List of things you’ll need to start a blog.
#1 a topic
#2 a computer with access to the internet
#3 internet space
#4 at least a 2nd grade reading level
#5 the ability to pound on a key board
#6 a note book – or a note book app [take notes]
[SIDE NOTE – A note book app is a wonderful thing – I turn it on and it records my posts while I’m driving. Inspiration can hit anywhere so take a note book with you into the bathroom, PTA, Church, wherever! Just be ready when it hits.]
So you want to blog and I hope by now you’ve made a list of what you may possibly want to spend the rest of your life blogging about. And now you need a place to put all your knowledge or pictures or videos or angst – where to go? Oh where to go?
Start with Blogger.com
Don’t stay there long, but don’t invest any money until you know you have the hang of it. Give it a few months and once you have the basics, buy a domain and once you start getting traffic, move!
BUT we’ll get to all that, for the moment – Just Go to Blogger.com and create an account.
Creating an account is easy, but once you’re in you may feel a little lost. Just poke around, you can’t hurt it. If you screw it up just delete it and start another – they’re free! Who cares, it’s just digital bites, the world won’t fall apart if you screw up a new free blog.
Now that you have an account you need a theme!
Your blog needs to look like something.
There is a great little area within Blogger that will allow you to create your own style of theme – it’s in Themes! There is also Layout and that allows you to move things around a bit, but for right now, let’s just stick to themes.
I suggest you go out into the big world wide web and Google “Blogger layouts” or “Blogger themes” and find something that fits you and get one of the Free themes. You’re testing the waters right now, don’t buy anything.
The free theme comes as a bunch of code – BEFORE YOU PANIC. If you can’t handle copying and pasting a little code here and there – Blogging is NOT for you. It’s not brain surgery, but this is the internet, you’re going to have to learn a little bit of code or at least learn how to copy a bunch of code from one place and drop it into another.
Again it’s a FREE BLOG – you haven’t done anything yet, if you’re going to screw it all up NOW is the time to do it.
Now that you have your account and your theme in place, it’s time to Write Something!
Or upload pictures of something or paste in your embedded code. Because if there is nothing there, you’re not going to get a lot of traffic and you’re not going to make money with an empty blog – so fill it up.
So stay tuned for Part 3 – Blogging – What the Heck am I doing.