There are lots of ways how to create a blog.
Some are very easy, like setting up a blog on a service like Blogger.
Trouble is, spammers know this as well.
Which means that Blogger has to be quite aggressive when it decides whether a blog is for real or not.
If you're not careful, you could find yourself logging in to update your free blog and find that it's been accused of being spam and is therefore no longer visible to the rest of the world.
Ouch.
Especially if you're relying on your blog for some of your income.
It's a little bit more effort (although not much more) to set up a blog on your own hosting.
With it's own domain rather than being a part of someone else's site.
But it's well worth the effort.
With your own blog, you are mastery of your own destiny.
Most hosts have a one-click install for Wordpress.
So it's pretty easy to get a basic blog up and running.
After that, it's maybe 20 or 30 minutes work to tweak it so that it doesn't look like the thousands of other Wordpress blogs out there.
Make sure that you implement some kind of comment spam interceptor (Akismet works well, although you do need to jump through one simple hoop).
Choose a new theme so that yours doesn't look like a completely "straight out of the box" blog.
Then you're set to publish your views to the whole wide world! Post a comment, after making sure that your blog will notify the multitude of blog search engines.
It does this by "pinging" them.
Which is just a bit like a computer-to-computer radar bleep.
A ping tells the blog search engines that you've added new content.
They get excited by this (computers aren't that intelligent, are they!) and index your new content.
And this is the start of publicising your new blog.
Some are very easy, like setting up a blog on a service like Blogger.
Trouble is, spammers know this as well.
Which means that Blogger has to be quite aggressive when it decides whether a blog is for real or not.
If you're not careful, you could find yourself logging in to update your free blog and find that it's been accused of being spam and is therefore no longer visible to the rest of the world.
Ouch.
Especially if you're relying on your blog for some of your income.
It's a little bit more effort (although not much more) to set up a blog on your own hosting.
With it's own domain rather than being a part of someone else's site.
But it's well worth the effort.
With your own blog, you are mastery of your own destiny.
Most hosts have a one-click install for Wordpress.
So it's pretty easy to get a basic blog up and running.
After that, it's maybe 20 or 30 minutes work to tweak it so that it doesn't look like the thousands of other Wordpress blogs out there.
Make sure that you implement some kind of comment spam interceptor (Akismet works well, although you do need to jump through one simple hoop).
Choose a new theme so that yours doesn't look like a completely "straight out of the box" blog.
Then you're set to publish your views to the whole wide world! Post a comment, after making sure that your blog will notify the multitude of blog search engines.
It does this by "pinging" them.
Which is just a bit like a computer-to-computer radar bleep.
A ping tells the blog search engines that you've added new content.
They get excited by this (computers aren't that intelligent, are they!) and index your new content.
And this is the start of publicising your new blog.