Blogging is a powerful way of speaking out loud to the world of one's opinion. In good old days, blogs were just online journals of people who were keen to write online. Since then it has become so much more than just expressing one's experience online.
There are many free and popular blogging platforms such as Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, and Medium out there to start a blog without going through all that hassle to host a blog by yourself. But most of these blogs just become another brick on the wall of blogs as they do not receive a great reader base.
Another reason for these free blogs to fail is that they are hosted under a subdomain. This is a technical disadvantage as well as a social error if the name of the blog is more than 6 characters. Readers wouldn't remember the name of the blog to come back to, even though your content is great.
Who are great bloggers? Great bloggers are those who post relevant, frequent and consistent, content online with a passion. And if you look closely, they are great advertisers too. A Blogger should have their persona in everything they say and contribute to the world. Otherwise the content you write will not be unique.
A blog, to be successful should consist of great content that can relate to many readers. So, how on earth a beginner can become a successful blogger? If free blogging platforms are too good to be true, the only option left is to host your own blog.
Hosting a blog is costly and you will need to have a separate budget for maintenance. At the same time you will need to put a lot of effort towards internet marketing to build an audience. For a starter, this can be seen as a major challenge with the competition that is among bloggers around the world.
With all being said, you will be surprised to know that you can use your social media accounts as personal blogs. It's true, out of all the popular social media websites, I've found that Facebook notes are the most tempting and suitable platform to start blogging. Here is why,
Free
First of all, just like all the other blogging platforms, Facebook notes allow you to publish your content for free under your profile. You can publish multimedia content like photos, videos, and GIFs and even go live when you need to. Infographics and flowcharts are quite hip these days and you can create them easily with a tool like Creately Flowchart Software.
Freedom to do whatever you want is there as long as you play by the Facebook TOS. All these features are given at zero cost and for a beginner this may seem like a golden opportunity.
No Maintenance
Sometimes freedom comes at a cost which you always have to pay at the end. Surprisingly, you don't have to pay for anything as Facebook servers are maintained by them. You don't have to renew domain names or pay for expensive hosting every year. And there are no bandwidth limitations for your content. And guess what, your blog will never go offline!
Audience
The best thing about Facebook blogging is that having your audience right then and there. You don't have to go anywhere, post anywhere or put a lot of effort towards online marketing to reach out to your readers.
Your friend list is your preliminary audience and then comes the 2nd level which is friends of friends. Everyone else can be attracted through engagement via your content.
That's not all, you will get to know your audience personally and the feedback you receive will be focused more on your content rather than on link building.
Engagement
Engagement is the key factor when it comes to a typical blog post. With Facebook blogging, the engagement will be visible. Interactions like commenting, likes and shares are the forms of engagement you will receive.
These interactions will be live and you won't have to go through the hassle of filtering spam. You can also measure your efforts with these interactions and improve the way you write.
Advertising
You don't have to rely on a lot of tools and methods to advertise your Facebook notes. You can create a separate Facebook page and boost your content off the page to other communities.
You can also target and filter the audience by age, gender, interests and geographical locations and pay for clicks or impressions. You can increase the number of your followers as you go and later commercialize the content you write.
Disadvantages
Even though there is no actual cost involved with Facebook Notes, there are some disadvantages of using Facebook for blogging.
There is only a very small chance of your posts getting indexed on Google so that your post will not get much organic traffic. In other words, they will not appear on search engines at all.
Your marketing efforts will be pretty straightforward; you will not be able to anticipate user behavior freely excluding the data and information provided by Facebook tailored for advertising. So, in other words, you don't have a lot options to experiment with.
The biggest disadvantage is that you will have to make an effort in finding readers. Since the organic switch is turned off, you will have to self-promote your content using the paid advertisement system. But that doesn't mean your free audience, which is your fan base, will not see your content on their news feeds. They will be your frequents and if you want to reach out of your fan base, use advertising.
About the Author Amanda Athuraliya is the communication specialist/content writer at Cinergix, the team behind the development of theMore Related Blog Posts For You