How to Make a Blog

Blogging is not for everyone. If you don't enjoy writing, or at least communicating, I don't believe you will enjoy blogging and I don't believe that you will stick with it. You might as well use a totally free service while you find out. There are many free blog hosts.

One more note about getting started: if you are doing this to make a lot of money, just stop right now. It's not worth it. You might as well cut grass or deliver papers. At least that's guaranteed income. Some people do very well but most people how make any money at all are just making enough to pay for their hosting.

I chose blogger.com way back when because it was the first one I found. Wordpress.com did not yet exist. As a matter of a fact, many of the sites that exist now did not exist then.

If you go to google and search on "free blog host", you will get millions of hits. There are a few very popular sites and you should probably start with one of those unless you have a specific reason to go somewhere else (like some friends already have sites or something).

The biggies are (completely free):

• Blogger.com - extremely easy setup, be up and running in minutes, very liberal policies on advertising and such.
• Wordpress.com - extremely easy setup, be up and running in minutes, no advertising unless you pay for it.
• Yahoo! 360 - Free blog from one of the giants. New service. Expect excellent integration with other yahoo services.
• Microsoft Live Spaces - Web environment from Microsoft. Ties in with Microsoft Live Office. You can get a free domain name and web hosting via the Office Live Basics package.
  

I'll cover sites that require payments in the future. As I said above, I chose blogger.com and have been fairly happy. It is somewhat limiting in that I don't have full control over the site (like accessing root), but I do have access to the html for my blog so that works for me.

In the near future, I will also cover sites that let you easily build a web presence outside of a blog. Where you can get a yourname.com or something very close to that.

One of the golden rules of blogging (if you want to grow readership) is that you have to post frequently. That's doesn't mean multiple times per day but it does mean multiple times per week. It doesn't have to be long (I will talk about content and quality in a post later on) but it should be more than just, "I don't have time to post today".

If nothing else, do a google search on an interesting topic and post some links on that. For example, I can search on "blog frequency" and see what pops up.

Interestingly enough, I find a few good links such as, "Why blog post frequency does not matter anymore" and "Optimal blog posting frequency". I just both of these and they are very good.

Also, if you are posting for your own enjoyment, post as often, or as rarely, as you like.

Are comments on your blog a good thing? Some say yes, some say no. I personally like to get feedback and share comments with my readers. Not everyone does.

Some people are afraid of allowing comments due to lawsuits that might arise from what people post. One way to alleviate that concern is to only allow authenticated users post comments. That can get painful though on a mostly anonymous internet.

A good article that you can read is The Legal Issues with Comments fromn the Blog Herald. The author, Jonathan Bailey, covers Libel, Copyright and Trademark issues. He concludes the article with:

All in all, there are many reasons to consider dropping comments from your blog, but legal issues should not be one of them. In the vast majority of cases, if you approach commenting with good faith, the risk is very low and you are more likely engaging in riskier behavior in your blog itself.

With that in mind, it is still very important to be careful about what you say and publish as the protections offered to you for what your commenters say do not apply to your own words.

Everyone can be held accountable for what they post, just not what other people say, at least in the vast majority of cases.

This is a very clear and easy to read article from a very informed writer. He's not a lawyer but he also writes Plagiarism Today.

So how would i conclude this? I say you should allow comments. We become better bloggers by interacting, not by being talking heads.

This is an easy one. Write about whatever you want. Write as often as you want. It's totally up to you.

Now, if you are looking for a regular following, you should pick a topic and stick to it. That doesn't mean never write about anything but that one topic but, in general, the majority of your blog entries should relate to the topic of your blog.

If you want to write regularly on two unrelated topics, start two (or more) blogs. For example, I am writing this blog and I have my LewisC's Random Thoughts blog as well as several pure tech blogs, like my Oracle DB News Blog.

A quick tip to help you focus on your topic is to put a very clear topic description in your blog header. If that topic is not clear, people won't know what you're about and might not stick around. Make sure the message is clear.

Once you have a clear message, check each post as you post it. Does the topic of your post agree with the topic of your blog? If not, you may want to think about creating an additional blog.

Here is the "but" that you had to know was coming. If you are writing a blog for you, your family, or your friends, write about anything you want at any time that you want to. My Random Thoughts blog is really about whatever interests me. It really gets random at times. Then again, I am ok with not having a large readership on that blog. I hope people stick around but I understand if they don't.