. Search each candidate and look at what ranks. If the first page is forums and thin pages, there is room. If it is ten established guides, pick a narrower version of the question.
4. Keep the ten that you can answer better than what is already there, because you know something the others do not.

Step 6: write and publish your first post

Put the answer in the first paragraph. Then give the details: how much, how long, what can go wrong, who should do something else. Add what only you know: a price you were quoted, a mistake you have seen customers make, a photo of the real thing.

Expect it to take a while. In Orbit Media's 2026 survey of 1,042 content marketers, the average post took 3 hours and 20 minutes and ran to 1,312 words. That is a professional average; a first post usually takes longer.

Before you publish, run the page through the SEO checker to catch a missing title, a missing description or text that loads only with JavaScript.

Step 7: get it into Google

Google Search Console is free. Add your blog, prove you own it, and then submit your sitemap: find your sitemap's address (most platforms create one automatically, often at /sitemap.xml), paste it into Add a new sitemap in the Sitemaps report, and submit.

Search Console then shows which searches your posts appear for, which is the best guide to what to write next.

Step 8: keep publishing at a pace you can hold

A post a week for a year beats a post a day for a fortnight. Set the pace you can keep when you are busy, not the one you can manage this week.

And expect it to be slow. In Ahrefs' study of a million pages crawled in September 2023, 1.74% reached the top ten within a year. Ahrefs also gives 6.11% from a larger sample of two million, which it says is a fairer number to use. Either way, most new pages never reach page one, and the ones that do usually take months. A blog grows by having many posts, each with a chance.

What free costs you

Nothing in money, if you stay on a free plan. In time, a few hours a post. The other costs arrive later: the upgrade you need for your own domain, a cut of anything you earn, and the work of moving if you outgrow the platform. Choosing your own domain at step 3 removes most of them.

When to stop doing it by hand

When the blog is working and the bottleneck is writing time. That is the point where paying someone, or something, to write makes sense, and the cost comparison is in How much does SEO cost?.