Want to join the fun and start a blog? There are a lot of options out there, from great free blogs at Wordpress to hosting your own. And how does all this work, anyway? It’s the new media revolution.
FREE WORDPRESS THEMES
For some really interesting sites that offer unique Wordpress themes, see here: Some Fantastic Free Wordpress Themes
Do a search for WordPress themes and you invariably get the same little mix of sites that have lists of their “Top Ten,” or how-ever-many, Wordpress themes. You can find some good themes this way, but there are some great and free themes that are somewhat harder to find.
(Note: Since writing this article, Deluxe Themes has become a pay-to-play theme site. I’m not sure they are good enough that I would recommend paying for one of their themes)
The first place I was going to link to was Deluxe Themes, but they are down right now. Hopefully, that’s not “down for good” because they really have some great stuff. I would keep trying if you go there and they aren’t up, because they are worth it. They’ve created some very complex magazine themes and even a theme that looks just like the People Magazine site. A word of warning, though: One issue with them is that their themes tend to create a lot of databases on your server, so they are a little more bandwidth intensive than the average theme, and if you can only create a limited number of databases with your host, you may want to avoid them. They may also be rough on hosts that offer shared hosting plans.
Another good spot is BustATheme. Greg Johnson has created several unique themes, two of which can be used to make your index page show posts in a calendar form. I also like his News CMS theme, which is very clean and offers something that the vast majority of magazine themes don’t offer: no need for putting freakin’ pictures with every damn post. I mean, most of us are bloggers, not photographers, so why every other magazine theme out there expects you to put photos with every post is beyond me. If you’ve been looking for a clean CMS magazine theme that doesn’t require you to add photos all over the place, check this one out.
Themes Junction provides an absolutely massive quantity of unique and free WordPress themes. I’ve pulled several off of there, and they all worked fantastically. It’s almost overwhelming, really, but they have pretty good search and navigation features.
Blogging can be free and fun, or you can go the self-hosted route and, depending on your web hosting, it can then either be inexpensive, exorbitantly expensive, hassle free, or make you want to jump out a window. But whichever way you want to go, there are some things to consider before you open your blog and decide where to put it (one of the free services or self-hosted).
Why? Everyone blogger starts blogging for a reason. I know many bloggers, and there are just about as many different reasons for them to blog as their are bloggers that I know. I know people who are just extremely committed to the cause they are blogging about, sort of the activist blogger, and getting the word out is all they care about, 100%.
Some do it strictly for fun, as a sort of personal diary and emotional release.
Some do it to try to get a name made for themselves, the fame crowd.
Some do it just because they like to write and know that a few people are reading their stuff.
Some do it to try to earn an income.
Many do it for multiple reasons; they love to write and wouldn’t mind making a penny or two, for instance.
But you need to decide all the reasons you are going to start blogging before you begin. For instance, if your primary goal is to reach as many people as possible and you don’t care about monetizing your site, setting up a blog for free at Wordpress.com is a great selection.
If you throw monetizing the site in, then blogger.com becomes the choice.
If you want something really powerful and easy to use and don’t want the limitations that come with a free service and don’t have a lot of computer knowledge, you may go to Typepad, a place where you can set up very powerful blogs with minimal, or no, coding knowledge.
If you want full control and know a little bit about what you are doing, you may want to buy a domain name and select a good host and head off on your own. All good hosting companies have one-click installations of blogging software.
But it is important to figure out the “Why” on the front end because blogs can be a hassle to move from one location to another, and it isn’t necessarily easy to rebuild your traffic after you move. Say you start off with a free Wordpress blog and decide that you want to monetize your blog. Now you are stuck moving files to a new location somewhere. Or you want to start off free and with ads on your site so you pick Blogger.com only to find out that there are some significant limitations to site design, navigation, etc.
If you are really serious about blogging and bringing in income, you probably need to make a serious decision and either go with Typepad, or go on your own to a web host. If the income doesn’t matter in the least, then you probably should just stick with free Wordpress.
What?
What are you going to blog about? Forget all the schemes about running multiple blogs in your spare time and linking around, etc. A good blog that builds up readership takes real time to work. I can’t tell you how many people I know who decided to start blogging and immediately put up several blogs, sometimes even on the same, or very similar, subject matter. Don’t make that mistake. If you have a subject you want to blog about, just set up one blog, at least in the beginning, and do it right. Take your time with it.
The two most important things about picking what you are going to write about is that, one, you should like the subject, and, two, you should already have some knowledge of that subject.
As an example, let’s say you are wanting to blog primarily for the purpose of making money, so you think that blogging about tee shirts would be a good thing, and you can send people, via affiliate programs, to go buy tee shirts, and you’ll get a cut. The only problem with that is that you better really like writing about tee shirts because the most successful blogs are the ones that update regularly and have well-written and entertaining posts. Pick a subject that bores you, and not only will you get bored, but so will your readers.
As another example, let’s say that you really love ancient Egypt and just want to write about archaeology ongoing there. That’s great, but if it is just something you enjoy, and you will end up either writing generic stories because your knowledge level is low, or you will end up spending several days doing research for a single story, then that might not be the subject for you. You might be able to work it out, but it might wear you out, too.
The best thing to write about is something that you love and already have at least a basic knowledge of. Your goal will be to not only allow your passion for your subject to come through, but also to use your knowledge and research to find things that most people won’t know or haven’t found yet.
Yet another example: I know someone who is a global warming skeptic and passionate about it. He spent a great deal of time having his site professionally designed and wrote for it constantly. The problem? He really didn’t have the knowledge necessary to make compelling stories about the subject. He ended up rehashing and linking to other articles. That can be okay if you are truly great at it, but most of us aren’t able to spend the time necessary to run what amounts to a link site, and he has never successfully acquired a decent reader base because he isn’t an authority, and can’t speak authoritatively, on the subject, so people go elsewhere (but see below for other altnernative for this sort of situation).
Who?
Who is your intended audience? Obviously, it will be people who like the same subject that you like, so you need to find some way of giving them real value in that area. Using the above glowal warming example, that blogger, given his lack of knowledge, should have really concentrated on simply directing people elsewhere. He should have set his site up as a link site and worked his tail off, every day, to scour the web for interesting stories written by others on the subject. That’s what I call “Drudge Blogging,” after The Drudge Report. You find almost no original material there, but the author manages to go all around the web various times a day and update his site with links of interest to his readers.
On the other hand, if you have both a passion for, and knowledge of, the subject you choose to blog on (or even if you are just committed to doing enough research) then you can become an expert in your field.
Here is as clear an example of where I am going as I can manage. If you decide to run a humor blog (as I did), but don’t have an ability to write humorous material (as I generally don’t), then you need to write a blog that just includes uncopyrighted humor or that highlights great jokes or whatever. I did this with funnyemail.org, where I simply took the funny emails that people send me everyday and post them into the blog. On the other hand, if I were Dave Berry and decided to write a humor blog, I would just use my skills as a humorist to write original material.
So as long as you like your subject, you can make it work, whether by being a source or an expert. But the first thing you have to do, no matter what your end goals are, is to pick a subject that you like, and then to remember who you are writing for. The best thing is just to pretend that you are writing for yourself. Would you, honestly, bookmark and visit your blog often? If not, you need to think about doing it in another way.
In my next installment, I’ll go over the hosting options in a little more detail, and then we’ll start to cover topics like monetization, search engine optimization and marketing.
As most of you know, I’ve moved my efforts, temporarily, to Hosting Website.
I’m just dropping by here to let you know that I think I’ve gotten a pretty important article written that will be helpful to anyone who is hosting their own website. Essentually, it describes all the things you need to do to make sure that your site is running smoothly and using as few server resources as possible.
You can read that article here: Optimizing A Site for Servers