Blogging Made Easy(er)

I heard that a local-ish CoC blog presentation this week-ish was less than helpful-ish.Now there is an entire group of people in the city of Chicago that think blogging is difficult and time consuming. How awful is that?

I’m here to tell you a few truths:

• Consistency is important, but can be achieved by blogging once a week or less.
• If you ever decide to quit using your blog, it’s not the end of the world. The content can be moved to your main website or deleted entirely or fixed up and submitted as articles to drive traffic. It does not make you a bad person to quit.
• You do NOT have to spend an hour a day blogging for results. Not by a long shot.

With all that out of the way, let me tell you how to set up a blog.

First you will need to know what kind of server your website is hosted on. You can do this by calling your internet provider’s customer service department and asking, or calling your techie/webmaster and asking. The options are basically Windows, Linux or Unix. If you get a different answer, call me and we’ll figure it out. Yes, for free. Bad blog advice breaks my heart and to me, if you were hurt or confused by the presentation this morning you’re a blog refugee and deserve help.

Second, with your “what kind of server I have” answer in hand, check out local blog programs like WordPress.org, WordPress.com, and TypePad.com.

• Wordpress.org is a program that lives on your server in the same place your website lives, if you put it in a folder on your server named blog, the link to your blog will be http://www.yoursitename.com/blog – you can name the link Blog, Jen’s Blog, Info about Jen, or Jen is a Genius (I listed those for keyword purposes…I want to see if anyone finds me in Google by typing in Jen is a Genius.)
• Wordpress.com uses subdomain mapping so that you could pay a little extra and have a website that says http://blog.yoursitename.com – there are pros and cons to having a subdomain for your blog rather than a /blog/ at the end of your site name. The main one is that Google sees the subdomain as a separate site entirely, whereas with the /blog/ at the end it sees your site as a whole. But links to your pages from within the subdomain directory are supposedly weighted more heavily because they are seen as inbound links from an outside page. At least that’s how it stands as I write this. I hold no liability if you read this six months from now and Google changed its mind.
• Typepad.com gives you the option to mask your domain or use a subdomain. It’s your choice. This gives you the option to have a site somewhere else and have your blog in a different place and you can make it look like your blog lives in the same place as your webpage. It’s a win win. Of course, win win comes with a pricetag. In this case, a pricetag of about $89 – $1300 per month. Yeowch, right? But you can completely customize the blog and, basically, no one will know it’s a hosted solution and not living on your server.

Third, sign up for the service. If you sign up for either of the “.com” options above, you just need to pick a username and password, sign in, fill out your profile, and begin blogging. If you need domain mapping, just add on the additional step of calling your techie/webmaster and asking them to please add on the mapping so your blog will have the correct name.

If you have chosen WordPress.org, check in the backend of your server (or ask your webmaster) if you have an option called “one-click install” that will set your site up with a basic WordPress blog with one click. If you are not so lucky that you have a “one-click install” option, you will need to visit WordPress.org and download the program for use on your own computer. When you download it, go into the file called wp-config-sample.php and you’ll see clearly written instructions. If your computer does not want to open this file, you can get a free editor at www.pspad.com – it’s a nice little open source program that makes editing files a lot easier. You can also open the file in Frontpage or Dreamweaver.

Now that you’ve opened the file, go back to your hosting backend and sign up for a MySQL database. Depending on your level of hosting, some companies do not automatically provide MySQL databases, and other companies offer unlimited databases (it takes one database to make a blog.) There should be a link in your hosting backend that says “Databases” or “MySQL” and you can sign up through that link. Make a note of the username, password, and database name you’ve chosen. You’ll need those next. Go back into wp-config-sample.php file and fill in the blanks with the appropriate information. Now rename that file by right clicking and choosing “rename” – change the name to wp-config.php and upload the whole shebang into your server. If you want to use WordPress as your website, you upload it into the root (or html) folder. If you want it at /blog/ you would create a folder called blog and upload the files into that folder.

Then go to a fresh webpage and type in the address bar www.yoursitename.com/blog/wp-admin/install.php (or www.yoursitename.com/wp-admin/install.php) and you should receive a walkthrough menu that shows what to do next. From there you’re looking at filling in a title for your blog and your email address where they will send your initial password.

Once that’s complete, login and check out the dashboard. If you want to write your first blog post, just click the link that says “write a post.”

Let’s talk about consistency. An hour a day? No way! If you are dedicated to consistency (or even on the fence) you can make it easy to be consistent with any of the above blog choices. Take an hour on a weekend, or on Wednesday, or any other time you think you’ll have an hour and write as many blog posts as you can. The beauty of a blog is that you can put the content in the blog on Sunday, but have the posts actually show up on your blog with timestamps of Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

The key is to have those blog posts show up on the same days every week. This is actually easier to accomplish than setting an alarm to go off on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday reminding you to write a quick blog post. You can just set an alarm to go off on Sunday morning that says “write this week’s blog posts” – I think that makes life, and blogging, far simpler than spending an hour a day on an overworked, over-tweaked blog post that doesn’t show an ounce of personality. Personality sells. Not an offensive personality (in many cases) but a real personality, letting people see you are a human with thoughts and feelings is important. Just don’t cross the line and write about your kids, your dog, and your issues unless it’s appropriate for your target market.

I hope this makes blogging a little less scary – it started as something fun, and even though it’s for business and you’re being professional, that does not mean you should pretend you aren’t you. Be yourself, help people, be informative – and the business inquiries will come.