Where to start blogging?

I started blogging and self hosted it in 5-10 minutes.

1. Purchase a domain
2. Pay for shared hosting $10/yr https://www.namecheap.com/hosting/shared.aspx
3. DNS Setup on domain
4. Log into cPanel on your hosting account, install wordpress.
5. Done

Easy.

To speed up DNS updates on your domain:

• ipconfig /flushdns
• https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/cache

You may check out this guide here: http://tcmastery.com/how-to-start-a-blog/
Quite complete.

What is the purpose of your blog?

If you have a product and intend to use your blog as your primary marketing channel, then I would recommend hosting it yourself. Take for instance that you post a blog with a catchy title like "Top 10 Mistakes that Entrepreneurs Make". This is going to attract a lot of people in a community like this one. You can then use the Facebook tracking pixel to begin creating a custom audience based on who visited this article. You can then create advertisements on Facebook that target that specific audience that viewed your blog post and pay much less for the click thru rate. You can't do that with externally hosted blogs.

You should supplement your blog posts though by syndicating them on medium with a canonical link back to your blog post. Not all blogs support this, but it means that your original post will still get all the page rank credit.

Medium is definitely convenient, and has a potential audience built-in. But IMO they're going downhill a bit now that they're constantly pestering readers to sign up or pay for the service. You also can't use your own domain there anymore. I'd go with hosting your own, or if you still want that convenience for free, WordPress.

Alternatively a platform I've built, https://Write.as, might be what you need. It's more focused just on writing, but supports custom domains and lets you syndicate everything to Medium, Twitter etc. if you want.

Until you decide which platform you're going to use, i recommend to start writing and save the articles to publish later "and to make sure you like blogging and will not quit it very soon".

Network effects, especially if you become a "Top Contributor" in topics your users care about. But keep in mind you will have to shell out a one-time $75 for a custom domain which is important if you care about SEO. Checkout blog.parrotread.com for an example (disclaimer: I work on this).

I recently read an awesome post https://www.authorityhacker.com/amazon-affiliate-site/ for total beginners. Although it is related to amazon affiliate sites you can definitely use some of its content. good luck

You could take a look at ghost (IH interview here https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/ghost)