Sounds simple, doesn’t it. Everyone who’s used the web knows what a blog is. They were the web for a very long time, before all this social media nonsense kicked off, and there’s a very real push for more people to start them. The belief is that you have to have something to write about, or you need a special set of skills, but in reality you don’t need anything.

Well, you require a way to do it, and thankfully there are loads of options out there, many of them free, but this post isn’t about that. The trouble comes with what to put on your blog, and that’s where it’s important to remember what a blog is. It’s a web log. It’s there for you to ‘log’ anything you want. From thoughts and ideas, to life lessons and photos from vacations. There should be no worry about the what or the why of what you put on your blog.

You don’t need to start a website. Nor do you need to moleskin the posts you put there. You just need to take all the output you would usually give to a social network for free and put it on your blog. That’s why services like micro.blog, Tumblr or WordPress plugins like social sharing are the best place to start. You can share your blog to wherever you want, but keep control of everything you do.

There’s a higher, more preachy post on owning your content in here somewhere, too. One that urges you to get to grips with blogging to make the web a better place, but all you need to worry about is having a blog. Using it for whatever you want to use it for, and making sure you carry on sharing with the web. What is a blog is a question with numerous unique answers, but the reality is that a blog is you.