Blog it yourself

Your own blog can be a powerful communication and marketing tool, but how to set one up? Relax, it’s easy. Read on…

This week I’ll show you how, by covering off on two really easy ways of creating a blog.

1. Go to https://www.blogger.com. This outfit is owned by Google. Create your account, give your blog a name and choose a template. You can then list your blog among all others, and third parties can subscribe to your blog as a news feed. Thirty seconds. Job done.

2. Go to www.wordpress.org. This is the most popular bogging software in the world. It’s open source (which means it costs you nothing) but will create a couple of headaches – not so much setting up your blog, but preparing the space for it first. WordPress requires the Apache Webserver to be running, with PHP and a MySQL database available. This kind of hosting can normally be picked up for about $100 a year.

Once you’ve got your blog, have a search for effective blogging techniques. One of the main things to do is regularly update your blog.

It’s better to add a couple of paragraphs a week than, say, do nothing for a month then post five articles. Another thing to do is ensure you have plenty of links to other things you might discuss. Hyperlinking is one of the things that separate blogging from a series of opinion pieces or a straight diary.

Something else that’s interesting to consider: try consolidating blogs into an intranet page or news page. Wouldn’t it be great to know what business partners are up to, by getting their blog feed on to a page?

Brendan Lewis is the founder of two IT service firms, Edion and Verve IT, and executive director of the Churchill Club.

To read more Brendan Lewis blogs, click here.