Oct 23 2008
How To Create A Blog Like This?
I was asked by a customer on how to create a blog like my RickySoo.com. I guess I might as well post the reply here so that others can be benefited too.
First of all, this blog is not a prominent one. There are many other blogs doing much better than mine, in terms of their business model, strategy, marketing, design, usefulness and content.
But having created a few blogs for myself and others, I guess I still qualify to give my two cents. Below is not a step-by-step guide but just an overview. Not only the technical side, but also the business and marketing aspects as well. If you need any detailed information, please post your questions in the comments below.
Why you want to blog – Decide on the objective of a blog. Is it to promote your business, sell your products, bring traffic to your main web site, be a PR channel for your business, express your opinions, earn money by blogging or anything else. Even if it is just a personal blog, you still need a “business model”.
Domain name and web hosting – Register a domain name and web hosting. For serious blogging, don’t use free blogging service. There are many such domain name registrars and hosting providers. You can also consider mine at http://bizpartner.com.my. Alternatively, if you already have a business web site, you can include your blog into it under a folder such as http://www.yourbusiness.com/blog, or a subdomain such as http://blog.yourbusiness.com.
Get WordPress – Download the free blogging software called WordPress here at http://wordpress.org/download/. There are many other such software. But so far WordPress is the most popular one. Your web hosting provider, like me, may also provide a facility (such as cPanel) to install WordPress on your web server with just a few clicks of button.
Install WordPress – If you have downloaded WordPress manually, install it on your server. Refer to the documentation at http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress. It’s a 5-minute installation. Basically you just need to upload the files to your server, run the install file, and then follow the instructions on screen to finalize the setup.
Tune up your blog – Login to your admin account, click “Design” to choose a user-friendly blog theme. Click “Settings” to set up various options, especially options for Discussion and Permalinks. For a start, you should allow anyone to post comments. You should also change the “permalink structure” from the default to another more search engine-friendly structure such as “Day and name”.
Publicize your blog – Let Google know about your blog. You can submit your blog to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl/. Let your friends and customers know about your blog. Try to get other web sites to link to your blog. Incoming links help search engines to find you, and also to better your search engine ranking. If you have another business web site, you should put up a link there to your blog.
Blog consistently – It is one thing to set up your blog, but it’s another to run it successfully. To make it effective, you need to make new blog posts regularly and consistently, even if it means just once a week. In other words, you need to keep on adding (good) content into your blog so that search engines and other people can recognize it.
Review your blog – Evaluate your blog regularly to see whether it’s helping you to achieve the objective you set in the first place. Change course, or fine tune your blog to make sure it works for you. Close it down and restart another one if necessary. I had two other blogs on RickySoo.com since years ago but closed them down since they were not serving any useful purpose.
More advanced options – The above is just scratching the surface. As you use blog more often, you will naturally learn more. Then you can consider other more advanced options such as installing useful plugins, dealing with comment spams, search engine optimization (SEO), tracking your feed readers, doing web site analytics, promoting it on social networks and so on. But don’t worry for now. There is a time for everything.
Have I missed out anything else important? Please correct me or add your comments if any. Happy blogging! 
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