Hi I’m Praneeth Kumar.
In this blog I will walk you through 6 free blogging platforms and sites you can use to make money publishing content for free.
I have also explained how you can get started what are the pros and cons and how you can also make money from those blogging platforms.
So without further ado let’s get started.
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6 free blog sites to make money.
Founded in 2003, WordPress is a popular open source CMS.
WordPress is so popular that more than 40% of the websites on the internet are managed on this platform.
There are an estimated 64 million websites currently using WordPress.
Over 400 million people visit WordPress websites every month. 661 new WordPress sites go live each and every day.
Because of this you have a huge community of people using wordpress and if you have any doubt or problem using wordpress,
you can easily have access to lots of developers and content creators on YouTube and on websites like WP beginner to solve the issue for you and also have a dedicated forum on WordPress.
There are a couple of most important reasons why wordpress is so popular and highly used.
- There are more than 50000 plugins that you can install on WordPress and each plugin will help you add a unique and different functionality to your wordpress website within a click without touching code.
- There are more than 30000 free themes that you can use for wordpress website which are optimised for mobile friendliness and speed.
- WordPress is so flexible that you can easily integrated with external softwares like email marketing tools.
- WordPress is also very simple and easy to use.
You can learn the pros and cons of WordPress here.
There are essentially 2 types of WordPress,
- WordPress.com
- WordPress.org
When I refer to WordPress, I am talking about WordPress.org, this is open source CMS which is free to download and use, you own your website, WordPress.com is not open source rather it is paid platform,
it is owned by the company automatic which created WordPress, you can check the pricing of WordPress here.
You can check the difference between the two platforms here.
How to start & make money.
Even though wordpress.org is a open source CMS, you need web hosting where your website files are stored and others can access your website and domain name which is address of your website in order to start using WordPress, there are three main ways you can use WordPress,
- You can buy a web hosting for some price yearly or monthly.
- You can host wordpress on your local server.
- You can use free WordPress hosting services.
You can read my guide on how to start using WordPress for free without purchasing the hosting.
The drawbacks of it are that,
- You don’t completely own your website
- You have limited resources.
- You have to take care of web hosting technical issues like protection of your website from malware and hackers and online attacks.
- Read Bluehost review.
- Read why bluehost is best for WordPress.
- Read Bluehost vs hostinger Vs siteground.
- Read this guide on how to start a wordpress website using bluehost.
Since you have purchased the web hosting service for your website you don’t have to worry about any technical issues like scanning and removing Malware from your web servers,
you also don’t have to worry about limited resources like storage and bandwidth and you also get Technical Support for your website from hosting service like automatic backups of your website from hosting service and a lot of other features.
After you start your website on bluehost and create content consistently and get traffic, you can make money in different ways like,
- Display ads.
- Sell affiliate products.
- Sell your own physical and digital products.
- Sell your own services.
- Published sponsored content.
WordPress is by far the best platform to start a blog professionally and make money in 2021 and beyond.
There are a bunch of alternatives to WordPress.org which you can also consider using like joomla and ghost which are also open source content management systems but
they are relatively less popular and do not have much customisation features and plugins as well like WordPress but
you can also host them on your own website or you can use web hosting services like bluehost for the hosting purpose and
create a blog and because they’re free and open source software you completely own the website and blog and you have a lot of functionalities and customisation that you do on the blog to make money.
If you have ever wondered about starting a blog or blogging then you must have heard about this platform.
Founded back in 1999 and purchased by Google in 2003, blogger is a free blogging platform.
Using this tool you can create a blog within a matter of 5 minutes.
There is always a great fight and competition between blogger Vs wordpress.
But I would say it is not a great comparison.
WordPress is great to start a blog professionally and own it where as blogger is great for starting a blog to test the waters for free.
According to trends built with , over 600000+ websites are created and managed on blogger.
It is huge when you think about it for a second.
So many people still use wordpress for a couple of reasons.
- It is simple and easy to use.
- You can get your website live in less than 5 minutes.
- You don’t have to worry about limited resources like storage and bandwidth because you get unlimited of them as they are hosted on Google cloud.
- You have free amazing themes and good customization.
- You can easily connect the website with Google search console and Google Analytics and check the performance for free.
- You can also take backup of your website and easily migrate to other platforms like WordPress.
It is not all good about blogger, there are some serious cons as well like,
- You don’t own the website that you create on blogger, Google does.
- If you don’t follow the terms and conditions of using blogger, Google can delete your website.
- There is limited customization ability.
For more information you can read my blogger review along with pros and cons here.
How to start and make money?
You can read my step by step guide on how to create a blog on blogger and start writing and publishing content.
You can use a couple of strategies to make money on blogger.
- Display ads.
- Sell Affiliate products.
This is the exact road map you can use to start using blogger to make money from home blogging.
Medium is also one of the best platforms to write and publish content and make money from your blog posts.
Founded in 2012, you can call medium is a perfect mixture of both online content publishing platform and social media as well.
According to Similar web, medium gets more than 180 million visitors every month from Google and Other Search engines.
And medium is one of the top 20 social media sites as per buffer.
Medium is great for a couple of reasons.
- It is very simple and easy to use.
- It has a very user friendly, distraction free writing dashboard and very much useful to publish long form content along with adding images and multimedia on this platform.
- Users can easily interact with the content on the medium through claps, follow author’s, comments, report or block author suggestions content in your feed, share the stories, and also bookmark them as well.
There are a couple of bad things about medium as well.
- You don’t own the blog and content you publish on medium.
- In order to use Google analytics and webmaster tools, you need to use a custom domain name with the medium account.
You can read my medium review here to learn all the pros and cons.
How to start and make money?
First of all you need to create an account on medium you can do this by visiting the medium.com
You can create an account on medium within a couple of minutes with your Gmail or Facebook account and after you do that you will visit the dashboard of your account and
click on your account icon and then click on write a story and you will be redirected to a dashboard where you can write and publish content.
After you write and edit the content you can make some necessary SEO settings like meta description, add canonical tags if you have that content already published on your own Website, customize URLs, etc.
After you publish a bunch of content on your medium account, if it is high quality content properly optimised on around a specific keyword then it can have a high chance that the keyword can definitely rank in Google search results because
medium has a domain authority of 98 which can make your blog to easily rank in Google,you can easily check the statistics of your content in the stats section of medium.
Let’s take a look at a couple of ways you can use to make money from your medium content.
- You can join medium partnership program and make money depending upon how users interact with your content and the total views you get on your medium content.
- You can add affiliate links in your medium content and make money through affiliate marketing.
- You can also publish sponsored content on your medium account but make sure it is connected with the custom domain name.
This is how you can use medium to write and publish content for free and make money.
Tumblr is one of the best social media platform in western countries.
Founded in 2007, this is a popular social media platform and also known as micro blogging platform.
Tumblr is exactly opposite to medium where the platform is popular for publishing short piece of content like images, videos, links, quotes, text on a frequent basis.
According to statista, this popular blogging platform has 327 million people visiting every month and 472 million registered users and accounts and 47% of traffic of Tumblr cones from USA.
This platform is so popular that many popular brands and companies in the world like Coca Cola and redbull use this platform for brand marketing.
There are a couple of reasons why this platform is so popular like,
- It is not just a micro blogging platform but also a social media with you can easily connect, interact with different people worldwide
- It is very easy to publish content in terms of images and videos in a few clicks
- You can create an account on tumblr in a matter of a few clicks and less than 5 minutes
You can read my Tumblr review here.
How to start and make money?
In order to use Tumblr you need to create a free account using Gmail from its official website and you can create a free sub domain name in the process.
After you successfully create an account, you can select a theme and customise your website.
Now you can have access to a dashboard of tumblr like this where you can easily publish content on the platform.
Just like in twitter there are retweets and save pins or repins in pinterest, similarly there is a feature called reblogs which is about sharing others content on your account in Tumblr, because tumblr is a social media platform as well like medium and Facebook,
you will have to follow a couple of user account in order to see their content feed in your account and obviously they can also follow you.if you have a active account and always stay connected with them and
as you constantly upload content on this platform if users on the platform like and enjoy your content then the users can reblog that piece of content on their account.
When others reblog your content on their account you will get more exposure and do follow backlinks in return to your account.
This will increase the exposure of your account and get more views to your account eventually down the road.
Now let’s take a look at how you can make money from tumblr account.
- Tumblr does not display ads on your free tumblr account so you can make money by showing ads from Google AdSense.
- You can also add affiliate links in your content and make money with affiliate marketing.
- You can also publish sponsored content of brands on your account depending upon the engagement and exposure of your tumblr account.
This is the exact method you can use to make money from Tumblr for free.
I know you might be wondering that you have came here to read about free blogging sites to earn money but I am listing out social media platforms in place of blogging platforms but hold on read a while and it will make sense.
You must have heard about LinkedIn as a social media platform but it is also a great platform to write blog posts and make money.
You might be wondering why only LinkedIn Facebook is the largest social media platform why not that instead?
Let me explain!
Let’s take a look at a couple of interesting statistics about LinkedIn first to learn why it is on my list.
- LinkedIn has 675 million monthly users.
- LinkedIn is the most-used social media platform amongst Fortune 500 companies.
- Of the 2 billion Millennials globally, 87 million of them are on LinkedIn,Of those 87 million Millennial users, 11 million are in decision-making positions.
- 65% of B2B companies have acquired a customer through LinkedIn.
- Half of all US adults with college degrees use LinkedIn.
- LinkedIn generates 3x more conversions than Twitter & Facebook.
- LinkedIn is the #1 channel B2B marketers use to distribute content at 94%.
- Long-form content gets the most shares on LinkedIn.
- 97% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn
- 91% of marketing executives list LinkedIn as the top place to find quality content.
- 30 million companies are on LinkedIn.
Source: FOUNDATIONINC.
I know it is long list of statistics but each and every statistic tell a different and unique story about LinkedIn that seperates it from Facebook and other social media channels.
After reading all these amazing statistics and facts about linkedin, now you should have no doubts and questions regarding why linkedin is one of the best platforms to publish content and make money for free.
Even though Facebook and Instagram are one of the top social media platforms with a lot of people using it every month in numbers but
LinkedIn is a perfect platform because it is used by the most highly professional people in the world who are making a lot of money in their life as per the above stats.
Alot of people use Facebook and Instagram for time pass and connecting with people where as people use LinkedIn for business opportunities and partners.
So linkedin is simply great choice to get,
- Make money.
- Get new business opportunities.
- Find new mentors and friends.
- Increase your network and connections.
Now you know why linkedin is so great.
Let’s see how you can start and make money using linkedin.
How to start and make money?
You can refer to this guide to learn how to start writing articles on linkedin.
Since most LinkedIn users are business men and professionals so you know that they are already making a lot of money from their business and life.
You can leverage that to make money from following methods like,
- You can sell your own products you create from landing pages.
- You can sell affiliate products.
This is how you can use LinkedIn with its pre-established audience base to publish content and make money.
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Wix.
Founded back in 2006, wix is popular for its drag and drop website builder.
There are more than 160 million websites which are hosted on this platform.
One of the main reasons why wix is so popular blogging sites is because,
- Built-in professional solutions to promote your business, like email marketing, powerful SEO tools, client management, and more.
- You can easily create a website for free using Wix and drag and drop feature
- Hundreds of fully customizable templates made by design experts with WYSIWYG editor.
There are a few drawbacks of using Wix like,
- You have limited functionality.
- You can’t easily migrate your content from Wix to other website builder like WordPress
- You only get 500 MB storage and 1 GB bandwidth for free
- You can’t use Google Analytics to check your website performance in free plan
- You can’t display ads and make money from wix free website since Wix displays their company ads on your free site.
Anyhow wix is one of the best blogging platforms for beginners because it has very less learning curve involved in order to start using and creating website.
You can read my wix review.
How to start and make money?
In order to start a website, you need to create a free account on Wix.com
You will also decide the subdomain for the website.
After you properly select the right theme and customise the website and publish it on the internet then you can start thinking about creating and publishing content on your blog.
There are lots of tools you can use to optimise your Wix blog posts for SEO using the app market.
And when it comes to making money, You can use a couple of ways to make from free Wix blog like,
- You can obviously sell affiliate products on your blog.
If you like using wix you can upgrade to the premium version from the free plan which starts from 325 INR monthly.
You can check their prices below.
Using the premium plan of wix you can make money from different ways without any restrictions like,
- You can display ads on your blog
- You can now sell your own physical and digital products e books and courses
- You can sell your own services as well
- You can also publish sponsored content on your blog.
These are all the popular method you can use to make money creating content for free using Wix.
You can also consider using Weebly if you don’t like wix which has similar features at a similar pricing range and also offers a free hosting to get started with and make money publishing content as well.
Ending remarks;
These are all the popular platforms you can use to publish content for free and make money from your content like blog posts.
Share the blog post with your family and friends to let them know that how they can start a blog for free and make money,
Sharing is caring.
Do comment down which blogging platform do you like the most & looking forward to start a blog on.
I will catch you next time till then keep learning and keep growing.