Creating Your First Blog

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You may have heard time and time again, that content is king when it comes to the online world, and with all the major search engines revolving round themed content, starting up your own blog to draw traffic is becoming more and more important.

What is a Blog?
First of all before we get started, what exactly is a blog? A blog is an online journal or dairy that is updated very frequently. Business styled blogs are usually articles placed in chronological order. You may have heard blogs mentioned very frequently lately, but don’t worry it’s not too late to catch onto the band wagon, it seems for the time being that blogs are currently the way the web is shifting.

Setting up your blog
If you have taken time to read my post on finding your niche you may be very well on your way in choosing the theme and style you want your blog to follow. Finding a niche to write about is one of the most important steps in starting up a blog, as you want to give your readers news and updates that is current and interesting.

There are two good methods in setting up your own blog, depending on your skill level.

• Using a third party to host your blog
• Hosting your blog yourself

Using a third party to host your blog
This is the suggested route if you are very new to the web, and have little experience in dealing with web sites. Dealing with a third party takes out all the guess work, and will have your blog up and running in no time at all. Currently there are many places to host your blog for free, here’s a list of a few of them.

• Blogger
• Wordpress
• Expression Engine

Setting up a blog with these sites merely means filling in a registration from, and selecting a few other options like choosing a name for your blog and a styled theme. All of this is done by point and click and you will not need to know any coding to accomplish most of the tasks relating to blogging. However, with the more experience you gain in creating websites, the more flexibility you are going to want to have, and hosting your blog with the above mentioned options isn’t going to cater for this.

Hosting your blog yourself
If you want to have complete flexibility with your blog, you are not going to get it with services such as blogger.com. Being able to have complete flexibility with your blog requires you to have a little more knowledge about how websites are created, and how CMS (content management systems) work.

Wordpress is currently leading the pack with there CMS installation which you can download and host free of charge on your own servers. To prevent any further confusion, and I came across when I created my first blog. Wordpress.com is a service similar blogger.com, where they host your blog for you, on the same architecture that you get from wordpress.org. Wordpress.org gives you all the scripts, and HTML you need to run your own blog giving you all the flexibility that you need.

You can install Wordpress by following their famous 5 minute installation.

Once your blog is all set up and rearing to go, don’t make the mistake of letting it loose in the wild, never to be maintained and looked after again. You have to keep at it, creating new fresh content that’s not only interesting but entertaining too! Read up on building an authority site, and you will be all set.