Learn to Blog

[DayTrader]

Hello! I have read a lot of blogs and I think it is fun. I would like to create my own blog site. Can anyone help me where to start? A step by step how-to would be a great help. Thanks in advance.

[TriCityGuy]

Without reinventing the wheel there are a ton of resources online (Google) on how to start up a blog.

First and foremost pick a topic you're interested in or passionate about.

You will then need to decide if your going to host the blog yourself on your own web host or have it hosted for you. Typically the blog hosted websites may include a few ads or restrict functionality of a few features. If you're considering doing it long term and want greater SEO benifits (like a keyword rich domain name) then host it yourself. You can typically get a hosting account for 5-6 bucks a month and a lot of hosts will have scripts to easily install the scripts needed to deploy the blog.

You can start a free blog on either Blogger.com or Wordpress.com

Theres advantages and disadvantages to having one hosted for you as opposed to putting it on your own shared/dedicated hosting account.

The main advantage to having it hosted is its very inexpensive and you can easily deploy and build on the site to see if it's really something you want to dedicate time too. If it is you can easily move your blog your own host later on if you continue to grow.

Blogger.com has a pretty quick video demonstrating how to get started in minutes. You can then customize your blog with themes, widgets, plugins using the easy to use admin panel.You can check out the video from the link on their main page.

[SethKravitz]

My blog is through Wordpress.com. I would definitely recommend starting out with a hosted blog service like them first. You really never know how much you want to blog until you actually have to start doing it. See if you enjoy it and can keep up with first. If it starts to take off, its very easy to move from Wordpress.com to another blog platform you host on your own server.