Things you need to start a blog
Things You Need to Start a Blog
Now that you know what a blog is, the second question that you are probably thinking is “How do I start a blog? What are the things I need?”
You can blog for free, or you can buy your own domain and pay a hosting company to store your blog files. The latter is usually called self-hosted blogging although strictly speaking, most self hosted blogs are hosted by commercial companies. For now, we will discuss free blogging which is very ideal for starters. Hosted blogging are for more experienced bloggers.
To start a free blog you only need to be connected to the internet. There are many free blog hosts on the internet. Some popular free blog hosts are WordPress (there are also hosted WordPress blogs), Blogger, and Tumblr. For our first tutorial series, we will use WordPress.
Our plan in Blogineering is to provide you with most of the things you need to blog. We will teach you how to register and start a blog, how to integrate your blog with social networking sites, and how to grow your audience. For those who know a little (or a lot), just skip the articles that you already know about.
As of this writing, there are more than 165 million blogs in the cyberworld and 50 million of these blogs are WordPress blogs, according to Blogpulse. In addition, 27 out of the top 100 blogs according to Pingdom and 9 out of the top 20 blogs ranked by Technorati also use WordPress. Now, these numbers are probably sufficient to convince you to use WordPress, but we add more. Riley and I attest to these: WordPress is indeed a very good blogging platform because it’s easy to use and it’s free. WordPress is also open-source — meaning, volunteer programmers around the world collaborate in improving the software. Of course, software that are created by a lot of people are likely better compared to software that are only created by a small group of people.
Confusing Names
Don’t be confused. WordPress is a software platform used for blogging. It is also the name of the free blogging host WordPress.com. If you blog in WordPress.com, WordPress is already installed. All you need to do is to register. However, if you choose a hosted blog, you will download the software and manually install it.
