Garrett Saundry
You’ve been thinking about starting a blog for yourself or your business, but haven’t really done anything about it. You may have either thought that it was something overly complicated or you have just never set aside a block of time to sit down and get organized. Well good news, it’s neither difficult or very time consuming, but there are certain things that you will need to do before you can sit down and start pouring your heart out to the world.
Blogs come in many shapes, sizes and forms. According to estimates, 175,000 new blogs were started each day in 2007. You can use your personal blog to keep in touch with family members that are in another time zone, that odd Aunt Edna that keeps you on the phone for three hours whenever you call, or friends that you aren’t close to but still want to keep updated with your day to day goings on. Blogs are also used as forums for product, game or movie reviews, oddball news or simply things you’ve found on the Internet that you want to share with your audience. If you are considering starting a blog for your business, there is no better (and cheaper) way to build your credibility and show expertise online. Business blogs are great because they allow you to engage with current and potential customters in a direct, but informal way. Through this relationship building, you will grow both positive word-of-mouth and sales leads for your business.
So what do you need to start off? Obviously a space to host your innermost thoughts and deepest darkest feelings for the whole world to see. There are two ways to do this, you can either sign up for a blogging service and use their dedicated hosting services, or purchase your own domain and have the website hosted. There are pro’s and con’s to each.
Some of the biggest blogging platforms out there right now are Blogger, WordPress, MovableType and LiveJournal. If you’re just starting out however, I’d probably reccomend either Blogger or WordPress. Blogger is run by Google and tends to sometimes have issues with both spam comments and blogs. WordPress is pretty much considered the defacto blogger’s gold standard when it comes to blogging platforms. With features like “live preview” and the ability to compose in text or xhtml, formatting is pretty much effortless. Which one you decide to use is totally up to you, so I’d reccomend you to check them all out if you’re not sure which one you want to go with.
The downside to having the blogging service host your blog is that often the content of your blog will belong to the service that hosts it. The terms and conditions sometimes also stipulate what sort of content is appropriate and what is not. If you are launching a personal blog and have plans to let other’s know what is going on in your life and what you find interesting, you might not want to be constrained by a ‘G’ rating.
The drawback to having your blog hosted on your own website pretty much comes down to cost. You will first need to register a domain name, and then purchase web hosting for it. Wordpress for example runs on a PHP server that is designed to handle databases. Not all hosting packages include access to either MySQL or PHPMyAdmin, so you will need to do some research and make sure you purchase the correct level of webhosting. You yourself will also need to upload and configure your website on the server, while this is not overly difficult it may take a few hours for somebody that isn’t too familiar with the process. There is a lot more involved in setting up your own hosting for a blog, but you can be assured that whatever content you post on your blog belongs to you and (as long as it’s not illegal) cannot be censored or removed.
So you’ve now decided how you want to host your blog and are getting down to the business of writing. You’re expecting thousands of visitors on your site and you want them to all marvel at your wit and wisdom. You check your blog stats and see that a grand total of zero visitors have seen your site… What can you do to change this? Well tell people about it for one. Another way is to submit your blog to indexing services such as Technorati or blo.gs. You’ll also want to set your blog to automatically ping sites such as this to let them know when you’ve updated your blog and added a new post.
How do you keep people coming back? An easy way to get lazy people such as myself coming back to your site when you’ve updated it is by setting up an RSS feed if you can. RSS allows people to monitor updates to a blog without actually going there. You can view all of the RSS feeds you are subscribed to in an Aggregator at the same time. This saves a lot of random clicking around the internet as well as time.
So now it’s up to you where to go with your blog. You have an audience and a platform. You can post things as benign as family pictures or as deep as the personal story of your struggle with a complicated illness. There are a lot of blogs out there, but with the world turning increasingly towards digital media and our collective attention span dropping, I don’t think we’ve yet seen the start of the blogging revolution.