Many people have contemplated starting a blog but many probably feel like it is out of their realm of skill or knowledge.  The truth is, blogs are simple to start, easy to maintain and can be a powerful tool for recognition and brand promotion, both for business and personal use. 

For businesses, a blog is a place to begin building relationships with your audience. It’s a place where transparency, honesty, and relevancy all meet.

Blogs allow your business to:

•    provide relevant information regularly
•    receive feedback from readers and engage them in discussion
•    distribute content more widely through search engines, online communities, and so on

Blogs allow your readers to:

•    receive regular updates from you when they want, where they want
•    easily share your content
•    find you through search engines via keywords and tags

For businesses, people have come to expect that you have a Web presence. It conveys credibility, expertise, problem-solving ability and overall entrepreneurial effort.  

You can certainly put yourself and your business out there through e-newsletters and testimonial ads but they are one way communications - from you to your customers and prospects.  Send one too many newsletters by email and they may delete it or skip, especially if they are receiving a lot of email, in general.  On the other hand, some people prefer receiving information by email - you can still do that with a blog but the difference is, the person can choose to subscribe to a blog’s RSS feed in whatever way is easiest for them: via email, through a feed reader or straight off the site. 

This article will give you tools, tips and advice on how you can easily start a blog to use as a vehicle to drive traffic to your business by targeting a specific customer base through online communities and blog link exchanges.  We will offer a simple how-to guide on starting a blog, various blog platforms you can utilize, tips on building a personal brand, providing great content and finally, promoting your site through social media and social bookmarking.

Step 1: Choosing a Blog Platform

When you decide to start your own blog, there are many choices to be made. The very first choice is which platform to use. The most popular blog platforms are Blogger, Typepad, and WordPress. You can also hire a creative agency, like Aixen, to build you a custom blog from scratch.

You can choose to have your blog self-hosted on your own server (usually a third-party you pay to host your site). WordPress.org would require a self-hosted blog, but they work with several hosting companies (i.e. Aixen, DreamHost, etc) that will install the WordPress.org blogging software automatically on their servers for a small monthly fee. You can also buy a domain name to use (i.e. seedingideas.com).

Blogger, WordPress.com and TypePad blogs are hosted by the platform’s server and don’t require additional 3rd party services. Blogger and WordPress.com’s services are free, TypePad has several tiers of paid services, depending on your budget.

Pros & Cons of the Various Blogging Platforms

- Some of the pros of having a hosted site (like Blogger or TypePad) are they are very user-friendly, easy to navigate and inexpensive (or free).

- Some of the cons of having a hosted site are that there are many platform limitations and Blogger blogs have been criticized for being less-professional looking (although many blogs have overcome this bias by using professional themes and templates).

- Some of the pros of having a self-hosted site are you have control over your HTML and CSS, permalinks and how are your archives are managed. WordPress.org also have hundreds of plug-ins and widgets that allow you to enhance many features of your blog from SEO to SPAM control to advertising more efficiently.

- Some of the cons of having a self-hosted site are that you need to be very comfortable with HTML, CSS and PHP if you want to tweak your templates.

Our recommendation for a blogging platform is to use Google's Blogger.com if you are very new to blogging. Here is a link to their Getting Started Guide. If you very comfortable with more advanced coding and already have a working knowledge of blogs, we recommend starting a WordPress.org blog.  Here is a link to their Getting Started Guide.

** Check back next week for Step 2: Branding: Developing Content Strategy & Name for Your Blog **