Grand-daughter wants to blog
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Hello all!
I just wanted some input here from you good forum folks.
My 12 year old grand-daughter wants to start a blog, and I was helping her look at some of her options. Her main choice is WordPress.com, and I’m considering gifting her with a Premium plan to get her started.
My question for anyone reading is, would the WordPress community have any issues with her mishmash style, and wide range of interests? While I can help her learn how to get things set up, she pretty clearly doesn’t want my input on ‘having a focus.’
She’s at that age where she’s basically all over the map, and wants to blog about her Sims game, writing, drawing, and those are just a few of the ‘list’ she rattled off for me. (oh…to be that young again…lol) So, while I love that she’s wants to dive in and get involved, her writing might leave a lot to be desired just yet, and I didn’t want the community to be put off by something at her level.
Any thoughts, input?
Thanks!
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First off, it’s impressive that a girl at that age wants to get started with blogging. Blogging is a wonderful art that I learned rather late in my life and I wish her the best on her plans.
Choosing a WordPress.com Premium plan for her should be the excellent choice. With access to over thousands of free and premium WordPress.com themes, she will have all the exposure to pick the best look.
As for blogging about all the things happening in her life, I have been there too. I have been confused on whether blogging in a certain niche and keep my thoughts focused to a particular topic to rank higher, or start one blog and write all my thoughts together.
I have come far in my blogging career and realized that either of the can work. The goal is to maintain the optimum keywords and optimize one’s content for SEO. Thankfully WordPress.com has put up a detailed guide on ranking better on search results and she can learn the best SEO tips on this WordPress.com guide. https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2013/03/22/seo-on-wordpress-com/
It’s also encouraged that she takes a look at what metadata is and how it makes up blogs’ ranking on search results here on this page. https://en.support.wordpress.com/seo-tools/ This marks the fundamental approach to doing better and ranking higher on search results.
Given the motive of a 12 years old, I believe she is looking for a WordPress.com site wherein she can jot down her thoughts, and I believe that monetary growth and ranking on search results is not her primary goal. I encourage you to let her write on her own terms. :)
She can use WordPress.com categories to classify her content though https://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/categories/ and use tags to tag https://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/tags/ her content. Tags will help her content to be discovered on WordPress.com Discover https://discover.wordpress.com/ It will help bring audience to her content and will encourage her to blog better.
I also suggest taking a look at this page https://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/categories-vs-tags/ to learn the differences between categories and tags.
Hope this helps. Wishing her the best!
If she is blogging in the public, I encourage you to share her WordPress.com site’s link here in this thread. Myself and other community members would love to read what she has to share with the world.
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Thank you for the quick response.
At this point, you’re right, she’s totally uninterested in monetizing, but I’m fairly certain she will soon take an interest in who’s reading once she gets started. And, yes, the idea was to let her completely run with it….beyond my setting up her account, and going over where she can find all the help she might want/need.
I’m excited and nervous for her all at the same time, because the internet can be a cruel place sometimes, so I wanted the experience to be a positive one, which is why I was leaning toward the WordPress community.
Kind regards
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Hello there @thespectralscribe, as you’ve mentioned your granddaughter is under the 13 year-old age limit for registering for a site here, I’ve tagged this thread for Staff attention and input.
Meanwhile, you’ll want to read again our Terms of Service before you sign her up. https://wordpress.com/tos/
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Hi thespectralscribe,
It’s exciting to hear your granddaughter is thinking about blogging :)
As @justjennifer mentioned, our Terms of Service state that your granddaughter will need to be 13 years old in order blog here on WordPress.com. It is mentioned in the Terms of Service section on this page:
Until that point, I see @strikebuys has already given you lots of useful information about getting started.
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Thanks very much to both of you for the TOS heads up.
I did note that before talking to her about it. Her birthday is in four days, hence the gifting of the Premium plan for her.
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Premium is a great choice for all the additional features it includes, but your granddaughter can also start for free just to see if this is something she wants to do. :)
If you do buy her a Premium plan and she decides that its not for her, you can request a refund within 30 days of purchase. If she buys a custom domain with her Premium plan, that can only be refunded within 48-hours of purchase. Here’s more on refunds: https://en.support.wordpress.com/refunds/
Also, if she does purchase a custom domain, adding site owner information privacy is a must to avoid her (or you) getting unwanted marketing emails from companies that scoop email addresses from domain registration info.
Do also consider that if her site is Public, that is who will read it, not just the “WordPress community” you mentioned in your first post. It will be indexed by search engines as well. You can learn more about a site’s Privacy settings here: https://en.support.wordpress.com/settings/privacy-settings/
Of course it goes without saying that she should also follow best practices when it comes to internet safety by not posting photos of herself, and not revealing locations, addresses or phone numbers in her blog posts.
Sorry for being so long-winded about this, but children and the internet…
If you have any follow up questions, please let us know.
Cheers!
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I’m just following up here. I think justjennifer and gemmacevans have shared all the necessary details. If you have further questions though, please do write back and I’ll be happy to answer those.
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