How To Set Up Your Blog
Chapter 1: Setting up your Website
Section 7: How to set up your Blog
In case you aren’t exactly sure, a blog is short for a weblog. That is another name for basically an online journal. I used to shy away from blogs, thinking they were nothing more than basically online diaries that offered no real useful content, but I was quite wrong. Just like anything else out there, there are useful, content-rich blogs, and not so useful blogs. Some blogs are have readerships in the MILLIONS!
There are several very good reasons for setting up a blog yourself. First off, it is a great way to keep in touch with your readers, by continually adding USEFUL content. They can even subscribe to your RSS feed ("Really Simple Syndication") and be notified each time you make an update. There are many cool tools that you can easily add to your blog too, like archives and grouping your posts into categories.
Secondly, it is a great way to get interaction with your readers. They can easily post comments, so you can get quick feedback, and even get dialogues going that can take on a life of their own. Don’t worry, you can set it up such that you have to ok comments before they go live on your site.
Third, and just as important, search engines LOVE blogs. They love when websites are updated frequently, and will keep coming back often when you regularly post to your blog. This helps tremendously for positioning yourself to get free traffic from the search engines.
Lastly, blogs are very easy to set up and maintain. There are many professional templates to choose from for free, and most web hosting services have free blog software to use. In fact, you could set up your entire site to be a blog if you wanted. If you use godaddy, it is really easy to set up your blog. The software I use to do that is called wordpress, and is included free in your account.
To see all the details of how to set up your blog, choose your template, choose your tools, and make a post, watch my video on this page. (Note, my own video series will be up soon. In the meantime, you can get a full wordpress tutorial here.) It took me a couple hours to get things up and running the first time, but if you follow my short video you should be able to have your blog up and functioning in 10 minutes.
As always, give me a call or e-mail if you have any questions or problems with that.
Next, we will discuss how to get content for your site to start with, when you (possibly) don’t have much to write about yet…
