I often get asked by friends or co-workers on how to set up a blog, when I tell them I blog in my spare time. The process is simple enough but when you are new, it can be overwhelming and not knowing where to start, so I want to set up a series of articles on how to start a blog and how SEO works, whatever I know. Of course, I am not an blogger or SEO expert yet, but doing this for over 3 years has given a few skills. So here it is;
Part 1: Setting Up Your Blog
Blogging is a lucrative source of profit and blogs are easy to set up and maintain. Imagine a life where you are paid to write on stuff that interests you, whenever you want, wherever you are. The mere flexibility of blogging makes it easy for you to just kick back, relax and go on a vacation whenever you feel like it.
In this article, we are going to look into the profitability of a blog and set up a blog of our own at no cost! Interested? Read on! I want to show you how to get started on your free blog with free hosting as many new bloggers may not have money to get started yet. If you have about $5-$8 a month to spend, I recommend getting a domain and self hosting as I have learned over the years, see get started blogging post for more details.
First, we need to obtain a blog. There are several options – host a blog on your own domain or get a free blog. For starters, let’s talk about the free blogs. You can obtain a free blog at www.blogger.com or at www.wordpress.com. If you are a techie, you must have heard of WordPress, a free blog engine that is robust and infinitely expandable.
Blogger.com is actually owned by Google, so it will be detected on Google’s radar faster and you will be indexed faster. WordPress.com, however, is a one platform loved and made for blogging, with many free and paid plugins making blogging so much easier. WordPress is better in the sense that it has more advanced features such as Trackbacks and Categories. You can also manage your sidebar links more efficiently.
Get a free blog at either Blogger.com (http://www.blogger.com/signup.g) or WordPress (http://wordpress.com/signup/). Then, familiarize yourself by posting your first post on your blog and tinkering around with the options and templates.
Here are a few common “blog-related” words to help you out:
1) Permalink – Permalink stands for permanent link, which is a URL (uniform resource locator) that leads to an individual post that you make in your blog.
2) Trackback – When you post about someone else’s blog post elsewhere, your post will show up in their “trackback” section. This feature, however, is not available with a Blogger.com account.
3) Pinging – Blogging seems to be paired with pinging almost every time either one is mentioned nowadays. Pinging is actually the action where a certain aggregator is notified whenever your blog is updated, so that the aggregator may show the newest post of your blog on their website. This is a useful way to gaining traffic, which we shall discuss later
For now, I shall leave you testing out your new blog and the features that come included with it. In the next articles, we shall discuss the many ways we can gain profit from a blog, as well as tips on how to write posts that keep visitors glued and keep coming back for more.
Stay tuned for Part of 2 of the how to set up blog series: How to Set Up Blog:Part 2- How to Write Content
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