How To Set Up A Blog
You hear it all the time, websites are old history, blogging is the new frontier. But many people are still do not really understand how to set up a blog. Trust me, if you have been in the internet marketing business for a while, blogging is a whole lot simpler than what most internet marketers have had to go through over the years.
There are so many different reasons why people want to set up a blog, so it will be somewhat difficult to explain how to set up a blog that covers all the different bases. But there is definitely some common ground no matter what your intentions. Let’s take a look at some design goals that you must consider as you learn how to set up a blog.
- The first choice you need to make is whether you want to use one of the free blogging platforms like blogger.com or wordpress.com, or have a self-hosted blog. The key difference is that with a self-hosted blog you will have your own domain name (http://yourdomainname.com), whereas with the free blog platforms you will share a domain name (http://yourblogname.blogspot.com). Some people feel strongly one way or the other, but both free and self-hosted platforms provide great content systems that allow easy posting of new blog entries. But the best option is always to have a self-hosted platform because there are many, many more options on how you can control your content, and the overall design of your blog. I use a combination of free and self-hosted blogs, and a combination of blogger and WordPress blog platforms. I do this because I use the free blogs as traffic feeders to this blog, which is my main blog.
- You probably already know this going in, but you also need to decide if the blog is purely for informational purposes or whether there are profit motives involved. If you are putting a blog up for profit, then you need to consider affiliate programs that complement the content of your blog. The fact is many people are looking to make extra money from home through an internet marketing program, so most blogs today are definitely designed with a profit motive in mind.
- As with any website, you will need to be concerned with search engine optimization with your blog if you want your site to be found in the search engines. Here’s where the self-hosted blogs really out perform the free blogs because the self-hosted blogs can be much better optimized with your domain name, etc. Also, if you are using WordPress as your blog platform there are numerous plug-ins that help not only with search engine optimization, but many other facets of your blog performance.
- One of really cool things about blogs is the syndication of the blog feeds. While technically this is complicated to understand, in usage it’s actually quite simple. You can sign up for a free account at feedburner.com and include your blog RSS feed into their syndication feeds. This gets you much wider exposure across the internet, allows others to subscribe to your blog through the RSS feeds, and can help you grow your reader base. This is one clear example of why blogging platforms are my only choice moving forward, I cannot ever seeing why I would ever put up another static website.
- If you are designing a website, you have to create the “look and feel” in addition to the content. With blogs, there are hundreds if not thousands of free blog templates that you can download. Just do a search for “free wordpress templates” or “free blogger templates”. This gives you great control of how you want your website to look without having to invest time or money into the design.
- Today’s blogging platforms have a number of social bookmarking tools that are built into the platform, especially if you use WordPress. Again, these tools help you spread your blog’s message easily and quickly across the internet allowing you to get indexed much quicker, build more back links, and drive more traffic. That will ultimately make you more money.
If you are interested in getting more information about how to set up a blog, we strongly recommend Blog Success which provides eduction, tutorials and content tools that will help you get on the path to success with your blog.
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[...] is more typically a blog like WordPress. You can find more information on this previous blog post How-To-Set-Up-A-Blog. Blogs have made starting an internet business much easier, and you can have your blog set up in [...]