Creating and maintaining a blog is NO BIG DEAL, it's NOT difficult and most importantly it's NOT just for 'dorks, nerds and geeks'. On the contrary once you start blogging you'd experience that blogging is a highly effective medium to channelize your creative energies and showcase your talent easily.
I've recently started a new blog called 'Tips & Tricks 4 Bloggers '. All the posts on this blog would be posted with only one objective i.e. to successfully create and/ or maintain a blog here on blogger.com which is also referred to as blogspot.com. I've decided to share this post with all the readers of Surreal Nirvana so that they could know about this blog and also because I believe that many readers would find this post extremely helpful. As the title suggests, in this post I'm going to try to help all readers with an extremely simple to understand and adopt step by step process to create a new blog.
For a person who's never created a blog before it's an evolving process wherein a blogger learns with baby steps and keeps growing with every new post on the blog. But, with this post I plan to expedite your learning process so that you can over come some problems which you might face if you don't know anything about blogging. Please read the steps which have been arranged chronologically and will help you to set up your own blog.
- Decide the subject area or purpose of the blog: This is extremely important for a successful blog. The subject of your blog could be any of your likes or topics you plan to blog about. Narrowing down to the main purpose of the blog provides a clear vision for the posts and the content that would be displayed. To illustrate the same effectively I can tell you how this blog was evolved. Surreal Nirvana is all about me recommending movies, music albums, songs, books, websites etc to my readers. All of my readers might not be interested to know how to create and maintain a blog, hence I decided to start this blog which would enable me to focus on both the topics in an unbiased manner.
- Determine if your blog will be an anonymous one: A substantial number of blogs are related to personal lives, and regular updates about the blogs' owner. It could be appropriate to classify these blogs as journals. Often these blogs are written since people find an easy outlet to talk about their college life, relationship problems, sexual orientation, family/friend/work issues in a funny, sarcastic manner. For many, this is therapeutic as they share their problems with their readers and their faithful readers interact with them through their comments. BUT, many a times personal blogs can make the blogger vulnerable if the blogger mentions the names, locations, private details etc. There have also been problems of online stalkers and bloggers falling into trouble due to not maintaining required anonymity. Ifyou wish to create a personal blog I'd request you to please take proper precautions. Use variables like the guy/girl named 'X'; my boy/girlfriend number 02; the guy/girl from school/ work who is such a pain instead of declaring names. It might be a good idea to create a pseudonym to secure yourself as well.
- Think of a great name: All the steps mentioned here are meant to be used purely at users discretion especially this one. Having said that, I'd suggest you do give the name of your blog enough thought since it would become a brand as soon as it's publicized and you've created a strong reader base for your blog. The easiest thing to do is to start a blog with your own name and if need be, there's nothing wrong your name being the namesake for your blog. But if your content is dedicated towards a particular interest area, thinking a good name for your blog could help later. I would suggest to think a couple of names just in case if you can't register your first choice due to non-availability of username.
- Create a separate email address for your blog: I'd strongly recommend you to create a separate email address (probably 'the-name-you've-chosen-for-your-blog@gmail.com') for all your blog purposes. This will enable you to synchronize your blog related mails, subscriptions, reader interactions, your blog based twitter account to a dedicated email address. Also, if you choose to earn revenue out of your bog, a separate email address would help you to easily sort out all your revenue generating subscriptions to a single email address.
- Choose the site where you'll host your blog: I'd leave this decision on you. As I've mentioned earlier, I'd suggest you to choose blogger since it's quite popular and you'd not face any problems with the settings of the account (all your Google account settings will be default since blogger is Google's service), connecting the RSS Feeds (Feedburner is a part of Google) etc. However, you also have a couple of options available besides blogger likeWordPress, Tumblr, Posterous etc.
- Create your blog: Now that all the necessary groundwork is done, you're ready to create your own blog and enter this magical, fulfilling and extremely addictive world of bloggers. Welcome to the bloggers community.
Manish :)
P.S. If you've found this post informative please do help us by telling us what you think of the same. Also feel free to email this post to all your contacts who'd be interested to create a new blog. You can also subscribe to 'Tips & Tricks 4 Bloggers ' through RSS Feeds or get email updates delivered directly to your mailbox.
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