You must start your blog with a plan of action, think about your final result very carefully because there are a lot of blogs that are started with a high level of enthusiasm and later dead because the author lost interest in the topic, so be very sure of the topic you choose to start with, and there is no harm done investing a few hours on a project which you are planning to give at least a year’s time of life, If you need your blog to last you will need to put in a few precious hours into it.
Find the answers to the following questions:
1. What is the topic that you are going to blog about?
2. Why would people read your blog?
3. How often you will find the time and mindset to update your blog?
4. Are you planning to make money out of your blog or is it purely for the sake of information.
Now that you have the answers to the question’s above, let’s call that your plan of action, once you are armed with the plan of action you are ready to go ahead with your guide – creating a blog, by calicutnet.com, make sure you add this guide to your favorites and check back for reference or for continued reading in case you don’t complete the entire guide in one go.
In the previous chapters you have learned, what a blog is, what is the format of a blog and what are the purposes of a blog. Now is the time to put all your knowledge of blogging into practice, Begin by checking out a minimum of five blogs in related areas of the topic you have chosen.
Now you have to familiarize yourself with the different elements of blog, the elements should have a harmony matching with the theme you have planned to blog about.
• Blog Title: The name of your blog.
• Blog description: A description of your blog
• Entry date: The date the entry was posted.
• Entry title: The title of the post.
• Timestamp: The time the entry was posted, this is used by blog searchers to find out the first blogger
who made the entry.
• Authors Name: If you have multiple authors adding entries to a blog then this is very important.
• Comments: the area where your readers posts comments on your entry.
• Archives: links to earlier entries.
• Images: Images relevant to your topic
• Videos: you can either upload these but we suggest you open a video posting account with youtube.com
and then link it to your blog.
• RSS feeds: RSS stands for “really simple syndication” you can update your blog with constant news feeds
using this technology.
• Ads: your source of income for your blog.
• Links: link out to other bloggers of your interest and always ask them to link back to you.
Once you have written down a plan on how to implement the above elements into your blog, you can start designing a page style for your blog, if you are hosting on any free blog hosts, then you can choose your template from their list or you could design your own if you are aware of web designing, if you are a non-commercial blogger then your best starting point is with a template file from a free blogging host.
Next : Setting up your blog