Starting your own blog is a fun, free and easy way to get your work published on the web. While blogs were originally started as a kind of online journal called web logs, blogging has grown into a HUGE industry. These days it seems like just about everyone has a blog of some sort. From stay at home moms to fortune 500 companies.
If you’re looking to start your own blog, but don’t know where to begin, there are plenty of options available to you. However, before getting into the actual setting up of your blog, it’s a good idea to first pick a topic to blog about.
Picking a Topic to Blog About
When deciding on what to blog about, make sure you have a narrow topic in mind. There are tons of blogs that are random pictures of someone’s life, beliefs and ideas, but some of the most popular blogs are narrow and specific. This is especially important when you’re just starting out with blogging. Reason being is if you try to blog about too many things at once when just starting out, you may get overwhelmed. So it’s a good idea to keep things simple to start.
If you’re looking to start a blog to make money, try to make sure you don’t choose a niche where you have too much competition, unless you are planning to put a unique spin on things.
Choosing Your Blogging Platform
A blog platform is basically software that allows you to create your blog. There are two types of blog platforms:
* Hosted Blog Platform – this type of blog platform is probably the simpler of the two types of platforms especially for those new to blogging. Basically, you can start your own blog without needing to buy your own domain name, setup web hosting, or anything “techie.” There are a lot of free hosted blog platform options with a couple of the more popular ones being Blogger (by Google) and WordPress.com.
* Stand-Alone Blog Platform – this type of blog platform requires you to have your own domain name (like www.yourdomain.com) and setup web hosting. While this type of blog platform is not as simple to setup as a hosted blog, it offers more freedom and flexibility, which really allows to you setup a blog to match your style and personality. By far the most popular stand-alone blog platform is WordPress.org, which is absolutely free.
These days some web hosts offer easy installation of the WordPress.org stand-alone blog software through either Fantastico or Softaculous, which they include with your web hosting at no extra charge. So even if you’re new to blogging, you can literally install the WordPress.org software on your domain in about a minute.
In the end it’s really your decision if you want to go with a hosted blog platform or a stand-alone blog platform. If you do go with the stand-alone option, a very inexpensive web host that includes Fantastico with your web hosting is HostGator (use coupon code klowshookup to get your first month hosting for only 1 penny).
Time to Blog!
After your blog is all setup, it’s time to get writing! You can really create (write) new posts as often or as rarely as you like, but if possible, try to stick to a schedule. It doesn’t really matter if it’s once a day, once a week, whatever. Just try to make the time in between each post as consistent as possible. This will not only get you in the habit of posting to your blog, it will also let your readers know when to expect new posts from you.
