Before you start a blog, decide what you want to blog about and why. Then just start writing. Start writing your “posts” in your favorite word processor and simply save your work as document files on your hard drive for now. After you have done 10, 20 or 30 posts, assess your progress and decide whether this is something you want and like to continue doing. After you choose your hosting option, discussed below, you will be able to just copy your content from the files you create and paste them into the blog authoring tool. This will give you a nice head start for your blog’s content.
In addition to having good content the next critical thing is a decision about what blogging platform to choose?
There are a few ways to host your blog.
- Free blog hosts such as Blogger.com or Livejournal.com
- Your own domain and blog software. Get your own domain name and host it on a web server. You need to pay a minimal fee for your web hosting service. Think This // blog is hosted on Midphase web hosting server.
- Use a hosting service for a fee such as Typepad.com.
All options have their unique benefits and drawbacks.
Free Blog Hosts:
To use a free blogging service you do not have to pay anything nor worry about administration of your webserver and blogging software. However the drawbacks are:
- you do not own your own domain name, so your blog’s address would look like myblog.blogger.com, or momsblog.livejournal.com
- when you would like to move your blog to another hosting service you will have limited options
- you are limited to what features you are able to install on your blog. There are many add-ons available for free download and install on you blog, that you will not able to use with this option.
How do you get started with this option? Go to www.blogger.com or www.livejournal.com and sign up for a free account.
Own Your Domain and Own Blog:
This is the most flexible option. It works very well, and it is easy to setup. The drawback is that there is some work you need to do to administer your blogging softare. However there is tons of information available to help you with this task. Another drawback is that you need to pay for web hosting service. Benefits of having your own hosted blog include:
- you can have and keep your own domain name
- you control everything on the blog
- huge selection of themes, add-ons, tools and features
- you have more options later hot to monetize (make money with your blog) and market your blog.
How do you get started with this option?
- First, figure out what domain name is available that you like to have. Use many online tools to find if a domain name is available. If you choose to sign up with Midphase, the sign up process will let you know if your domain name is available.
- Find a reliable web hosting service, such as Midphase, that we use. When you sign up with Midphase you will get your own domain name for life.
- Make sure that your web hosting service provides hosting of your own blog and includes easy install scripts for blogs such as WordPress.
- Your web hosting should provide a “single click” install of the blogging software. We use WordPress and highly recommend it. After you install WordPress, there are a few additional features you would want to add to enhance your blog and protect it from unwanted comment spam. They are:
- Spam Karma - spam fighting plug-in prevents your blog comments from being invaded by comment spam
- Themes for WordPress are a great way to change the look and feel of your website. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of themes to choose from. Here we use a theme called K2 with TrueBlue custom scheme.
- Sociable - is a plug-in which adds social networking links at the bottom of your each post, such as Digg-It, Technorati, etc. for your visitors to easily add them to their collections or vote for your posts.
- myGallery – is a nice plug-in to manage and display your photo galleries, you can look on our Photos page to see how it looks.
- Ultimate Tag Warrior - provides an easy way to tag your posts with “tags” (relevant keywords) which can be later displayed in “tag cloud” – you can see it on the top right side of our blog.
- WP Lightbox 2 - provides the cool effect of overlaying images on the page. See Photos page for an example. It works well with myGallery to provinde Next and Previous functions.
- WordTube – will allow you to embed video, mp3 and other media files on your posts.
- runPHP - Allows you to run PHP code into a post.
There are many more plug-ins to WordPress for just about anything you can think of. You can find them on WordPress.org website.
Professionally Hosted Blog:
The third option is to use a hosted blog solution that you will have to pay a monthly fee. This solution has some of the same benefits of the free services but it also allows you to have your own domain name and it provides many of the features that hosting your own blog does. The drawback is a monthly fee. It is like paying rent for something you do not own versus owning your own installation of the blog and domain name. Many professional bloggers and organizations use this.
There are some points that you need to keep in mind from SEO perspective. This post talks about it.
Wikipedia provides a nice history and information about blogs in general.
The next step after having your blog for a while is to market it on the Internet. This will be a topic of a future post.
A friend at church yesterday stopped me and said, “I was thinking about starting a blog, and this morning I get your subscription notice about how to start a blog!”
That was cool to hear. People may actually sometimes find this thing useful…
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