Friday Firsts: Starting a Blog

Why a Blog?

I know, I know… Starting a blog sounds so New Milennium, everyone-at-the-coffee-house-is-doing-it. But blogging can be one of the most powerful tools for finding, connecting with, and keeping an audience online. Coming from a point of absolute-zero online visibility, a blog is a very strong base camp for your Brand. Here, you can gain some credence with your target audience, let your work be seen, and even start an online networking campaign to rival the possibilities available in both Twitter and Facebook. You may sound a bit pretensious when you tell your friends “I’m starting a blog,” but so what? Help them clean up post mocha latte spit-take and kindly explain that it’s an extremely solid addition to your marketing toolbox.

Picking a Topic:

Blogs come in many shapes and sizes, and might offer beautiful photography, useful articles, an ongoing story, or simply a look into your day-to day-life.  At first glance, it may seem like a photographer should start a photoblog, and an actor should start a “living the Hollywood dream” memoir, and a writer should post her work. But who says? Maybe as an actor you want to start a photoblog with interesting visuals from your audition locations. Maybe an artisan could start a blog not about crafting, but about starting a small business. Maybe a wedding photographer could write stories about his subjects.

When deciding on a topic, there are several questions to ask yourself. Is there an audience for it? Is the market already glutted with exactly the same thing? Does it help sell your brand and bring you an audience? I would suggest, though, that there is one single question about your blog topic that is more important than all the others combined; Are you passionate about it?

A blog is a huge commitment. If you intend to serve any sort of audience, you’ll be posting at least semi-regularly, you’ll want your posts to stay mostly on-topic, and you’ll want that underlying topic to stay as relatively consistent as possible. A topic that you can wring a maximum of 20 or 30 posts out of (or even 90 or 100) , has a built-in self-destruct date and could spell a long term commitment that comes to a dead-end. Pick a topic that you could talk about forever. In your free time. For fun. Passion, equals dedication, equals output, equals a consistently kickass blog.

Picking a Service:

This is where things start to get tricky. There are a lot, and I mean a lot of options out there when it comes to choosing a blog platform.  The first step towards choosing is determining if you want a hosted blog, or a non-hosted blog.

• Hosted Blogs (Blogger, LiveJournal, Tumblr, TypePad, etc)

A hosted blog is any service where your blog, the blog software, and the front end (where you enter your posts) are hosted on another website. These sites offer a varying range of on-board functionality, but are pretty uniformly easy to use.  Most of these blogs are free, and extremely intuitive if you have ever used word processing software like Microsoft Word.

The downside here is some services may display ads on your blog if you choose not to pay a subscription fee, and your web address will most likely be something like YourBlog.blogspot.com or YourNameHere.tumblr.com, which may or may not be professional enough for what you’re trying to accomplish

• Non-Hosted Blogs (WordPress, for one)

These blogging platforms are basically software that you install directly on your own hosted web account (the storage that makes your website possible). Everything remains on your website, so you’re not at the mercy of your service going down or going out of business. Your posts are archived on your own website, and you can make backup after backup until you feel secure that your posts will never ever be lost. The number of additonal plugins, skins, widgets, and tools are seemingly endless on some of these platforms too, which makes a highly custimizable blog.

But there is a downside here too. These babies are not for the weak of heart. Just getting the blog up and running takes much more tech savvy than the typical PC-user has. Customizing can be much, much more difficult. Some of the user interfaces are not quite as intiutive either, as they lean more towards functionality and options than towards attractiveness and ease of use.

There are so many services to choose from, I couldn’t possibly keep your interest through the couple-thousand words it would take to review them all, but keep watching for my suggestions of some sites to check out.

Start Posting!

We’ve come to the fun. It’s time to open up to your audience. Find your groove, and start churning out those posts! Of course, it doesn’t end there. There are endless things you can do to keep improving your blog. Check back in the coming weeks and months for articles on:

• Managing and optimizing your RSS feed with FeedBurner.
• Finding readers with Technorati.
• How often to post.
• Headlines that catch readers.
• Making it easier for readers to link to your posts.
• How your High School composition teacher would tell you to write your posts (and why she’s right).
• Posting more frequently.
• Moving from a hosted to a non-hosted blog.
• Starting a WordPress Blog.

… and probably a lot more. In the meantime, feel free to shamelessly promote your blog in the comments. I would too, but, uh… I think you found it.