Blogging for Beginners

What is a blog? I can't tell you how many times someone has asked me this with a look of sheer confusion on their face. Maybe it is a strange word but it is actually a neat concept loved by many people out there today. Blogs are becoming increasingly popular.

A blog is actually a short term for the concept of a web log. An easy way to think of a blog is as an online journal. It is a place to share information with others, or to privately keep information online for your eyes only. Blogs can be shared with the public or password protected if one so chooses. There are blogs out there on millions of topics both personal, political, technical, and otherwise.

The information put into a blog is instantly published online to a web site. Most blogs are updated frequently either by one person or a group of people as group blogs are growing in popularity as well.

For someone to set up a blog there are a few steps that need to be taken and a few decisions that will need to be made. One of the first decisions is would you like to go with a free, less personalized service to host your blog or would you like to have something that is more personalized and that can be made your own, though you will have to pay a small fee to do so.

If you choose to go with the free service, you can choose from several free online services including wordpress.com, blogger.com or typepad.com. The disadvantage to using these services is that you cannot have a personal URL such as myblog.com but will rather have a URL that looks more like this myblog.wordpress.com . This is simply a matter of preference. However, there will be more options for personalizing and updating a blog that you yourself host on your own website. The advantage to the free services is one, it's free, two, it is usually much easier and more step-by-step, where you just follow a few quick and easy steps and within minutes have a blog set up.

On the other hand, hosting your own blog on your own URL has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. The advantages include obviously the fact that you have your own URL, and you can personalize it in many more ways, with themes, customized logos, and more. The disadvantages include the added cost to purchase the URL and the hosting for the website, as well as the fact that you will have to install a blog on the website, which takes a little more time than the free blog sites. Wordpress.org offers a free version of wordpress that can be installed but this is more complicated and if you're not familiar with it, you might have to hire a web pro to do this for you.

After making these decisions, you will then need to decide what you would like your blog to be about, will it be for personal or business use and what will be the focus of the blog. This will also aid you in deciding on a name for the blog and help you begin the process of actually blogging. It is important to blog on a regular basis so be sure to choose a topic that you could compose blogs about often.

Once you have your blog set up and ready to go it is just a matter of blogging on a regular basis and keeping it up to date. You might also tweak the blogs theme and sidebars to make your place on the web more personal. There is much more you can do, but this is definitely a good start for someone who is just beginning to blog.

Best of luck with beginning your adventure.