Considering these stats and the performance of the keyphrase search for how do I start blogging I find a sense in writing this simple tutorial on how to start your first blog and start blogging not depending on the fact if you want a self hosted blog or one of the free ones provided from several providers like wordpress.com, blogspot.com, typepad.com and many others. Lets start discovering things you need to know before starting a blog.

Identify your self and your blog

This is a simple rule which many lose to achieve because they are influenced from other factors, one of which is make money blogging. The fact is that blogs were not made for making money online, but blogs were found as a great way for monetizing your passion which later on passion vanished and all what remained is pure business and money online. If you want to start a blog purely for making money online then you will fail and I am telling you stop reading now this post because it is not for you. But if you have a passion which you are willing to start share world wide then welcome.

Now lets take the steps of these first rule, identify yourself and your blog. The first question you should ask your self is “Why do I want to start blogging” , this question should help you understand the topic you want to blog about, is it sports, fashion, hairstyle, glamour, cars, or anything you have enough knowledge with and would want to share your experience/knowledge with the others for one or another reason.

Once you have identified your blogs core identity and have defined the main topic of your blog it is time to expand slightly your blogs nature. By expanding I mean to identify other topics that somehow or closely related to your blog. Lets take as example your core topic is “fashion”, th expanding topics for fashion would be: man fashion, women fashion, shoes, skirt, dress, hairstyle, fashion news. Expanding your blog into several other topics which are closely related to your core topic will give you that freedom to write on several topics and still remain in your core topic and will permit you not to remain without a post to publish for your readers, in addition you will expand your readership for those interested in man fashion, women fashion, shoe lovers, hairstyle freaks or model gossip eager to know folks.

I would also suggest you free keyword tools to find more “content related” keywords based on which you can expand your blog. Just pick them carefully, here is an example for “fashion options“.

Picking Up Your Name

So far we have identified your and have learned how to expand your topics and reach a wider range of readers. What we need now is a name that will distinguish us from the rest of the “fashion blogs”.

Regardless if you chose to use a self-hosted blog (is it wordpress, drupal or even joomla) your second important issue will be to give your self a name, a name that will be remarkable and distinguish you from the rest of the crowd. Now a days that internet is being more and more used, new websites and blogs are being released, domain stalkers have already played their game finding the most appropriate domain name for your blog is not going to be easy.

Since your blogs core topic is going to be fashion it would be nice, but not necessary, that the word fashion is included in your domain name, for example, cathiesfashion.com myfashionblog.com, fashionblogging.com, fashiongossip.com etc etc, it all actually depends on how creative you want to be with your name, what you want your blog name to actually be and if that domain name is actually available. But as I said, having the word “fashion” within your domain name is not really necessary, you can even go with domain like: cathiesblog.com cathieblogging.com etc etc, but you will definitively want to re compensate this lack of keywords in your blogs title tag.

Why I am reminding you about keywords in domain is mainly for seo purpose, something that might sound Alienist to you at this moment but later on you will realize how important search engine optimization would become for your blog. You can already learn some more about wordpress seo since the early stages, but too much learning all at once it will certainly not do any good.

Installing Your Blog

The preferred blogging platform now a days is wordpress, so I will take wordpress as example. If you have already identified your blog, found your domain name and have already purchased your hosting space you are ready to install the blogging software.

If your hosting company uses cPanel it is very possible that they also use the Fantastico DeLuxe plugin. With Fantastico you get presented with several pre-installed softwares, one of which is wordpress, that can be installed within just a few clicks. After the install is done all you need is a theme for your blog, you can even search for “free wordpress themes” on google to find thousands of results.

Setting Up Your Blog

Your blog is already installed and its up running now with the default post and the default about page. There are few technical things you need to get them done properly before we proceed.

• Your Blog Settings There are several blog settings you would want to setup, by clicking in the Options tab you will be presented with several sub options. The first option is the General options, where you have to setup the blog title and the blog description. Since the other options are already okey (but in either case you might want to check them) we can pass with this tutorial on the permalinks.
• Setting your permalinks The permalinks are actually the URL your posts should have. By default the URL of your posts would look like ?p=ID , but wordpress has been build with seo in mind and have given you the option to modify your permalinks for better search engine performance. Once you are in your permalinks chose the Custom option and write down: /%postname%/. By using that small code for your permalink your posts will now look like your-blog-post-title/, the URL is now of real words which people can read, and even search engines love this too

Now that we have setup the technical settings we can proceed to create categories for your blog (remember, expanding your blog to several sub topics). Go on Manage > Categories and a table will be presented from where you can add/modify/delete categories. Categories are like a organizer, and you can mark each of your post to which category it belongs (you can even mark a post to 2 or more categories if it suits). What is required in the table to add a category is the category name, the category slug (which would be the URL for the category, example your category name is: fashion models, then it would be nice to have categories slug as: fashion-models) and the description for the category. The description should be not longer then 160 characters and should be well written to intrigue visitors reading to visit that category.

Categories are already been settled up. With WordPress aside the posts which would be market under categories you can as well create pages for your blog. These pages can be used to talk about your self, a contact page or anything you actually want.

Now you are ready to start blogging. To write your posts you need to click on Write and chose Write Post (and NOT write page unless thats what you want to do). Now that you have clicked to the write button you get presented with a table and two inputs where you can write. One is the title where the title of the post should be written, the second is the body where the posts content should be written. Once you are done writing your first post, on your right side of the screen you will notice some blue tabs with a + sign on their right end, click on the tab name categories and it should open a list of categories that you have created, select the proper category for which your post classifies and then hit the publish button.

Thats it, now you don’t need anymore to ask how do I start blogging, at least not the technical side. For similar tutorials on how to continue effective blogging you can subscribe to my RSS feed