I’m glad that I was sitting down when I saw this guide on starting up a blog from gHacks, as although Martin knows a hell of a lot about blogging, SEO, hosting, revenue generation etc I’ve never seen him write a post about blogging. I have however managed to coax out some of his knowledge in the Connected Forums.
In part I Martin gives some good tips on the things needed to start writing your first articles:
- domain
- hosting
- blog software
- ftp client
- basic html/php knowledge (not essential – I got by and learnt as I went along)
- a niche
My personal addition is to stress the importance of a good domain name. I groan when I see sites with awful domain names. For instance, one of my key readers has a domain name for a tech blog that sounds more like a porn site.
Always try and get a domain name that contains at least one of your keywords. I went for Connected Internet as my domain as I was originally going to write about mobile devices and convergence.
One tip which Martin also gives is to get a .com, .net or .org domain. Not getting a .com address is one of my biggest blogging regrets. I went for a UK domain as I was expecting most of my traffic to come from the UK, but my site is dominated by Americans. Once I’d realised and did a check, I discovered that connectedinternet.com and connectedinternet.net had already gone. I’m convinced I’d get a bit more traffic if I had a .com address.
More: Guide To Starting A Blog
