How to Start a Blog for Your Child

Have you ever wondered how to start a blog for your child? Have you been put off because you thought it might be hard, complex or expensive?

You don’t need to be, it’s so easy a child could do it, literally! It may be just half a day’s work for your child to start a blog and publish their first posts, and it’s free.

Starting a Blog is a Great Projects for Kids

• Blogging is fun!
• It can be a creative outlet for literary and artistic talents.
• It’s not hard, with ready made themes, almost all of the technical side is taken care of for you.
• Writing, of any sort, is great for their literacy skills, using spell check helps enormously too ( it’s helped me!).
• The sky’s the limit with the computer skills you can acquire. Everything from files on your computer to HTML coding, if you wish. ( try Code Academy, another free site for learning to code).
• Viewing blog statistics in table and graph form helps with maths skills.
• Photo editing is creative, fun and a real skill in itself, as is taking the original photos.
• Kids love feeling good about themselves, seeing the viewing figures and Facebook likes mount up is great for their self esteem.
• One day their blog may just bring in decent money. I make money from my blogs, that will be another lesson.

Want to See My Kids’ Blogs?

My kids built their blogs when they were very young. These days they works on our professional websites, we have several. My younger son has a cat site which makes him money in Amazon sales. He loves to make money!

Their old sites are below but they haven’t been updated in years.

D, age 9 has World Food Kid. We set that one up yesterday morning.

Boo, age 7 has Boy Around The World. He’s had his blog for a while but he lost interest. He’s all fired up again now.

How to Start a Blog For Your Child.

Take yourself along to WordPress.com or some other free blogging site ( Blogger is another good one, but I know WordPress best). Hit the big, orange Get Started button and enter your email address to sign up.

The 4th box down asks for your blog address. Enter the name of the blog you would like here. The  .wordpress.com will be added automatically. You’ll have to get creative with the name, duplicate blog names aren’t allowed.

Click the box for a free blog ( Create Blog in the Beginner column) and that’s it, you have a blog.

All you need now is a theme. WordPress will show you a selection, some free, some paid. Just select a free theme that appeals to you. Most of the free themes have options to customize them, you’ll have to pay for this option. You really don’t need to. You can easily change your theme at any time.

To write your first post go to your WordPress dashboard, find Posts on the left hand menu, select Add New and start creating. Type in your text, add images using the Add Media button, Publish when you are ready. If you get stuck feel free to ask me via the comments section.

Blog Image Processing.

Blogging isn’t just about writing and tech skills, photography also plays a part. Getting kids into photography is a smart thing to do, it can open many doors and photographers generally don’t have to sit exams. We have a post on learning photography for kids.

My 7-year-old and I changed the picture on the left to the one on the right in a few minutes this morning. These skills are really useful to have. I’m self-taught and used my digital image manipulation skills professionally in a hospital pathology laboratory. I was the only one in the lab who knew how to do it, so I scored myself a pay rise.

If you have Photoshop and you know how to use it, great, if not there are a few free image processing sites available online. Picmonkey and pixlr are both good. These days I use Adobe Spark Post on my phone and laptop.

It’s best to reduce your file size by reducing image quality and image size. We like to add text and play around with colours, cropping, borders and a million other variables.  You can even produce photo collages or Facebook headers really easily.Just play around with your photos, it’s lots of fun for you and the kids.

Obviously there is a lot more to it than this if you want to make your blog popular, successful and lucrative. This is just lesson one, to get your kids, and you, interested. Stick around or feel free to ask questions. Happy blogging!