Create a blog

Whether you're starting a personal project or supporting your business's growth, a blog is an ideal format for keeping in contact with internet users/your community. Creating a blog enables you to:

• Share your passion: Creating a blog means being free to share with, discuss with, and react to a community organized around a shared passion
• Have your own online space: Creating a blog means having your own space in the wilds of the internet. Your own communication space online!
• Develop your network: Creating a blog means meeting a community that shares the same interest centers as you and expanding your personal network
• Promote your expertise: Creating a blog means sharing quality content that highlights your expertise with a wider community
• Increase visibility: Creating a blog means improving your natural search engine ranking and increase visibility with an attentive community
• Increase traffic: Creating a blog means increasing your online legitimacy as well as traffic to your primary website

There are many options for creating a free blog. Their drag-and-drop system is efficient and enables you to create a free blog in just a few minutes. However, these systems require compromises that in the long term undermine your blog's credibility by:
- limiting the number of pages
- restricting the number features available
- limiting storage space or bandwidth
- displaying the name of the provider in the website's address
- displaying ad banners on your blog's pages
- providing less reactive support that may require payment
- not providing choice in data storage location

These solutions, then, are at best temporary and migrating to a paid solution is often required. By choosing to create your WordPress blog with Gandi, you can be assured that you own your own identity online, and you maintain control over your data and can change providers without having to start over again.

Increasing revenue can be a source of motivation to create a blog. Monetization of your blog essentially depends on your number of visitors. The wider number of readers you reach, the more new customers you attract, and the more you'll increase your website's traffic. To reach this goal, you'll need to identify your audience and produce quality content. Once you've established your reputation, you can monetize your blog in a few ways:

• Affiliation: create partnerships with brands you promote and get a commission when a visit from your website results in a sale
• Sponsored posts: write content for your blog that promotes a product, a brand, or a business
• Product sales: you sell products such as ebooks, video trainings, or even physical merchandise
• Subscriptions: the holy grail once you've attracted a solid community, is to offer subscriptions to access exclusive content

WordPress is widely popular or creating a blog because it's a free tool that enables you to implement a blog in just a few minutes. WordPress is particularly well known for:
- Its ease of use: WordPress is the most used content management system (CMS) in the world, particularly because of how easy it is to create, edit, and manage websites with it, even for total beginners. Additionally, creating a WordPress website means you're sure to find an answer to any question you might have with the many sources of help available, frequently refreshed by a large, highly engaged community
- Its customization options: Creating a WordPress site enables you to access an enormous catalog of themes and plugins, most of them free. A theme sets the appearance of your blog and plugins add additional features which enable you to completely customize your blog even if you don't have any particular technical skills
- Its ability to ensure better natural search engine ranking: One of the reasons for starting a blog is to improve your ranking in search engine results. Good news: with code specially formatted for search engines, WordPress is a search engine favorite. Creating a WordPress site guarantees you benefit from better natural search engine ranking and meet your SEO goals.
- Its open-source format supports freedom and independence: As opposed to blogs created by site creation platforms, when you create your website with WordPress, you maintain complete control over your data. You are free to update it yourself, and above all, your not bound to your provider. You maintain independence, you can change your provider when when you want, without having to rebuild your blog from nothing.

WordPress is a free, content management system that's easy to use and provides a high level of customization. Here are the steps you need to take to create a WordPress blog:

1. Sign up for a web hosting solution adapted to your needs. To create a blog, we recommend you start with a Gandi Starter website pack that provides the fairest turnkey solution
2. Choose your domain name, that is, your website's address, from a list of more than 80 domain extensions (included with your website pack)
3. Launch the automatic installation of WordPress on your web hosting
4. Select your website theme and customize your blog
5. Write and publish your first blog post

A blog is a website that enables you to demonstrate your expertise/knowledge through publishing content. A showcase website is an informative website that presents a company's business: its identity, its location, as well as the products and services it sells. As opposed to a showcase website, which is a static website, a blog is a site that's regularly updated.It's very common to have a blog and a showcase website, since a blog serves to redirect traffic towards a showcase website in order to increase traffic and hence the number of customers.

Gandi's website packs include a free domain name with one of among more than 80 domain extensions. If you already have a domain name at another provider, you can choose WordPress web hosting or Prestashop web hosting. You can then manually configure your DNS records at your domain name provider.