Keith Dsouza

Technorati tags: starting a new blog, a new blog tutorial, start  blogging, tips before you start a blog

 

I am starting a series of tutorials starting with this ranging on topics of Essential know how on starting a blog through getting your blog noticed in the blogosphere along with some contests that I have planned to have along the same lines.

I will unravel new things along the way to the path to the last tutorial on how to get your blog noticed. Also will research and find you tutorials form other sites for the same effect so that you can get a wide range of writers on the same topic.

 

So getting right on the way, here is the first one on the series, Essential know how to start blogging.

 

What you need to know before starting a blog?

1. Know before hand what you will write about.

While you are already in the right path to becoming a blogger, you still have to think about what you are going to write for your readers, your blog is going to be read by people and they would relate to a particular topic for a particular blog rather than multiple topics on a single blog.

 

For instance a blog that writes about cooking will have a reader base who are learning cooking or are passionate about them and even those who may find your topics interesting but if you start writing about sports on the same blog your regular readers will not like it or get confused as the first thing they come to read your blog to is about cooking.

 

So stick to a topic which you want to write about, use different blogs to write different content, never mix content that are on the opposite poles.

 

So my first advice is think about what you will be regualarly writing about and stick to it religiously on that particular blog. This does not mean that you don't write about differenet things, you do it but try and keep it on different blogs.

 

2. Get a good domain name.

I have two full time domains which i brought and three other domains which I have at blogspot, but I am more religiously devoted to my two domains than those at blogspot.

Your blog should have a good domain name, one that is simple and easy to remember, something that relates to the content of your site, well I specifically moved all my technology content to my new domain at Techie Buzz just for this reason, to realte it to the tehnology content I write about.

You can get a lot of free blogging space and a sub-domain at wordpress.org, blogger.com etc, so you will probably not have to spend a penny to start blogging with the blogging space.

 

But nevertheless mind you this space is not yours permanently neither is the sub-domain you get, so i prefer my personal domain rather than a free sub-domain.

But anyways the decision is always yours and you can opt for anything you want.

Just ensure to make a wise decision here, as if you decide to move later on, all your hard work in getting the readers to your blog, the page ranks, traffic ranks etc will be lost in the process.

 

3. Get a good hosting provider.

Well those who opt for the sub-domain's at popular blogging sites can ignore this as you will not require this at all.

For those who need to get their own domain name, will also require hosting space and bandwidth to host their blogs from, well choose wisely as you will be using it for your readers and for yourself too.

Your readers those who visit your site will use your bandwidth, you will use your bandwidth and webspace too to post articles and store them.

I recommend Dreamhost to host your domain as it provides you with a whopping 20 GB webspace, unlimited mysql database and a almost never ending amount of email accounts, and to top it all a 1 terabyte limit for bandwitdh usage per month.

There is another good thing about Dreamhost is that the webspace and bandwith keep on increasing every month, with 8 GB added to your account for bandwith every month per week.

Now the icing on the cake, one year hosting costs you only 97$ and you can get a whopping 50$ discount on that if you use the promo code BLOGDISCOUNT when you sign up there, and you also get a domain registered for free for the first year while signing up with them, so if you are planning to get a domain don't but it yet, you can get it absolutely at a cost of 47$ for a year.

 

All in all for starter's If you get these three things clear in your mind, you are very well on the course to start a blog and that too becoming a good one, my challenge is to create a array of the tutorials to get you up and running, so can we get on with the challenge then?

 

Well I will end my first part of the series here, Sneak peek on the next part is Pro and Cons of owning your blog rather than hosting it on a free blog service and detailed instructions on setting up your blog on your personal site and on some of the free services namely blogger.com and wordpress.org which you can expect tomorrow.