How to Set Up a Blog

Setting up a new blog is a lot simpler than people think. The most important step is to figure out why you want a blog. Establish what the purpose is for you to have, maintain, and manage a blog.

It could range from a wide possibility of ideas. Here are some to get your creative juices flowing:

-Slice of Life
Document your daily life like an online journal.

-Picture sharing
Post pictures from amateur point and shoot, to professional artistic shots from an SLR.

-Discuss Politics
Share your views, collect other views, and have an open forum.

-Write movie reviews
What's good out there in the theater or on DVD? Be the first to share!

-Share recipes
Are you the next Top Chef?

-Restaurant experiences
Create a local following for all the restaurants you visit!

-Or all of the above!
Yes, a full blown blog with just about everything you want to talk about.

Once you have a purpose you will need to think about a clever title for your blog. Believe it or not, your clever title may be already taken so have a few ideas ready to go.

Now choose the blog website that you will be using. There are several for you to choose from and if you are brand new to 'blogging' it might be easier to go with one of the following free blog websites.

Weebly
Create a free website or blog in minutes by using a simple drag and drop interface. No ads. One of Time's 50 best websites of the year.
http://www.weebly.com

Blogspot or Blogger
A free blog publishing tool from Google for easily sharing your thoughts with the world. Blogger makes it simple to post text, photos and video.
http://www.blogger.com

WordPress
A semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.
http://www.wordpress.com

LiveJournal
A free service for all your journaling and blogging needs, offering privacy controls, photo storage, publishing tools, and style templates.
http://www.livejournal.com

Xanga
A community where you can start your own free weblog, share photos and videos, and meet new friends too! This is blogging community, which caters to the younger bloggers.
http://www.xanga.com

Once you decided on the purpose of your blog, setting it up is simple.

Pick one of the free blog websites to host your blog and sign up with an account. You will need an email address in order to start a blog. It is recommended to create another email address outside your personal email so that you can manage possible emails from the blog more efficiently. This way it does not mix into your personal email account and your 'blogger' email is completely separate.

Once your blog is setup, everything will be done in your 'dashboard'. Here you can choose from many types of themes to give your blog character. Many of the above blogs allows you to create 'blog rolls' to include your favorite links outside your blog. You can also set up different categories to file each of your entries into for easy navigation or search once you start blogging a lot more.

As you get familiar with your blog there may be 'plugins' to spice up your blog and/or make things in your 'dashboard' easier to use. If you are serious you can learn the code within the themes to create or manipulate the themes on your own.

You can also set up your entries to be private, for your eyes only, or for a select few whom you may want to issue passwords to.

You can also allow comments from other people and manage them manually to filter out possible spam and to allow legitimate comments to your blog entries.

Blogging is simple, easy, and extremely fun. Getting past the setup is quick and simple. And once you do that, you can share your blog with the world! Be forewarned: Blogging is quite addicting!

Have fun.