How to start your own blog

When i started out this blog, I only have one thing in mind - finding avenues to make money, online or offline, and share my experience here. The avenues may be lot’s of different things - paid blogging, content ads, adsense, ASB investments - all sorts of thing. If you haven’t noticed yet, most of the ways that I discussed here are ways of making money via your blog. Yes - many ways - you can get Adsense, Kontera, write blog posts for money. But I missed out the most important thing: How to even start your own blog?

First off, in order to have a blog like what you are reading now, you’ll need some basic understanding on what you want to achieve. What will your blog be discussing most of the time? Are you going to make it pay for some of your bills? Will you be able to commit some time to updating it?

If you have that sorted out, good. We can now move on to the next one - deciding if you want to get your own domain + hosting, or get a free-hosted blog site. If you planned on getting making some money out of your blog, i suggest that you invest in your own domain + hosting - it will save you a lot of headache in the future. The paid to blog companies moving away from free blog sites, so you should to if you planned to earn some moeny with your blog. Let’s explore both options.

For free blog site, you have a lot to choose from. If you already have an existing Friendster account, you can activate the build-in blog and just use it. Alternately, you can choose from other free blog sites like Blogger.com, Wordpress.com or MSN’s mySpace. Most will offer free blog with their domains, and some decent space for your creative ideas and pictures. You’ll need to register to gain access.

But if you are serious and decided to get your own domain & hosting, then you can scout around for hosting companies. My hosting provider, Micfo.com offers quite an attractive package with options of hosting up to 6 domains on one hosting account. If you are done with that, you’ll need to get blog software to start your blog. Most hosting companies offers a lot of blog software with 1 or 2 click installation - so you don’t have to worry much about installation. Wordpress, MovableType and NucleusCMS are some of the common blog softwares that bloggers use. This blog uses Wordpress - if you haven’t noticed.

Once you have those registration or installation, then you can start doing the obvious - blogging! Let your creative juice flows, and try to commit yourself to updating your blog at least once or twice a week. Initially, you may want to write for yourself, but once you have your steady stream of regular readers, you may want to find other topics to write about. Read around, and pay attention to your surrounding more will help you with blogging