Now you know you want a blog. You have a name. (Let me stop here and let you know you can have your own .com – it doesn’t have to have a .blogspot in the address [the address is the "http://" thing way up there in your url bar - it's your address like your home address] this .com doesn’t cost a lot I think it’s about $5 or $10 for a year’s worth for your very own name. For instance I get to be http://www.thejoyfulchaos.com instead of http://www.thejoyfulchaos.wordpress.org -see? It helps with people finding you, adding more to your branding – just something else to think about.)
You know if you’re going public or private. You know who your audience is, who it is you’re wanting to connect with. You know what you’ll use to blog with (paid hosting or free Blogger).
Now to get down to the how-tos.
No matter what you go with (WordPress or Blogger or someone else) you’re going to have a learning curve. I’m visual so it breaks down like this for me. You have the Wizard of Oz fancy castle and colored horse and bright colors and booming Wizard voice. This is the blog that the world sees – the production, you can add as many bells and whistles and pictures and colors as you like. Behind the curtain and booming voice is you. It’s where you go to your “dashboard” to type your posts (each day’s writing is a “post”; the whole thing is called a “blog”), to design your colors and font, to move your side bars around (those are the things on either side or on one side of your main content or “post”). When you finish writing what you want to write for the day you click a little button called “publish”. You are now officially published for the world to read.
There is one more level behind the wizard behind the curtain. That’s the hosting – if you are using Blogger and it’s free you won’t ever see that. It’s what Blogger does for you. If you get paid hosting, it’s a bit more complicated, just research it. You can change some of the things behind that curtain even in Blogger and that’s when you get into HTML coding. Most of the time when you first start out you won’t have to worry about that. Because Blogger includes things called “themes” preset colors and fonts and sidebar placement for you. You can choose a “theme” and it’s like choosing a colorful fancy case for your cell phone – it’s all done for you, you just click a button and it changes the look for you.
Another part of the coding that Blogger does for you is offers you “gadgets” they are little things on your sidebar that you can click and drag over to your sidebar. So of the most looked for and useful “gadgets” are your “Archives” where your old posts are stored (people like this so that if they’re new they can read back through your posts a chunk at a time – like chapters of a novel), your “Categories” – you will assign all of your posts to different categories that you make up – it’s easier for people to find the things they want to read on your blog – if you’re a homeschool blogger and you get a visitor looking for all of your lapbooks – they can just click on that category and it will pull up only the posts you’ve assigned to “lapbooks”. You’re going to want a “Search Box” on your sidebar. People want to be able to type in a keyword to find your posts. If they remember you talking about a Winnie the Pooh lapbook once, but don’t remember when you wrote it (so Archives is useless) and you have 50 posts on lapbooks (so Categories is too much to wade through) they can just type the words “Winnie the Pooh Lapbook” into your search box and it will pull up only the posts with those words in it. Add a “Subscribe” button to your blog or the “Followers” gadget. This makes it really easy for people to read your posts regularly. They click a button and get your content automatically delivered to their email or their “reader” (a place that people collect all their blogs they like to read) every time you publish a new post. People like this, trust me. If you want to “add a button” to your blog such as mine (you usually do this if you like someone’s blog and want others to see what you like, it’s like a doorway to their site) then you click on those words underneath the picture, right click, click copy and paste all those words into a gadget called “HTML/Javascript” in your sidebar. Voila! You have a place for people’s button’s that you like.
Okay, you have a blog. You have it looking like you want. Except you just have words (your title of your blog) at the top. You want a “header”. This takes a bit of work. If you’re not paying someone to design your blog for you you’ll need a picture or more. Make sure you have taken the picture yourself. Don’t steal it from other people. You’ll need a photo editor. Go download Gimp. It’s free. It’s safe. You’ll have to research how to use it. Too much to go into in this post. Now you’ll need to know the size of your header. For instance one of mine was 300 px by 60 px. That means it’s really wide and really short. I think you can choose a picture and click “shrink to fit”. This is something you’ll have to play with and research. If this is too daunting right now, pay someone or just use what your theme offers.
While we’re talking about the header and title you may want to think about a “tag line” – this is where you tell a little something about your blog. It’s usually poignant or witty. My tagline is “Making others feel normal since 2001″ – this can change or even go away – it’s not set in stone. Think of it like an advertising campaign – Nike – Just do it, Energizer – keeps going and going and going. Get it?
Also to include on your blog are “pages” – these are content that doesn’t change. It stays there. It’s information you want your readers to always have access to. The main one to consider is an “About Me” page, I call mine SillyMe, but most folks just go for “About Me”. This is pretty straight forward – people want to know who you are, what you’re about, what you’re writing about. It’s your brief biography.
You’re almost ready to write you first post. And get published! Hang in there! You have a blog, you have a title, a tag line, a theme, some gadgets, an “About Me” page. Tomorrow we’ll talk about the do’s and don’t's of writing. Some hard and fast rules. And just some general “people like this, people don’t” rules. Yay! You have a blog – get ready!!
(If you haven’t been following this series, be sure to catch Part 1 (How I Got Where I Am), Part 2 (Decide Who You Are), Part 4 (What To Do and What Not To Do), and Part 5 (Making Friends and Money)
