You are a talented writer or a contender at the beginning of your road. You don’t want to become a successful blogger – spend years building your audience, fight the competition, constantly digging for trending topics and popular keywords. All you want to do is write about movies, engineering, psychology, investing for dummies or pretty much any topic you can think of. You don’t have to start by registering a domain and paying for a hosting service – all you need to do is register an account with these free blog services and start publishing your blog posts right away.
Blogger and WordPress
These two free blog services are the first to come to mind when it comes to publishing posts online for free. Both of them are age-long and popular, with millions all over the world sharing their ideas through them day after day. As such, they are seen as a bit “flippant” by most professional bloggers – they are great alternatives for aspiring writers at the beginning of their roads, nonetheless.
Both services need some initial setting up – choosing a theme and getting familiar with the user interface. They have steep learning curves, though. And if you think you are ready to take your blog to the next level, you can always export your content from either or add a custom domain name to your existing one.
Tumblr
Tumblr has recently been subjected to serious scrutiny for removing all of its adult-oriented blogs at once. In spite of this, it remains a pretty decent microblogging platform without the limitations of Twitter. Tumblr works either with a subdomain (yourname.tumblr.com) or with a custom domain name, it is easy to use and set up, and it has integrated social components, making it easy to upload and share short texts, images, animations, videos, and audio.
Tumblr has its limitations but it’s still a great tool to start sharing your thoughts and building an audience.
Medium
Medium is perfect for those who don’t want to waste any time with setting up a blog. It is a distraction-free publishing platform with a simple WYSIWYG editor. All you need to do is register an account and start writing right away. Medium was created by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams to serve as an alternative to the former (then limited to publishing updates of 140 characters or less). It works almost like a social network focused on long-form writing – users can write their article and publish it through the platform, and other users can appreciate the others’ articles, follow them, and reward them.
Medium also works as a content curation service – its editors review thousands of stories each day, recommending the best ones to their readers. The content creators in the Partner Program are rewarded with cash for their high-quality work – the money doesn’t come from advertisers but from those paying $50 a year for Medium’s premium membership.
