Creating a New Blog
A Blog or web log or online diary or modern website or profit machine is – the easiest way to start to have an identity on the web. Whether you choose a site that hosts blogs or install a blog on your own host is your choice, and you can also create your blog externally and point it to your own domain. Any option is your choice and whichever is easiest is best while you learn.
Regarding these 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 the newer (and better!) www.wordpress.com. Wordpress is a free blog engine that is robust and infinitely expandable. There are a huge range of themes and plugins available to truly individualise your blog and add functionality like adsense and RSS. It is worth starting with this just to get an API key that you will need if you host your own blogs.
Blogger.com is owned by Google, so it will be detected on Google’s radar faster and you will be indexed faster. If you first get a gmail account then logging in is a breeze and access links can be on your desktop on the google page. Bookmark your login pages otherwise so they are easy to find.
Wordpress is a relatively new blog option, but growing rapidly – unfortunately I don’t know the speed of getting indexed by search engines for it. However, Wordpress is a better option in the sense that it has more advanced features such as Trackbacks and Categories. You can also manage your sidebar links more efficiently (more about this later).
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 on the different tabs. It’s easy and its fun and the results look very professional.
As to blogs you have to pay for – If you are looking for a very professional blog platform then choose http://www.typepad.com . It’s for serious bloggers who are very creative and professional and small business blogs.
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 – Like a horse and carriage -blogging is often paired with pinging when either one is mentioned. Pinging is 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 directory website. This is a useful way to gaining traffic, which we shall discuss later.
For now, I shall leave you playing with your new blog and exploring 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!
