The Free and Easy Way to Start Your Own Blog

Deciding to start your own web log, better known as a "blog," can be exciting but knowing how or where to start can be daunting. If you've decided to share with the world you should first decide what you want to share and why.

There are three main types of blogs, one of which if probably describes your blog:

Personal Blog - With this kind of blog, you share your daily life, thoughts, and pictures and so on with others.

Promotion Blog - This type of blog you goal is to attract readers by posting about your company or product, often with the goal of having them do business with your company or buy your product.

Entertainment or Informational Blog - These blogs post about celebrities, news, or evolve around one specific topic. The goal with this type of blog is to share with others who have a similar interest.

When you know what kind of blog you want to start you should now ask yourself why you want to start a blog. Is it just to share information, drive traffic to another website, or perhaps make money?

Share Information - This is the easiest goal to have. All you need to do is just post your entries and that's it. If this is your goal, and you're sharing information about something other than yourself (as in a personal blog), make sure you know about the subject about which you're posting.

Drive Traffic to Another Website - With this goal, it's important to put links to the site you want your blog readers to view. If you're trying to get readers to visit a website that sells widgets, you'll want to write blog entries that tell readers why he or she needs a widget and give easy to find links to the website where they can buy one.

Make Money - You can make money from your blog, regardless of the type it is, with ads on your blog.

Okay, now hopefully you know what type of blog you want to create and why you are doing it. So now where do you start? The easiest way I've found to start a blog is starting it at BlogSpot at www.blogspot.com. They will host your blog and give you a virtual domain name for free. Once you sign up, you will select a name for your blog and that name will become your virtual domain. For example, if you are starting a blog called "Top 10 Disney" (which, by the way, is a blog I started to post top 10 lists related to Disney), your virtual domain will be top10disney.blogspot.com.

Once you've created your account and selected your virtual domain you can begin posting to your blog. BlogSpot makes it easy to add pictures and videos to your blog, too. If your goal was to make some money from your blog (and even it was not, I encourage your to try) you'll want to add Google AdSense ads to your blog. From the control panel within BlogSpot select this option. You'll select where on your blog you want the ads to appear and Google will do the rest. Google will scan your blog and post ads that relate to the content of your blog. Every time someone clicks on one of the ads Google puts up, they'll split the profit with you. Before you know it, you'll be making money from your blog.

Now that you've got some blog entries up and ads on the blog to earn some cash, you need to get the word out about your blog. Tell your friends and family. Ask them to bookmark your blog in their web browser and to visit it often. You can also visit other blogs that are similar to your and add comments on blog entries and give the link to your blog in your comment. You can also ask other bloggers to link to your blog and you can link back to theirs (this is easy to do with BlogSpot from the control panel).

With regular, informative updates, and by sharing the news about your blog with others, in time you'll have visitors to your blog. The key to any good blog is to update it regularly. If you keep your visitors coming back for your latest entry, you're sure to develop a loyal following and perhaps make a little money, too.