A No-Bullshit Honest Answer
TLDR: Click here to signup at Magicpages hosting, on which you can deploy Ghost and connect your domain and start your blog in less than 5 minutes.
I have been asked so many times how to start my blog, and this is a very famous question. If you do a quick, simple Google search, you might find hundreds of articles because it has a great affiliate revenue and it's a recurring revenue. And if your page ranks highly on the Google search, you would have loads of money in your bank account.
So that's a fascinating thing, and that is also partly an incentive for me to write this article, but this is not the main thing. I'm here to give you a no-bullshit answer to this question, how to start your blog.
The thing is, 10 years from now in the past, if you had asked me, the answer would have been WordPress. It is the most popular content management system. However, it is a very robust thing, and of course, you need to have hosting for it and also buy a human email newsletter and have hundreds of plugins so that your site works perfectly. And it has many use cases. And if you're looking for anything but a simple blog system, then you can have WordPress or any other thing like Squarespace and so many things.
But if you're looking for writing, if you wake up daily and you just need to write something into a beautiful CMS and publish it with a very minimal charge, then I think Ghost is a modern blogging platform which is simple and which gives you the autonomy and which is not behind founders who are wanting a closed system.
So it is a completely open system, and that is the beautiful of it. So all you need to do is buy a hosting for Ghost from any of the partners, but the one I recommend is Magic Pages.
It is run by a founder, Janice, who is very excellent in the customer service, perhaps more than the Ghost official managed hosting system. So what do you need to do? Go to Magic Pages, buy their hosting plan, and within two minutes, you would have your Ghost deployed on their subdomain.
Now you need to buy a domain name from any of the registrars, and then go to the settings and point your domain to that subdomain. That's it. And your blog is ready within the five minutes.
And your purchases are only two things as of now. It is the hosting which will be $10 to $15 depending upon when you're buying the hosting, and the domain name will be $10 per year. So basically $25 for now, and every month it will be $10 to $15 depending upon the hosting plan. And that's it.
And including in this, you have the at least 2,000 emails per month sending facility. And as a simple blogging feature, this is all you need. So if you are a beginner who just wants to blog, this is the best option for you.
Anybody who tells you otherwise are just trying to maximize their affiliate revenue. Nothing else. This is the correct answer on how to start your blog.