If you want to start your own professional blog there are a few simple steps:

• First you have to choose between hosting the domain yourself or using a free blogging service. Because there are limitations on customization when you are using a free blogging service I recommend to host it yourself. There are a lot of tools that help you to find a good name for your blog.
• The second thing you have to do is decide which open source software to use. In my opinion WordPress is the best open source software available. It’s easy to use, there are a lot of plugins and the community is really active in giving support. WordPress has a famous 5-minute installation, also for the non tech geeks.
• The third step is to choose a theme for your blog. There are thousands of free themes available and most of them can be found in the WordPress theme directory. You can also use google to look for themes or simply buy one for a few bucks. I prefer using a free theme and customize it myself so it has some unique features.
• Your Blog is ready to use now but you probably won’t be finished. Try to install some of the available widgets to customize it even more. New WordPress installations have a drag-and-drop sidebar feature pre-installed under the presentation tab.
• When you’re all finished with the look and feel, you can start optimizing your blog for search engines. You can find a lot of amazing SEO power built into WordPress. Unfortunately it doesn’t all come by the default installation. There are a few easy tweaks you can do to make your blog more SEO friendly.
• Now it’s time to start writing some posts and keep your blog up to date. If you want visitors and links to your blog remember that “Content is King”. Write good posts on a regular basis. Start visiting other blogs and leave comments to create some awareness about your blog.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 11th, 2007 at 2:39 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.