First things first, don’t be intimidated. If you need any help during any step of the way, send us an email at bloghelp@columbusunderground.com and we’ll answer any questions you may have.
With that said, let’s get started!
- Decide upon your topic or theme.
Hopefully this step shouldn’t be too much of a challenge. If you’ve made it this far, you probably already have some sort of idea of what you want to be doing with your blog. If you don’t, you might want to figure that out before going any further.
- Pick your blog software.
There’s quite a few blog applications out there, and most of the popular and easy-to-use choices are also free. The two we recommend most highly are Blogger and WordPress. There are hundreds of other choices, but these two are the ones you will probably see used most often and will probably be the most comfortable and familiar to start with. You can always move your blog into different software later on, as most of them have import and export functionality.
- Set up your account and customize your settings.
This step depends mostly upon what blog software you decided to use. Some basic user info will be required when setting up your account. It’s very important to remember that you are responsible for the content you write in your blog, so if you’re worried about something potentially coming back to haunt you, you might want to set up your account using an alias and an alternate email address. Remember, everyone on the Internet can read your blog. This includes your family, your neighbors, your coworkers, and everyone else in between.
The rest of your blog settings will mostly deal with the appearance of your blog. There are typically some themes or color settings you can alter to give your blog a little flair. These settings can always be changed later on, and your older posts will update along with the changes.
- Add some links.
If there are similar blogs or other websites out there that relate to your blog, link to them. There should be a way to create a list of links very easily within your blog software. These links will help you share traffic with other blogs and a general rule of thumb is that the more traffic you share, the more traffic will be shared with you. Don’t hesitate to contact other blog owners and ask if they want to trade links with you. It’s a great way to build an audience quickly when you’re first getting started.
- Create an “About” page.
An “about” page is exactly what it sounds like: a page on your blog that tells what your blog is all about. It may sound silly, but these pages are very useful for new visitors to your blog who may not understand the purpose of it just by a quick glance at your most recent writings. The about page should help fill them in. It also serves as a nice constant reminder for you, so that you remain focused on the purpose of your blog and don’t stray too far from the theme you establish. For example, it may be exciting that you just got a new cat, but the readers of your blog about Columbus Art History may not care to hear about it too frequently.
- Post new updates regularly.
This is the most important part of blogging. You have to keep up with it. That doesn’t mean that you need to spend hours a day writing new material for your blog’s readers, but if you start off strong with loads of new content and then drop down to sporadic updates once every three months, you’ll lose a lot of your traffic to other blogs that update more frequently.
Most blogs have a time-delay feature where you can write up a post, and before “submitting” or “publishing” it to your blog, you can set the date-stamp for tomorrow, so that your writing appears the following day as if you had written it the next day.
This means that you could spend an hour on Sunday writing seven different updates for your blog, and time delay each of them so that a new one appears every day for the next week as if you’re updating it yourself every day. It can help to maximize your time spent in front of the computer while also providing regularly scheduled content for your readers.
Are you ready to start your blog yet? Check out the following pages for more information:
[...] How Can I Start My Own? [...]
[...] going through our simple steps for starting your own blog and getting things up and running, you might be ready for some steps that are a little more [...]
What’s up with this new “Kid-On-The Block”? At the Juneteenth Celebration 2007 there was a young 10 year old, James Tanner whom I hear was the talk of the fest. I’m in South Carolina and would like some feed back on his story. I can’t get the story on line because of some type of error on the page.