Blogging 101: An Overview of Blogging Tools

Over the past five years in the Internet world, blogging has spread like wild fire; particularly, in the past one to two years. Anyone who wants to be visible on the Internet knows that in order to gain popularity online, you need to blog. But, when you're just starting out, it's difficult deciding how you can accomplish that.

Do you have your topic figured out? If not, you'll want to do that before you continue into the big bad world of blogging. Once you have that, you have to step out deeper into the unfamiliar world of technology.

The fastest and easiest way to get a blog setup is through a website that will host it for you. Here are some of my favorite and more popular websites -

www.livejournal.com - I've been blogging there since before blogging became a buzzword. If you're looking to start a more personal blog that will which a large community of Internet users around the globe, this might be the best choice for you.

www.xanga.com - This is also a good place to create a blog with more personal content. When I first started there, it wasn't as popular as LiveJournal, but it has since gained popularity and is at least close to having a large community of Internet users like LiveJournal.

www.myspace.com - MySpace is not only a good place to blog, but it provides many other important social networking tools. If you are a musician, comedian, filmmaker, writer, or in some other business, MySpace would be an excellent place for you to start. While it's extremely popular with teenagers, in the past year I've seen the MySpace community grow in leaps and bounds. You can find just about any kind of business there that you never knew existed.

www.wordpress.com - Word Press has also gained popularity in the past couple of years. It's based on their own templates that you can also download and install for free on your own web space (we'll discuss the option later).

The important thing to remember about all of these websites is that they are very fast and easy to get started. So, if you're looking for a quick introduction to blogging, then I highly suggest that you start with one of these places.

Another interesting part of the blogging world that is gaining in popularity due mostly to Google's AdSense advertising is revenue sharing. There are quite a few websites out there that will share their advertising revenue with you once you plug in your AdSense code. These are also fairly fast and easy to set up. Some of the more popular websites that cater to this sort of blogging are -

www.writingup.com - Writing Up uses a community-based blogging software called Drupal that offers its users much more capability than Word Press does. I've been using Writing Up for the past year and have found it a good introduction to blogging for real money. Once you get set up there, you will find an unending supply of how-to articles that focus on making more money with your blogs.

www.bloggerparty.com - Blogger Party is based on the same software that Writing Up is, but it allows you to customize the look of your blog a bit more than Writing Up does. For that reason, I like it a bit better. You can also find a lot of the same users on Blogger Party that you can on Writing Up.

All of these options that I've written about so far are excellent ways to start a personal blog, but if you have a business idea or area of expertise that you want to write about, don't let that deter you. You can find numerous blog owners on all of these sites that cater to business rather than personal writing.

However, if you are running a business, it's a good idea to look into setting up your own website. This used to be a scary part of the Internet to venture into, but hosting companies have made their services more user-friendly in the past three to four years.

If you're a beginner, here are a few of the hosting companies I've dealt with that would be of interest to you -

www.godaddy.com - I recommend Go Daddy for beginners. Their set up is pretty straight forward and their customer service and technical support is decent.

www.1and1.com - This is the service that I currently use and will most definitely stay with them indefinitely. Their customer service is terrific and they have just about any tool available in the control panels that you could ever think of.

www.hostrocket.com - Because of my personal experiences with them, Host Rocket is one of my favorite web hosting companies. Their technical support is great and so are their prices. Since I haven't used them in a few years, I can't comment on what tools they currently have available, but it's standard with web hosting these days to have a wide variety of tools available to customers.

If you're just starting out, this is probably a lot to take in, so I won't overload you with tech-speak that you won't understand. I highly recommend starting out with one of the free websites because they are fast and quite easy to use. Once you get the hang of it there, it would be a good idea to branch out and start a website of your own.

In future installments, I will go into detail about how to use each one of these types of services. Good luck!