How To Start Your Outside Blog. The Basics. Part 1

Do you have an outside blog in addition to your Active Rain blog? Maybe you want to blog about something different not usually found here on Active Rain. Do you have another business and a frugal marketing budget? Have you ever wondered what it would involve and what the costs may be? I hope you are not holding back because of the unknown. I'm going to shed a little light on this today. You have a lot to say and the world needs to hear it. I thought I would share some of the details and costs associated with starting your own blog.

I've heard people say about different things in life that "any monkey can do it". That's good news for me. I have posted my picture from my high school senior yearbook. As you can see from my picture, if that statement holds true, then I should be able to do a lot of stuff. If I can do this, so can you. It's not hard, you just have to take a little time and learn the basics.

For this article, I will be speaking of blogs using the Wordpress platform. Wordpress is probably the most widely used software for blogging in the world. I'm no Wordpress expert, but it's fairly easy to learn the basics. The great thing about Wordpress is there are thousands of free templates to choose from and download. Me and free have always got along very well. You can certainly pay for a custom theme. If you want to be frugal, stay with free.

You will need a company to serve as your host provider for your blog. Probably the most popular today would be GoDaddy. I prefer to use a company called Bluehost. Bluehost has a very fast and simple Wordpress installation built in to their system. I'm talking fast and easy and that's the name of the game for me. At Bluehost, you can select your domain name and install Wordpress in just a few minutes and you are online and blogging to the world.

How much does Bluehost cost?

The costs are surprisingly affordable. For $99 I was able to purchase my new web domain name and 6 months of hosting. If you have something to say, or you would like the world to visit you on the web, $99 is a heck of a deal in my book. I'm sure that costs at other companies are also competitive.

Keep watching for Part 2 as I begin to take you through the beginning steps of uploading a blog template to the host provider and making your site "hot" to the world.