How To Start A Blog

I just started blogging two days ago. I have absolutely no experience whatsoever in blogging. Where do I begin to learn how to start a blog? I figured the best way is to start googling it and see what I can find. It is amazing how much resources there are out there. I did a search on "how to start a blog" and there were at least 755,000 results! It seems that everybody who is anybody has something to say about how to start a blog (including myself). I am sure that once I am done with this blog, my site will just be number 755,001. Just another footnote in the history of blogging I guess. But I do hope that I can contribute some useful information to the blogosphere. It would make all the days and hours I spent researching all these information for this blog to be so much more worthwhile.

I started by reading some of the sites out there on how to start a blog. I found a lot of sites to be useless. That explained the 755,000 results. Most sites didn't have really good contents. Most just gave you an outline but provided very little details. I guess starting a blog is really not that difficult, so an outline may just suffice. Most really just gave you the reason to start a blog, but didn't really walk you through on how to do it.

So there were a lot of things I had to figure it out. I may not know where to start, but I knew that I didn't want to pay a lot to start this little venture. I wanted to use free resource if possible.

I opted to go for Blogger (it is free). I also did a lot of research on web hosting to see if I needed to host my own blog. But after some consideration I found hosting my own blog to be too much of a hassle. I don't consider myself to be a professional blogger. I am not sure if I would even want to become a professional blogger. I am sure that if later on I decide to become a professional blogger I can always find better hosting options at that time.

Blogger is owned by Google. So I am sure it won't be going away anytime soon. I also know that I can link my own domain to blogger if I want to look more "professional". A lot of people don't seem to know that. Most people seem to think that blogging on Blogger requires you to host your site on blogspot.com. A lot of people also want to host their own blog because they think they can better control over their blogs. But what they don't realized is that maitaining a site can be pain in the ass. Most beginners started with inexpensive shared hosting plans that may range from $3 to $20 a month. That may seem inexpensive, but the headaches that can comes with some of these plans can ruin the blogging experience. Most shared hosting plans are oversold. Some people might opt for a dedicated hosting plan, but they could be quite expensive.

The bad thing about having a blog hosted by Blogger is that you may not have a lot of control in customizing your blog and your blog's data is owned by Google. For serious bloggers that is a big deal and just for that reason they opted to host their own blog. And that is definitely for a good reason. So it does depend on what your needs are. For now, I just want to blog to "let it out". So there is really no need for me to be too serious about hosting my own blog. One other thing I like about Blogger is that it can scale. After all this site is owned by Google. Their infrastructure should be good enough whenever my blog got "Dugged" or "StumbledUpon". I don't see that happening soon, but just in case :)

Setting up a blog with Blogger was easy. I already got a Gmail account, so the process was even simpler. If you don't have a Gmail account, signing up for Blogger is actually just creating a Gmail account.

After I signed into my Gmail account all I had to do was creating a title for my new blog and chose a new Blogspot subdomain and my new blog was created.

Creating content for my blog took me a while. I also had to play around with the Blogger template for a little bit, but within an hour or so I got the hang of it and started adding test posts.