A few weeks ago, a friend of mine asked me about setting up a blog for him. I figured so many people are blogging these days that everyone would know how to start a blog. Guess what, not everyone know where to start. I haven’t gone over to set up his blog yet but I thought creating a little tutorial would be a good thing to talk about here at Jonespc.com. I’m going to do this over several post so stay tuned to get the full tutorial.

What do you want to blog about?

Many people have interest in topics that they want to talk about on their blogs but the first thing you should do is find a subject that you want to be the main focus of your blog. Its your blog, so when you write you can write about whatever you want, its ok to go off subject sometimes but you do need to narrow it down to a subject that you are interested in and have enough knowledge and passion to write about.

After you’ve picked a topic, check the web to see how many people are writing about that topic. This is basically just for your general knowledge, but it would be a good idea to know what the playing field looks like. If you want to make a little money blogging, through advertisements etc, gaining readers will be really important to you. If you pick a topic like Video games, you’d find that there are already tons of video game blogs out there, so getting large amounts of readers will take a lot of work. If you pick a topic that only has a few blogs, it will be a little easier to get a good reader base (if the interest in that topic is out there). Its hard to predict interest in your topic until you try it out, but you can find out if a topic is "overblogged‘ already.

You have your topic, whats next?

Now that you’ve picked a topic and done a little research, you have to decide how you want to set up your blog. Here Im talking about what blogging platform you are going to use. There are several choices available to you, this tutorial will go over one way of doing so in particular but right now Im going to go over a few of the options you have.

Free or hosted blogging platforms

You can get started blogging absolutely free by using a hosted blog. 2 of the popular ways of doing so is by using blogger.com (blogspot) or wordpress.com. Both of those platforms are pretty easy to set up and involves going to those sites and signing up. They are completely free and looks like any other blog you find out there. For examples of a blogspot or blogger blog, visit justanothertechblog.blogspot.com, or artnudes.blogspot.com. Both of these blogs are hosted by blogger.com and is completely free for that blogger to set up and run. As you can see, they both look just like any other blog.

For examples of a wordpress blog, check out macnwin.wordpress.com, or designxpert.wordpress.com.

As you can tell by the examples that I have given, most hosted blogs can look just like any other blog and have most of the same functionality. The only difference is the actual URL. If you notice, most hosted blogs have the platform URL in the web address with the name that you choose as the subdomain. lets say you wanted to make a blog about flowers and want to call it "theflowerblog". Using one of the free hosting platforms your URL would be theflowerblog.wordpress.com, or theflowerblog.blogspot.com. For most people there is nothing wrong with that type of set up but there are some reasons why you wouldnt want to set up a blog that way.

If later you decide you want to change blogging platforms, you would end up with a whole new URL. That would also mean that you may loose some of the search engine indexing, or pagerank that you had built up. Also, when you go to monetize your blog, youd find that there are a few money making options out there that require you to have your own URL and not a blogspot or wordpress URL.

For the most part, its not that big of a deal and is really a matter of personal preference.

Tomorrow, I will talk a little more about some other options you have to start your blog.