Starter Pack: Starting a Blog in 2025

The blogging industrial complex wants you to believe you need a lot of things before you start. An SEO audit. A premium WordPress theme that costs $200. A content calendar tool. Maybe a course on “turning your blog into a six-figure business.” Email sequences. Backlinking strategies. A personal brand consultant.

Here’s the truth: you need almost none of that.

Blogs have existed since the mid-90s. They got useful for people not because of better tools, but because people actually had something to say and said it consistently. The industrial complex just found a way to sell anxiety to anyone brave enough to start writing in public.

Let’s simplify this.

Pick your platform and be done with it

You have realistic options. Not infinite options. Realistic ones.

Ghost is my recommendation if you want simplicity without sacrificing design. It’s built for writers. The interface is clean, the hosted version works without fiddling, and you own your content. It costs money — $29/month or so — but that’s actually fine because it keeps the company incentivized to make your experience good instead of maximizing ad inventory.

Hugo or Astro are for people who like code and don’t mind setting things up themselves. Both are static site generators that produce fast, lightweight blogs. You write markdown. You deploy to a free host like Netlify. If you know what a command line is, you probably want one of these. No monthly fees. No vendor lock-in.

WordPress still works if you must, but host it yourself (WordPress.org, not WordPress.com). The self-hosted version is the real WordPress. The hosted version is a walled garden trying to upsell you.

What about Substack? Sure, if you want your content on someone else’s platform and you’re okay with algorithm discovery being their decision. It works. I’d just rather own my words.

Pick one this week. Spend 90 minutes setting it up. Move on.

Actually write something

This is the part the industrial complex doesn’t sell courses about because it’s not profitable: you just start writing. No perfect first post. No positioning statement. No buyer persona mapping.

Write about something you know or something you’re learning. Something people actually ask you about. A tool you’ve been using. A problem you solved. A mistake you made and fixed. A book that changed how you think about something.

Write like you’re talking to a friend, not performing for the internet. Contractions. Short sentences. Real opinions. That’s what separates actual writing from content pollution.

Don’t overthink the design

A clean, simple design beats a fancy one that hasn’t been updated since 2019. Most of the blog themes out there are fine. They’re not going to make or break your readership. What will break it is if your blog takes 8 seconds to load or if people can’t find what they came for.

Your homepage doesn’t need sliders or gradients or auto-playing videos. It needs a list of your recent posts and maybe a sentence about who you are. That’s it. Everything else is distraction.

If you picked Astro or Hugo, the default theme is probably good enough. If you picked Ghost, their built-in themes are solid. Don’t spend money on a premium theme unless you’ve been blogging for six months and you’re sure you’re staying.

The one thing that matters: consistency

Write something regularly. Could be weekly. Could be twice a month. Could be monthly. But pick a schedule and keep it.

People don’t follow blogs because the design is beautiful. They follow blogs because they know when to expect new writing and that writing is worth their time. Consistency builds trust. Everything else is secondary.

What about SEO? Monetization? Growth hacks?

Ignore them for now. Seriously.

SEO optimizations matter when you have 50+ posts and people are actually searching for what you write about. Before that, they’re premature micro-optimization. Write good stuff and Google will find it.

Monetization — ads, affiliate links, sponsorships — is something you think about after you have an actual audience that cares. Not before. Building for monetization first is how you end up writing garbage nobody wants to read.

Growth hacks are generally just spammy garbage dressed up as strategy. If your writing is good, people share it. That’s the whole system. Everything else is noise.

Start with a platform, a topic, and a schedule. Write consistently. Link to your personal brand starting from scratch if you’re thinking bigger-picture. If you want to understand the non-social-media angle, check out building an online presence without social media — blogging is often the anchor that makes that whole approach work.

You might also find free design tools that don’t look free useful if you do want to polish things later.

But right now? Just start writing. Everything else is optional.