What You Need to Know to Start a Blog

There are many reasons why you may want to start a blog. Personal blogs are a great way to let friends and family know what's up with your life without having to retell the same little anecdotes over and over a few dozen times. Public blogs are a nice public forum to speak your mind or share information or hobbies. There are a lot of tools out there for both types of blogging.

For personal blogs, it seemed for a while that everyone had one on Xanga, but personally I think LiveJournal is the best for this purpose. Both of these sites allow you to choose whether you want a post to be public (anyone on the web can read it), private (only you can read it, good for an online diary), or protected (only people on your friends list can read it, or some subset of your friends list that you decide). These settings can be chosen for each individual post. Both sites also support RSS feeds of your blog. Both sites put all your friends' latest blog entries onto a single page so you only have to check them in one place. LiveJournal also allows you to add syndicated accounts (ones for other RSS feeds) as your friends, and have them show up on this page. (RoboJenny can be found by adding http://syndicated.livejournal.com/robojenny/profile as a friend.) Therefore, a LiveJournal account can receive feeds from Xanga accounts, but as far as I know it doesn't work the other way around. Also, LiveJournal has communities for people with common interests.

There are a lot more tools out there that are better for public blogging. Many sites claim that you can make a lot of money blogging. And people like ProBlogger and John Cow do and claim they can help you do the same, but I wouldn't guarantee it. This is simply about how to start a blog and tools you can use to monitor your blog.

First of all, you need a blogging site. The easiest of all to use is probably Blogger by Google. It is easy to set-up, post, and you can even use it to get a domain name. In fact, this is what I use myself. The better option, though more technical, is to use WordPress. WordPress is a publishing platform, but it does not host a site for you like Blogger does, so you need to find your own hosting site. Many hosting sites will have WordPress already installed for you with a default configuration, but if you know what you're doing, it is better to configure it yourself.

If you want to add commenting, ratings, and trackbacks, I suggest using HaloScan. It is easy to use and easy to add to your site. Many people prefer to import the RSS feed of your blog into their own reader. FeedBurner is most commonly used for creating feeds, even for people using blogging software that has its own feed creator. FeedBurner has many attractive options, like sending a ping to search engines to let them know you updated your blog, adding links to allow people to mark your post in one of the public bookmarking sites, offer e-mail subscriptions, keep data on your subscribers, etc.

As for using data to track your blog, I have found these to be the most useful. Google Analytics allows you to see where you get your blog traffic from, whether it's from a search engine result, if someone followed a link on another page to get to your site, or if they directly came to your site. It also lists some browser information on your visitors, so you can make sure you test the way your blog works in the various browsers, and the average number of pages each visitor viewed as well as the average time spent in a session. Google's other tool, Google Webmasters helps you see what search results your webpage shows up in, as well as crawl statistics, and other things, but so far I find only the "upload sitemap" and "remove dead link" features to be useful. Instead, I like to use Webmaster Tools by Audit My PC. Its sitemap builder allows you to find broken links easily and give a full crawl of your blog for free. Then you can upload this sitemap to Google Webmasters as well as remove the dead links.

Finally, if you just want to write small updates, micro-blogging has become very popular. For this, I suggest Twitter, as I have suggested before.

For whatever reason you choose to start blogging, I hope these tools help you in your journey, and feel free to post a link to your blog in my comments! I promise to check it out.

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