I’ve been so busy the past few months with client projects and organizing Picnic on the Park that my poor blog has been severely neglected.
Lucky for me, my daughter decided to help me out.
A few weeks ago, my oldest daughter was sitting at my computer and said, “Mom, I’m writing a story about our family.”
“That’s great babe,” I replied.
She showed me what she was writing (which I thought was in Word) with all her pictures and the story. She loves to write. In kindergarten, they started writing daily journal entries. She can’t wait until 4th grade because they get to do a writing test for TAKS.
She is also very computer savvy. She send emails to family, creates videos (she has one about chickens that is a classic), creates drawings in Illustrator, and has been bugging me to create a web site for her.
However I was still surprised when I looked on my site feeds and saw a new post titled, “Family.”
She wasn’t writing her story in Word. Oh no. It was in Windows Live Writer. Not only did she find the program and create a post, but she also published it . . . to my business web site.
Blogging: The Easy Way to Publish and Promote
The moral of the story is if you have been holding off starting a blog because you think it is too difficult . . . don’t. My third grade daughter posted her first blog post all on her own.
The maxim for ranking well in the search engines is “content is king” and keeping that content fresh and updated is often a struggle for businesses. Writing may be fun for elementary students, but it can be intimidating for those of us who remember the research papers and reports of our college years.
Unlike writing a formal article or report, blogging is more about creating a conversation with your reader. It is developing an online personality so that site visitors and potential customers can get a sense of your company and how you do business.
Blogging Platforms
Rather than having to create a new page for every post, blogs run on database driven platform that dynamically create a new page based on the information you submit. Unless you are planning on getting into web development, you don’t need to know the technical aspects of it. For the user, it is as simple as filling in the form fields and hitting “publish.” Below is a screenshot of my WordPress admin panel as I was writing this post.
Hosted vs. Self Hosted
With a hosted blogging platform, a user signs up for an account and the service hosts and maintains its. The most popular of the hosted platforms are Blogger, Live Journal, and WordPress. All three offer free accounts. WordPress.com also has fee based premium services. Another fee based hosted platform is Typepad.
A self hosted blogging platform is one, as the term would suggest, installed on your own hosting. There are a wide range of options for self-hosted platforms: WordPress (Open Source), Moveable Type (free and fee based licensing), Joomla (Open Source), Drupal (Open Source), TextPattern (Open Source), and Expression Engine (fee based licensing) to name a few.
If you are starting a personal blog and just want to get your feet wet, going with a free hosted platform is a good choice. Blogger is my recommendation for people wanting free, simple, and easy.
However if you are starting a blog for your business, it is always best to go with a self-hosted platform on your own domain. The platforms I use most frequently are WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, it just depends on the client need, budget, and what else they want to do with the site besides blogging.
Events to Treasure is an example of a business site on WordPress that provides basic company information as well as a blog section.
The Kingwood Connection runs on Joomla with categorized news sections and user blogs among other features.
1st Bling is a baby product review blog running on WordPress MU.
How your blog looks is limited only by time and imagination.
Getting Started Blogging
- Will it be personal or professional.
- Define your topic.
- Choose a platform.
- Start writing.
It is as simple as that. Once you get a few posts under your belt, there are other considerations such as building a reader base, promoting your site through feeds and social networking sites, and search engine optimization, etc.
Don’t worry about that when you are just starting out. Find your own rhythm in your writing and get comfortable with blogging before you worry about the other aspects.
Blogging Resources
A great resource for beginning bloggers is Problogger by Darren Rowse. The book is a compilation of tips from Darren’s blog by the same name, Problogger.net.
Other sites that I follow on blogging are:
Blog Training from Legacy Marketing Services
Update 2014: As more and more people began to switch their business web sites over to content management platforms, a situation that I repeatedly ran into was one where a business owner had paid for a web site but then they didn’t know what to do with it next. This was especially true for those based on Joomla and WordPress as the development costs are relatively lower than other platforms and it was more likely that the business owner was managing the site themselves rather than paying for marketing company to do so or having an inhouse staff member that was solely dedicated to managing the site.
Because of this, and because of the needs of our own clients, we have developed a training site, Marketing Savvy, with video tutorials and instructions on how to manage and make the most of your web site and social media accounts. The tutorials are from a small business perspective.
Blog Development Services
If your business requires something more than a free hosted blog with a generic template, contact us for a consultation on the right solution for you. Legacy Marketing offers new blog development, theme conversions, and blog integration into your existing site.
Everyone is talking about free wordpress.com and paid wordpress.org services. Which do you think is better for starters? Great post.
Hello Carla,
I agree with the fact that blogging is easy and even a third grader can do it. But according to me, it takes a lot of hard work and dedication to make a successful blog, You have to take care of all the things, like seo, article frequency, traffic optimization and Google updates.
Isn’t it?
Chris,
Yes, there are a lot more considerations to making a blog successful and even managing the platform has gotten more involved than when WordPress first launched.
But I’ve noticed with many clients the main hurdle is the initial publishing. If they can get past that to posting content on the site, the rest will come, or they can pay someone to handle the technical aspects of the site.
Hello, I can’t say blogging is easy it requires decent time to make it successful, especially this time if cumbersome time, seo gets even harder as google updates their algorithm blogging needs constitency
I appreciate the links to copyblogger which I had never heard of. As someone fairly new to blogging your summary is helpful. What I’m finding is there is a huge difference between the various hosting companies and the total services they offer.
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Blogging has indeed simplified over the years. You need a sophisticated blog platform (like wordpress) and a reliable web hosting plan, which is really affordable today. By the way, my opinion is that a self hosted blog (which requires an account with one web hosting provider) is far better solution than hosted blogs. You are more free to create a superb blog, and don’t forget adding fresh and unique content to your blog.
Problogger is a good book but don;t let it scare you away from recreational blogging. The author’s point was he was able to make a 100,000 a year profit from blogging but he did it like 16 hours a day sometimes. There are pro bloggers and then there are the rest of us.
Friendly tip: link to your forum from the main page to increase the community involvement. I tried it on my site and it worked like a charm 🙂
Your post provided a lot of helpful ideas and resources about getting started with blogging.
Question: Has the popularity or effectiveness of blogging as a marketing tool been diminished by the explosive popularity of Facebook and Twitter?