It's been a while since my last installment, but I'm glad I waited. A lot has happened in the online world and a couple of new and better services have popped up of what I'm about to talk about next. Setting up your own blog, without owning a computer!

Choices of Blogging Sites

Most people that run blogs run their own sites and have to set up the blogging software and maintain the database and generally screw around with a bunch of stuff that costs (too much) money. But there are now a couple of websites out there that do all of that for you.

There are a ton of sites out there where you can set up a blog, some you have to pay for and some you don't. They all have different pros and cons and some are good and some are really bad. The great thing about these is that you don't have to worry about maintaining the server or upgrading the software. The blog service does all of that for you. If this is your first blog or you don't have money to burn, you'll want to go with a blog service.

There are really two free blogging sites that I'm going to talk about: blogger.com and wordpress.com.

Blogging For Dollars

Blogger.com is a site run by Google and is a very popular blog service. It's big selling point is that it's easy. Seriously, if you want easy, sign up with blogger.com. With blogger.com, you basically create a login account, create a blog (you can have more than one blog per account) and pick a fancy template that defines how your blog will look. Easy as that.

If you decided to create a blog called, say, TuberTop, then the address to get to your site will be http://TuberTop.blogspot.com/. If you ever see any blog with blogspot.com in the address, you know it's a blogger blog. Blogger.com blogs also have an ugly looking toolbar thing at the top that you can't get rid of. This is one of the prices you pay for using this service. But the ease of use may just outweight this inconvenience for you.

Another nice feature of Blogger.com is that it's tied in with Google's other sites. If you use GMail or Google Calendar, you can use your Google login to get into your blogger.com account. That makes it even easier!

Blogger.com is also tied into Google's AdSense service, letting you make a little coin off your blog if it proves to be popular enough. If you want an easy way to put advertising on your blog, nothing's easier than integrating with the King of Online Advertising.

So, when you think easy blogging, think Blogger.com.

Example

Does It Make Word Juice?

WordPress.com is the other blogging site I wanted to talk about. It's not easy, but like a M1A2 Abrams main battle tank, it is powerful. WordPress.com let's you set up your own template and let's you change it and mangle it all you want. That might be good or bad, depending on your mangling skills.

WordPress.com also doesn't have a toolbar at the top of all of it's pages. If it wasn't for the address (your TuberTop blog would now be TuberTop.wordpress.com) and a small blurb at the bottom of the page, you wouldn't even know it was a WordPress.com blog.

WordPress.com also has a wide array of plugins that add functionality to your blog. These are things like adding advertising to your site, adding a random quote to your pages, or adding a shopping cart. These are usually written by users and then shared with the whole community, so you can really get a lot of functionality. But they can sometimes conflict with each other too, causing problems that you then need to straighten out. Also, not easy.

If you want something powerful or want to tweak your blogging software to suit you, WordPress.com is where it's at.

Example

How to Eat Fried Blog

If you're starting your blog just for fun or for your friends, you can skip this and go straight on to blogging. If you're blogging to get a message out there or to attract an audience, read on.

The art of blogging is a complicated one and one I won't act like I've perfected. But I think there are a couple of general rules for attracting a loyal following.

Have a Focus

If you really want to gather an audience that will read your blog regularly, you need your blog to focus on a certain topic. A corollary to this is that you shouldn't be the topic. If you try to post about everything you're interested in, no one is going to be able to follow it.

When I read an article I really like, say one about how to organise a desk (I'm easily entertained), I usually try to follow that blog for a little while to see what's next. I'm expecting that the blog will have more articles on that topic that I was interested in. If there's a couple more posts and it's about stuff that I don't care about, say the antics of the person's cat or something else totally unrelated to organizing, I'll stop following. And I would say that this is true of most people. So if you want to attract and keep an audience, stick to a central topic of interest. You will eventually attract a crowd centered around that topic that will keep coming back for more.

Successful topics people have chosen are: Parental tips and tricks, Lazy management techniques, Software development, Wacky business ideas and many, many more.

Seriously, you can pick anything, but be sure to pick a topic that really, really interests you, because you're going to need to...

Post Often

Another thing about following a blog is that you want to see regular updates, or it's just not worth coming back. If someone hasn't posted in three months, I'll usually stop tracking them. If you don't post regularly, you will lose your audience (trust me).

There will be circumstances in life that cut into your blogging time, like the birth of your daughter for instance, but be sure to pick it back up once the chance arises again. It's never to late to get back into it.

An oft cited number for how often you should post is usually twice a week. I think once a week is fine, if you've got in depth information to post about. If you post shorter articles, posting more often is better to get the same amount of information out to your readers.

It's also good to post often to get Google to visit your site more and will help you get indexed in the search engines so people searching on your topic can find you. The more often the page changes, the more Google likes it.

Posting often doesn't mean you should skimp on the content. So be sure to...

Post Original Content

It's okay to link to other articles in other blogs based on your topic, but be sure to add to the conversation. Otherwise, you're not adding anything that your readers couldn't get elsewhere. The best of both worlds is to link to another article and then add your unique take.

If you link to another article, that can create what's called a "trackback" on their blog. This allows readers of that article to find your article about that post. Adding original content in your article is the best way to hook those readers to coming back to your blog again for future articles you might write. So, it is important to discuss other people's blog posts on your blog, but be sure to add your unique perspective on the article.

Conclusion

I think that's all I've got for now. Be sure to return when I talk about how best to follow other blogs and how people will typically follow yours.

You can find all the sites I've talked about, and more, over at my Del.icio.us lifelectric tag.

And be sure to check out all the other Life Electric posts. It's computing without a computer!