Increase your visibility – Steps to start a blog

A while ago I wrote about getting an online presence using a blog. So if you are ready to start your own blog or update your blog, what are the steps you could take to do so?

First you need to decide what type of blogging software you will use. There are basically two options here. One option is to have a hosted solution which means that you can have a blog at blogspot.com or at wordpress.com. In this case Google or WordPress are hosting your blog. There are some advantages and some disadvantages to this.
The advantages with this is that it is free and quite easy to set up. Backups are done for you, and the server is quite stable.
The disadvantages are that you do not have your own domain. The address for the blog will be something like http://myblog.blogspot.com which it is not advisable if you are creating a blog for your business since it does not really look very professional. Another disadvantage that I see is that you cannot add plugins. Plugins are like extra software that helps with the search engine optimization or with other functions that you want to add. Lets say for example you want to have a box where to ask for the reader’s email address, to capture their data. You cannot really do this with this type of blogs.
But the biggest disadvantage is that you do not have control over your blog. If Google or WordPress decide that they do not want your blog, then they can delete it and you could lose your blog overnight.

The second option and the best one for a business is to use wordpress.org. This will cost you a bit of money, but it is certainly worth it. In this case you will need your own domain name which can cost you around 10USD a year depending on the type of domain you get, and then you need to pay hosting which will cost you around 10USD a month. So it is really very cheap.
The other issue with this type of blogs is that it is a bit more complicated to set it up. but nothing that you cannot do. There are plenty of videos that assist you with setting up this type of blog, or plenty of people that offer this service at a reasonable fee. Once the blog is set up you can go and modify it easily. Posting articles is very easy and everyone can do it.
The advantages definitely outweigh the disadvantages in this case:

• You have your own domain and therefore better branding.
• You do not need to hire a graphic designer these days because there are lots of  templates you could use. You can always get someone to do your own template later on when you have the funds available.
• You can use Google analytics to give you information about the traffic to your blog
• You have control over it. It is your domain and noone can really take your blog away. But you still need to do your own backups.

So if you now decide to go with wordpress.org for your blog the steps to follow are:

1. Choose a domain name that will represent your business or that is based in a keyword that people are searching for. See if the domain name is available and register it.
2. Choose a hosting company to host your blog.
3. Get someone to set up your blog or learn to do it yourself. There are some free resources that can teach you this.
4. Start posting. I will talk about posting in the next post.

This may be an oversimplified view of how to set the blog up. It is not difficult and as I said there are lots of free resources. But if you are still scared of technology or you do not have the time then I suggest you get someone to do it for you. Remember time is money and sometimes we need to acknowledge that we can not do everything ourselves.

Happy posting!!

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