The minimum age to use most blogging platforms is 13 years old. Younger kids can still blog, but you’ll have to set up the blog and help out. 13 is simply the minimum age for your children to start a blog of their own, on their own.
Blogging has many benefits for your children, so let’s dig in to see how blogging can improve your life and the yours, because I really think so.
Since this guide is so detailed and comprehensive, I suggest bookmarking it for future reference. For ease of navigation, I’ve included a table of contents.
The Benefits of Blogging
Blogging has its benefits, but since you’re looking for information on starting a blog for your child , I guess you already think there are many benefits.
Here are 8 benefits of blogging:
- Blogging is all kinds of fun
- Blogging improves writing skills
- Blogging is a way to make money online
- Blogging creates an audience to share with
- Blogging promotes learning about every topic
- Blogging can happen anywhere, in any country
- Blogging builds friendships, rather than competition
- Blogging is a way to spend quality time with your child
Whether your goal is to help your child turn a blog into a business, or to start a blog just for fun, this guide will show you how.
5 Steps to Start Your Child’s Blog
Starting a blog is simple. You have two basic options from the start:
- Start a self-hosted blog: Your child will have her own domain name (.com) and her own web page. hosting (where the website is stored online).
- Start a hosted blog – Your child will have a blog on a platform, similar to having a social media account with posts longer. This option is more restrictive, but less expensive (usually free). Your web address will be something like yourblog.bloggingplatform.com, instead of just yourblog.com.
I highly recommend opting for the self-hosted option eventually, which is what we’ll discuss starting with this one. forward point. If you prefer a hosted blog, just go to WordPress.com or Blogger.com and sign up; it will be just like any other online platform that guides you through the process. Another option is KidzWorld, which may be the only blogging platform specifically for kids, but your options are limited.
A self-hosted blog requires a little more work, but the rewards are worth it.
Step 1: Select Your Hosting
There are thousands of web hosting companies out there, but I did the legwork to make it easy for you to choose. I tried all the popular hosting companies and found the one with the best customer service, fastest upload speeds, and the most overall benefits.
Who am I talking about? Siteground.
WordPress is my favorite platform and I’ve tried pretty much all of them. Siteground makes it easy to create a WordPress blog. Simply go to Siteground.com, hover over “Hosting” and select “WordPress Hosting”.
I suggest starting with the “StartUp” plan. It’s the cheapest way for your child to start blogging on a self-hosted platform, without paying for services you won’t use yet.
Step 2: Select a domain name
This is an extremely important step. This is how people will find your child’s blog.
Once you’ve selected your hosting plan, you’ll see this screen:
A free domain name (for the first year) is included with all hosting plans. After the first year, it will cost about a dollar a month to maintain.
When selecting your child’s domain name, it should be relevant and preferably less than 10 characters. Propose a title for the blog and see if that domain name is available first. Otherwise, you can use a domain name generator, such as Domain Wheel, based on your child’s blog keywords. The title and domain name don’t have to be the same, but they do have to make sense together.
Shorter domain names are better, according to research from Gaebler 2, a magazine for entrepreneurs. Six characters or less is ideal, although most are taken.
It’s always better to try a .com instead of other domain extensions, because people assume by default that your website has the .com extension 3. If there isn’t a good option available related to your child’s website title, you can break the rule and go with .net or .org (or one of the new extensions), but it’s better to stick with . com.
Make sure the name can be pronounced 4. If the name cannot be easily said out loud, it will be difficult for people to remember it.
Step 3: Setting Up Your Blog
Once you select a domain name, you’ll fill out your information and pay. Make sure your “free domain name” is still selected. “Privacy Domain” and “Sg Site Scanner” are not needed at this time. You can always add these services later.
Once you’ve paid, Siteground will walk you through the process of setting up your WordPress blog. Once you’re in WordPress, it’s time to set up the basics.
Step 4: Choose a theme
This is the easy part. You can choose how the website will look.
I recommend using Elegant Themes, a collection of 80+ themes. Their Divi platform is my favorite, but once you sign up, you have access to all of their themes for less than $8 a month (as of 2020).
If you’re not ready to pay for a premium theme , there are many free options to get started. Most of these have a check mark at the bottom linking to the theme developer, but that’s not a big deal when you’re just getting started.
Here are some options for free themes:
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To install a theme, download the .zip file and then upload it. To upload the theme, hover over “Appearance” in WordPress’s left menu bar and select “Themes”.
On the next page, click “Add New” at the top and then click “Upload Theme”. on the next page.
You will now see the screen below. Find the .zip of your theme and install it.
After clicking “Install Now”, activate the theme and the design will be applied. You are now ready to start working on the theme’s appearance.
Again in the left menu bar in WordPress, hover over “Appearance” and then click “Customize”.
This is where you can make most of the visual changes, add your logo, edit the typography, and everything else your theme will allow you to do. If you selected a free theme, you may have limited options here. If you opted for Elegant Themes, your child will have all sorts of options to customize the blog.
Step 5: Create Your Child’s First Post
It’s time to start blogging! the blog!
To create your first post, simply click “Add New” in the “Posts” section of the left menu bar. This will take you to the editing screen.
Thankfully, with WordPress 5.0, writing your post has never been easier. Your child has so many options to make beautiful posts with ease.
Play around with the different layout settings, featured image, article title, and interface, until your child is comfortable with it.
That’s it! Your son now has a fully functional WordPress blog. Sounds dangerous, right? Oh, they’ll be fine. What is the worst that can happen? Seriously though, be sure to monitor them from here on out; we will cover it in more detail later. They have the ability to post things that the whole world will see. Keep an eye on that!
Once your child knows how to write a post, it’s time to get into the extras: plugins!
Installing, using, and finding plugins
A plugin is a tool that [theoretically] increases the quality of a blog. There are plugins that make things easier, add features, and do just about anything your child wants. You don’t want to add too many, or it will slow down the website, but a handful of good plugins can really help.
First, here’s how to install them. In the left menu bar, hover over “Plugins” and then click “Add New.” Similar to installing a theme, you’ll simply load the plugin, activate it, and start using it.
Within WordPress, you’ll find countless plugins, but there are even more outside of WordPress.
You can customize most plugins under ‘Settings’ on the left menu bar, while other plugins will be located under ‘Plugins’, ‘Tools’ or right there on the menu bar.
Here are some plugins I recommend:
- Adsense Click Fraud Monitoring – Monitors and prevents malicious clicks on Google ads Adsense.
- Affiliate Link Cloaking – Hides your affiliate links 5. It also tracks unique hits and visitors for each link.
- Akismet – Used by millions, Akismet is possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from spam.
- BackupB uddy – The most complete WordPress solution for backup, restore, migration and deployment. Backs up a customizable selection of files, settings, and content for a complete snapshot of your site. Restore, migrate or deploy your site to a new host or new domain with complete peace of mind.
- Bloom – A simple, comprehensive and beautifully built email subscription plugin created to help you quickly grow your mailing list.
- Google Analytics – This plugin makes it easy to add Google Analytics to your your WordPress site, adding many features (for example, error page, automatic search result and outbound links, and download tracking).
- Growmap Anti Spambot – A very useful plugin. simple that adds a client-side generated checkbox on the feedback form that requests the user to click it to prove they are not a spammer. The bots won’t see it, so your spam comment will be discarded.
- Monarch – An extremely versatile and comprehensive social media plugin with many different options and ways to display your comments. social sharing buttons .
- P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) – Shows which plugins are slowing down your site. Profile the performance of plugins on your WordPress site by measuring their impact on your site’s load time.
- Pre-Publishing Checklist – With Pre-Publish Post Checklist, you’ll never have to worry about accidentally posting a post without an important piece.
- Professional Categories Widget – Has the option to exclude specific categories.
- Revive Old Posts – WordPress plugin that helps you keep your old posts alive by sharing them and driving more traffic to the those from Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. It also helps you promote your content. You can set the time and number of posts to share to drive more traffic.
- RSS Image Feed: RSS Image Feed does not literally produce an image feed, but adds the first picture. from the entry to the normal feeds of your blog. Those images show up even if you have the summary in your feed and not the content.
- S3 Media Storage: Store media library content directly on Amazon’s S3 hosting without need to store it temporarily. files in the file system/cron jobs. This is more ideal for multiple web server environments. If you don’t know what any of that means, skip this one.
- Shortcodes Ultimate – Supercharge your WordPress theme with a mega pack of shortcodes. This may be my personal favorite on this list, and your child will love it too!
- Sumo: Lots of free tools to grow your email list.
- Editorial Calendar: The Editorial Calendar allows you to see all your posts and drag and drop them to manage your blog. Highly recommend!
- WordPress Popular Posts – WordPress Popular Posts is a highly customizable widget that displays the most popular posts on your blog.
- WP Review – Create reviews! Choose from stars, percentages, or points for review scores. Supports Retina Display, WPMU and unlimited color schemes.
- WP Super Cache – Very fast caching plugin for WordPress. My caching plugin of choice.
- WP Optimize – This plugin helps you keep your database clean by removing post revisions and spam in a blink of an eye. Also, it allows you to run the optimization command on your main WordPress tables (use with caution).
- WP PageNavi – Adds more advanced and elegant pagination navigation to your blog from WordPress.
- Yoast SEO – The first true all-in-one SEO solution for WordPress, including on-page content analysis, XML sitemaps, and much more. Definitely recommended for anyone trying to increase their blog traffic.
>Better Click To Tweet – Add click-to-tweet boxes to your WordPress posts, easily.
Adsense – Provides a faster and more flexible way to insert Google Adsense or any ad code into a blog post.
There are too many good plugins to list them all. If you can think of a need, there’s probably a plugin to fill that need.
Finding and Using Images
The first and most important point about using images it’s understanding copyright Your child can’t just search for any image on Google (it’s also not the best idea for a child to use Google for search) and use it on their own blog. There are laws about that.
When you write something or post an image online, there is an automatic copyright that comes with it, since copyright is really just the ability to prove that you did it first . If someone else is the first to post a certain image, they own the copyright and have various rights associated with it 6.
That being said, you also have fair use and free use, which are not one . herein.
Fair use is the legal exception to the copyright laws listed above.
As you can see, if you expanded the above content, fair use does not give you or your child the right to use any image from any website for your personal blog. But it gives you the right to use some images for specific purposes.
There is another option. There is a thing called Creative Commons. Works under the Creative Commons license are free to use, with different restrictions. There are two basic types of usage you’ll see on stock photography websites (websites that post images solely for use by creative people, like your child): 7:
- Attribution: You may use the work (i.e., the image) as long as you provide attribution to the creator, a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if any changes were made to the work.
- No Restrictions: While it’s always good manners to link to the original source, this kind of restriction (or lack thereof) allows you to do whatever you want with the photos.
Those are the two types of images I use. I have no problem giving attribution, and I really enjoy images that don’t even require that much.
Now that you know all of the US copyright code, here are some sources you can use to find images that are free to use and don’t require attribution (I’ve filtered out the stock photography websites that allow adult content and the ones that just aren’t very good):
- Unsplash – My personal favourite. They have all kinds of high-quality images with incredible resolution. Most of these images are 4000 pixels or larger.
- Freegraphy – Another favourite. They also provide high-quality, high-resolution images, but with a twist. Most of the images are super unique and many are quite hilarious. Your child will love these images.
- Pik Wizard – High quality, high resolution photos.
- Jeshoots – Other great source.
- Stokpic – And another.
I’ve included many more sources below. These sources are generally safe to use unless your child is specifically searching for inappropriate topics.
Getting Visitors
If your goal is to gain an audience or monetize the blog eventually, you’ll want to know how to drive traffic to the blog.
While this isn’t as easy as it used to be, the main difference is that it now requires a lot more work (or money).
How People Find Websites
- Search Engine: When someone searches for a specific term or phrase, your website may appear as an option. If you want to rank higher in search engines, you’ll need to learn a bit about search engine optimization (SEO) and how Google ranks websites, but blogging isn’t just about adding a bunch of keywords to their blogs and writing for bots: keywords will naturally flow into your articles.
- References: when someone sees a link to your child’s blog in an article or on a blogroll 8 and you click on it, you just received referral traffic. This is some of the most valuable traffic you can get, and it’s relatively easy to get once you start working on your writing skills.
- Social Media: When someone sees your article on Facebook or Twitter and you click on it, you have just received traffic on social networks. There are hundreds of such places to share your content. This is a great source of traffic; However, you really don’t want to count on it as a main source of traffic, because websites and social media algorithms change almost every day. There are also many tools to automate part of this process.
- Direct Traffic – When someone types your blog URL into their browser, they go directly to your website. Hence the name: direct traffic. This could be word of mouth advertising or a random business card, but this also includes someone clicking a link in an email, such as your newsletter.
The The main way to get traffic is to grow the authority of your blog. To do this, your child needs to create high-quality backlinks. A “backlink” is a link that leads back to your website. The “anchor text” is the text that points to the link. So let’s say I want to link Google; in that example, “Google” is the anchor text and “https://google.com” is the link. It’s best when your anchor text is your brand or relevant keywords.
For example: If your child’s blog is about science, the anchor text should be the title of your blog. blog (or the title of the linked article), or some related keywords like “kids science blog” or “kids learn science”. The more specific the keyword, the faster your traffic will increase. You wouldn’t want to try to rank in Google for a word like “science” as it’s so broad, but ranking high for a phrase like “kids science blog” would be much easier.
So how do you build these backlinks? There are a few ways, but the most reliable and appropriate way is by writing for other blogs and linking to your child’s blog. This is called a “guest post”.
Guest Posting for Traffic
Guest posting is, in my opinion, the best and most authentic way to drive traffic to your blog. your son. It is a lot of work. It requires writing article after article to get published on someone else’s blog. But in the end, when the work is put in, it will be worth it.
If you’ve done any research on guest posting, you may have heard that Matt Cutts, former head of Google’s web spam team, said that the guest posting is dead 9. What he meant, when he said this in 2014, was: posting low-quality guest posts and “twists” articles 10 is dead. Honestly, that method has never been alive, though it may have shown results early on.
According to various authorities 11 12 13 14, guest blogging is by no means dead. In fact, it’s still a vital part of growing your audience.
How do you get started with guest blogging? Getting started is easy. It’s the “moving on” part that’s hard. You can help your child with this part, because it involves reaching out to others. You can try to find other children’s bloggers first, which may be for the best.
Find other blogs in the same category as your child’s blog and start reaching out. Look for listings on Google by searching for things like “[insert category] blogs that accept guest posts”; many of these lists will link directly to the page to submit your guest post request.
Traffic Boosting Resources
If only it were easy to attract thousands of visitors to your website , there would not be so many guides to teach you how to do it. It’s not easy, but it can be fun and it’s worth it.
I’m not going to spend hours teaching you all the ways your child can get traffic, but I did spend hours looking for the best resources that do. These are some long reads, but well worth it. Once you’re done, you can practically call yourself an expert, because you’ll be ahead of the vast majority. Then you have to explain it to the one who is actually blogging: your child. Or just help them through the process, which is what I suggest.
Read these resources:
- The Complete Guide to Building Your Blog Audience by Neil Patel and Aaron Agius
- The Advanced Guide to Link Building by Neil Patel and Brian Dean
- The Advanced Guide to SEO by Neil Patel and Sujan Patel
- The Ultimate Guide for Blogging Comments by Kevin Duncan
- Guest Posting on Steroids: A 4-Step Plan Using Top Guest Posters by Neil Patel
- How to Plan a Blog Post in 10 minutes so you can write it Better and Faster by Jennifer
You will learn how to get traffic through resources like the ones above, and even more so through experience. What is even more important than getting readers is where you direct those readers. Let’s talk about writing skills!
How to Become a Better Writer
Hopefully, blogging will make your child want to pay attention in English class. But of course, blogging and classroom writing differ in many ways.
Blogging should be conversational. If we could easily communicate our ideas conversationally, we wouldn’t need help with writing. But it only comes naturally to some.
It’s best for your child to use the first few days, weeks, months, and possibly years of blogging to practice her writing. That’s one benefit of having a small audience: less judgment!
I’ll give you some tips I’ve learned, before I pass it on to the experts:
- You should constantly push yourself to improve. your writing skills
- It takes time to become a great writer
- You really only get better by writing by writing
Now some tips from good writers real.Most of these articles are quick reads, but towards the bottom of the list, there are a few that take more time:
- Start with the Busy People’s Compact Guide to Grammar to refresh yourself
- Avoid These 15 Grammar Mistakes
- Avoid These 11 Compound Word Mistakes
- Don’t Make These 10 Common Grammar Mistakes
- Make Sure You’re Using These Correctly 27 Commonly Misused Words
- Try These 5 Simple Ways To Open Your Blog Posts With A Bang
- Check Out This List Of Apps And Services For Writers
- Read these 101 writing resources that will “take you from stuck to unstoppable”
- It will take time, but check out these 150 writing resources
- Try these 50 free resources that improve your Writing
- Get These Free Ebooks: 52 Headline Tricks & 101 Headline Formulas
- Try This IT Analyzer free emotional marketing headlines to test your headlines
If I could only recommend one resource to write, it would be this book:
How to monetize your child’s blog
I can’t stress this enough: if your child enters a blog with the sole intention of making money, they will be disappointed. Not only does it take a while before the money starts rolling in, but money isn’t the best motivator to stick with something as laborious as blogging (or writing in general, for that matter).
When you’re ready to help your child turn their blog into a business, here are some ways you can earn an income:
Advertising
Ads are often the first thing on that people think when it comes to making money with a blog. Every time I mention blogs, people assume I make money from ads, even though I don’t run ads here on Freedom Sprout. Personally I think that the return is not worth it. You need a large number of daily visitors for the ads to be really profitable. If you’re interested in trying it out, I’d suggest Google AdSense or Media.net.
Affiliate Marketing
I prefer affiliate marketing to anytime ads . Affiliates are similar to ads, but you only link to specific products or services that you want to link to. I use FlexOffers and CJ Affiliate mainly. You get a small commission every time someone clicks on your link and buys the product or service.
Products/Services
Creating a product or service is hard work, but it can provide passive income once created. Of course, the first step to selling anything is to grow your audience, so a product or service is likely to be something you do later on. Our finance course is a good example of this.
Membership/Subscription
If you want to regularly produce exclusive content through a membership website or subscription, this is an option for you. . I’ve seen it work for several bloggers, but they usually only charge a few dollars a month. I’ve seen more websites abandon this model than any other model, and I couldn’t tell you why: it may not be as profitable as people assume it will be.
Paid Posting/Writing
A sponsored post is when you publish an article for which you get paid. Perhaps a mattress company will sponsor an article titled 10 Ways to Sleep Better and link to their brand within the article. If you do this, you must disclose that it is a paid post, as per Google policy.
And don’t forget to write! One of the main ways many bloggers make money is by writing for other websites, but I didn’t want to give this a section of its own, because you’re not actually making money from your blog.
Videos
Whether it’s on YouTube or your personal blog, videos are still an effective tool for making money. Although they are not as profitable as they used to be, videos should still be considered. You can get paid on YouTube for ads, or you can simply drive traffic to your website through videos.
Legal, Ethical, and Online Safety Issues
Top An important thing to remember when your child starts blogging is internet safety. And then when it comes to blogging, there are ethical and legal issues to address.
Staying Safe Online
Cyberbullying is real, and the world of blogging is far from it. immune to him. . Your son should be transparent with his blog and keep you informed.
I’ll leave that to the experts. Safety Net Kids gives your child 10 rules 15 that will keep them safe online:
- Do not post any personal information online, such as your address, email address, or mobile phone number.
- Think carefully before posting photos or videos of yourself. Once you put a photo of yourself online, most people will be able to see and download it, it’s not just yours anymore.
- Keep your privacy settings as high as possible.
- Never give out your passwords.
- Don’t make friends with people you don’t know.
- Don’t meet up with people you’ve met online. Talk to your parents or guardians about who they suggest you do.
- Remember that not everyone online is who they say they are.
- Think carefully about what you say before posting anything online.
- Respect other people’s opinions, even if you disagree with another person’s opinions it doesn’t mean you should be. rude.
- If you see something online that makes you feel uncomfortable, unsafe, or worried: leave the website, turn off your computer if you wish, and tell a trusted adult immediately.
- TermsFeed Privacy Policy Generator
- FreePrivacyPolicy.com Privacy Policy Generator
- PrivacyPolicies.com Generator Privacy Policy
- TermsFeed Terms and Conditions Generator
- Shopify Terms and Conditions Generator
- Terms and Conditions Generator terms and conditions
- Problogger: Secrets to Blogging a Your Way to a Six Figure Income by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett
- How to Make Money Blogging: How I Replaced My Day Job with Blogging by Bob Lotich
- Blog Inc.: Blogging for Passion, Profit and Community Building by Joy Cho
- Do you have blogging experience?
- Would you allow your child to start a blog?
- If your child wants to write a blog, what is their topic of choice?
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Go over these points with your child to make sure they understand the dangers of the Internet and, more importantly, how to stay safe online.
Now let’s talk about the more commercial side of Internet. blogs…
Privacy Policy
A privacy policy is a statement (technically a legal document in privacy law) that discloses the ways your blog collects, uses , discloses and manages the data of its readers/clients. . It meets a legal requirement to protect the privacy of people who visit your blog. For bloggers, this just means: having a privacy policy page on your blog. Also, Google prefers that you have a privacy policy on your website16, so it helps you rank higher in search results.
Don’t worry about hiring a lawyer for this. still. Here are some free privacy policy generators you can use:
See mine here.
Terms and Conditions
Terms and Conditions (also known as such as “terms of service”, “terms of use”, or simply “terms”) is another legal document that can help establish the ground rules and protect you and your viewers. Basically, these are rules that you and the people who visitors to your website agree. Just like your privacy policy, Google likes it when you have terms and conditions on your blog.
Here are some free terms and conditions generators:
See mine here.
Disclaimer
This is where your child would explain that they are not a professional (unless , of course, that it is). It’s important to protect yourself, because once your child gets going, he’ll have a lot of content on his blog. Some of them may even be from other authors, and you don’t want to be held responsible. People understand that reading blogs is a good way to get information, and most accept the fact that bloggers aren’t certified experts, but cover your child legally with a disclaimer.
See the mine here; it’s part of my Terms and Conditions.
Affiliate Disclosure
This is exactly what it sounds like: a disclosure from any affiliate association. If your child doesn’t have affiliate partners, don’t worry about this part, but it’s vital if she has affiliates. You are required by law to have an FTC Affiliate Disclosure if you have affiliates on your website.
See mine here.
Other Disclosures/Disclaimers
Always play it safe and make sure your child has all the disclosures they need. Be honest and transparent with people, that’s the only way to have continued success. If the blog involves anything legally, do your research and get the proper disclosures. For example, since I am not a certified financial expert, such as a CPA or CFP, I must include that in my disclaimer.
Copyright
Copyright protects the Your Child’s Content: Your Words Technically, it’s just the process of being able to prove who wrote something first. Once your child publishes a blog, it’s copyrighted to a certain extent, but if you’re worried about other people stealing the work, get a professional copyright.
Usually you won’t have to follow through. the legal route, because it’s not a big deal if people steal your blog content, and most people give credit where credit is due. Zen Habits is an example of a blog that gives everyone permission to do what they want with the author’s content. That’s another option, and I don’t see anything wrong with that, unless you’re paranoid.
Let’s wrap it up
6000 words later, I feel like I’ve covered everything you need to know to, at least, less, that your son starts in the field of blogs. I recommend that you help your child with this. I think it will be something they can use for the rest of their lives.
Check the table of contents again to check the things where it’s still fuzzy. And don’t forget to save this guide for future reference.
Happy blogging!
Book Further Reading
Your Turn!
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