Okay, here’s the 30 second guide to get started.

1. Pick a free service like blogger, or typepad, or wordpress.  (recommendation: Go with WordPress)
2. Start blogging. Write about what you’re passionate about. Doesn’t matter if it’s fried pickles, smelly farts, or belly button lint , go for it.
3. Don’t expect followers to find you immediately, go out and start commenting on other people’s blogs.
4. Don’t expect to make any money on advertising. If you have 20000 hits a day, sure. But you don’t have to worry about that right now.
5. Write, write, write. It’s a daily exercise, get into the habit of writing about what’s on your mind.
6. Pay attention to the last note, it’s important. If you don’t write, why will people read your old stuff?
7. Post pictures of what you’re talking about whether it’s your family, the president, an oak tree, or a big plane. I’m a sucker for blogs with pics.

Once you have been doing it for a while, you might want to move away from the free services and go
with your own host.  I would recommend this, but only if you’ve kept with it for a while and you have a good groove going.  Otherwise, you’re spending money on stuff you don’t need to.

If you’re nervous about setting out on your own, then you find someone like me who can walk you through all the steps to move to your own host, because truthfully, the free services have some cool tools, but the self-hosted WordPress blog I have is SO much easier.  Then again, there’s also the fact that the free ones all belong to a community of sorts, but truthfully, having the freedom to load all the plugins I want and do ANYTHING I want to my blog far outweighs the add ons.

I’ve been involved with moving over several Typepad installs to hosted WordPress, and let me tell you, if you have pics on Typepad, get ready to download them all, one by one.  What a huge pain in the booty.  If there is any idea in your head of moving to a hosted solution, go with WordPress.com and when you’re ready, give me a holler.  I’d be happy to help you move it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 11:22 am and is filed under Daily Entry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.