Yesterday, we touched on the reasons to begin blogging.
Today I would like to discuss the hows of starting to blog.
To begin blogging, you need a blogging platform – blogger or wordpress.org are most common. Blogger is free, but google has a nasty habit of shutting down deal blogs as spam. *poof* You can get your blogger-blog back by dialing in and proving you are a human being to google (versus a spam bot), but wow it is terrible to see your work go away even for a few days.
I recommend that you start by purchasing your blog name. Spend the extra money for privacy because if you do not your name, address, zip code and phone number will be out there for the world to see. If you are on blogger, you can upload that name and it will look like you are self-hosting a blog. When you finally make the transition from blogger to a self-hosted blog that transition will be smoother.
If you are not 100% certain you will be blogging years from now, start with blogger. Since it is free, the $50 for a domain name + privacy will be your only real investment. You can easily customize your blog yourself – no need to pay a designer when working on blogger. If you decide in six months or a year that, “Yeah, I like this and I have people who are following my work”, then move on to a self-hosted wordpress blog.
Coupons, Deals and More is a self hosted wordpress blog. What that means is I started a wordpress.org platform, got a theme (Thesis now), and have the entire site hosted on my own server. I began with wordpress as I knew I would be blogging for a good long time. I purchased my blog name through godaddy as they always have a coupon code (I now own 50+ names). You do NOT have to host with godaddy to buy a domain through them. Godaddy is now the largest seller of domain names, but you can buy through any reputable domain register. I did start my blog hosting on godaddy on a shared server. That was not something I would recommend to anyone due to frequent outages and slow load times.
After a while, I had enough traffic rolling in that I decided to move to a different hosting company that has many different packages to choose from. I selected a cloud server, and they would bounce my blog based on traffic. The way a normal server works is 300 sites are crammed on the same machine without regard for space or web-hog considerations (deal blogs are web-hogs based a lot on data). With the new host I was moved around so I wasn’t sucking up speed from other sites or vice versa. Eventually my traffic got to the point where I needed my own server, which is what I currently use.
So now your have your name, your host and your theme. You need to customize it. If you are graphic designer you can do this yourself. If you are not, you will probably need to pay someone to customize your site. Make sure you own your blog design! And make sure you do pay for the pictures that are used in your design unless you drew everything from your own imagination.
Now that you have set up your site, you can begin to blog.
Tomorrow I will be writing about the “whats” of deal blogging.
