Sunday, October 18, 2009

How to Start a Free Blog or Weblog or Bloggs

This site is specially dedicated to help you start your first blog and for those who already have a blog (aka weblog) this site also collates information on various add-ins or plugins that can be used to make your bloggs feature rich.

What is a Blog?

A Blog is a short form of the word Weblog which started as a personal diary for an individual to record their thoughts, articles, commentary of various topics. Today more than few 100 million blogs hosted on varied platforms like Wordpress, Technorati, Blogger.com, Blogspot.com, etc. Blogs are maintained generally by an individual or group og like minded individuals who are interested to register their thoughts or views about a particular topic. The topics may be anything under this world- political blogs, music blogg, art blogg, women bloggs, stock bloggs, food bloggs, etc. You just think of a topic or interest and you will find 100s of bloggs for it.

Why should I have a Blog?

Why not? There are many reasons and benefits to have your blog online. If you are maintaining a dairy you can use free blogging tools to start your own blog and even keep it personal so that no one else can view contents of your personal blog. But here are few more reasons to starting your blog online
  • It's FREE, you can use internet blogging platforms like Wordpress.com or Blogger.com to start your first blogg.
  • Spread your knowledge! If you are a job, then you already generate huge content for your blog. As a Mechanic, you can share your views on latest Cars or bikes with the world.
  • Reach your customers: if your business already has website, you can also start a blog to keep in touch with your customers. Blogs can be used to build more content around your main website and can even attract visitors to your main website.
  • Earn Money- this one is more funny, with blogs you can build a loyal base of visitors who are interested to read your interests and you can then monetise this traffic by displaying paid ads or promoting products as an affiliate. You can get a FREE report on 'How to earn Money from your Blog' from Yaro Starak.
  • Interact with your readers: a common feature of your blog is it lets your readers add their comments to your 'posts'. This offers a two way channel unlike traditional websites.
How do I Publish My First FREE Blog?

Okay, here's the meat. There are many ways or platforms that offer you free account to start publishing articles on your Blogg. Here's the most prominent ones:



http://www.wordpress.com/ is one of the most popular blogging platforms. It comes in two variations, either you buy your own hosting space and copy the Wordpress source code. Or the fastest and easiest way is to signup for a free account which just takes about 2-3 minutes. Buying  your own hosting space for your blog offers the uniqueness of having your blog under it's unique domain name. For e.g. http://www.rohitblog.com/ is my another blog which is hosted on it's own domain name and powered by Wordpress. Checkout Wordpress's free account features.

If you are interested to rent out a hosting space for your blog, you can look at this article for some good names in domain hosting business.


http://www.blogger.com/ is another popular choice for blogging. It's offered by Google and this blog which you are reading is hosted on the Blogger service. Believe me I own other two blogs on Blogger and it's really doesn't take more than 2-3 minutes to signup for your new account (all you need is existing gmail account) and more than 10-15 minutes to configure additional features. But you can write your first post straightaway after you signup. The best thing about blogger I like is it's feature for AddIns. Not that you can't add add-ins on Wordpress, but it's just so much easier- point and click- routine.

You can always Spice-Up your blog by customising the basic blog feature. I offer reviews of Add-Ins that I have tried ti work wonderful for my blog. You can check out those add-ins on my blog.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Use Jing To Add Pictures/ Video Right From Your Desktop

TechSmith creators of Camstasia Studio, webs most popular Video capture tool has come up with a very useful free Image and Video capture tool called "Jing". It's specially useful for bloggers who need to embed Images or Videos on their blogs. What's more, Jing also comes up with free complementary account for ScreenCast that stores all your images and video files for free upto max 2GB.

Checkout the features.

This has to be in your toolsbox for giving multimedia experience to your blog.

There is a Jing 'Pro' version for a small license fee that takes the experience to next level- it allows to save Video files in MPEG format and direct push to your YouTube account as well.

Blog from your MS Word

This article is all about various ways you can blog without needing to login to your blogger.com account.

Blog for Word (download link)
This comes as an AddIn to your Microsoft Word tool. After you install Addin, there will be extra toolbar appearing in your Word menu (see below). Enter your blogger account details and push your Word doc as a new Post to your Blogger account.









Make Your Blog Updates Available to Readers

Letting your readers subscribe to your post updates can be good way to increase blog stickiness. This way you can always let your readers aware of changes happening on your website.

TheBestLinks.Com
This let people keep track of their favorite websites and organise in a friendly manner. To add this to your blogger account or any other account, go to TheBestLinks.com copy their custom Javascript code and add it as widget to side menu or page bottom.  Once done, your readers can click on this button and enter their email address to receive further updates. TheBestLink will periodically check your blog for updates and notifies subscribed readers of the changes.