If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

To Blog or Not to Blog? That is a very good question. Six months ago that was the question I was asking myself. I was reading many blogs through my RSS Reader, however it all just seemed too daunting for me. I felt reasonably comfortable with writing, however the technical side of things was far too overwhelming for me to even know where to begin. Of course, I could have spent time learning how to code with all that strange language that programmers use, yet I knew that if I wanted to succeed in anything I would have to focus primarily on my strengths and leave the other things to people who knew what they were doing and could assist me with getting my online ventures up and running.

 

What many Newbies don’t know… if they did, they wouldn’t hesitate

This may or may not apply to your particular situation. By “newbie” I mean someone who has very little knowledge or understanding about the Internet. It was pretty much where I was about 6 months ago. I had very little clue or idea about what I was doing and what my next step should be. Yeah sure, I was reading plenty of blogs and other information through my RSS Reader, yet I’m sure some of you can relate that when you are exposed to a lot of new information, it can get a little overwhelming, and you tend not to pick up on everything right away because you are trying to learn and understand so many new concepts and ideas at one time. My personal experience in mind mapping and accelerated learning strategies allowed me to organize and make sense of this information, yet to truly understand it at a deep level I had to physically attempt to set actions into motion that would bring me feedback and results. And so I decided that I needed to dip my feet into this strange world and setup a blog, even if I had to pay someone to do it for me. But where would I begin?

I quickly discovered that there are a number of blogging platforms that are available for those of us who have very little experience with anything that is even remotely technical. These tools make it very quick and easy to setup a blog in almost an instant. In fact they are so simple to use that if you know how to write an email or use a word processing piece of Software such as Microsoft Word, you should have no problems here.

So at this point I looked at 3 of the most popular blogging platforms that most blogger’s mentioned within their posts. They were:

For newbies, the great thing about these 3 blogging platforms is that you don’t need to outlay any money whatsoever. Not only are they absolutely free to use, they are also hosted on the website’s respective servers at no cost to you. Another great thing about these services is that they have a community built around them. What this means for newbie bloggers is that your new blog can gain a vast amount of exposure to a great number of people in very little time indeed. This also means that if you are dedicated towards posting regularly, than within your first 3 months of blogging you may be able to attract a good solid subscriber base. Of course there are plenty of strategies that one can use to gain more subscribers to their blog, however that will be discussed in great length another time.

 

Should I be a Blogger… Maybe I’ll TypePad… No maybe I’ll just do the WordPress

So, I had 3 good solid options to choose from. They are all well established online companies that give great support to their customers. They all provide very interesting blogging platforms, and all of them have many satisfied customers already on their books using their blogging software on a daily basis. Given the way I was thinking about RSS Readers - it yet again made sense to me to use Blogger as it was run, managed and operated by Google. Obviously I was already using Google Reader, Google Calendar and Gmail; it should have been the obvious logical choice. BUT!

Whenever looking to do something online I believe one must have a longterm vision and strategy. In essence one must have foresight and understanding that will propel one into a future setting where one becomes aware of the possible and potential circumstances one will face based on the current decision that one is about to make. Blogger was no doubt the most obvious choice. It appeared as though it was by far the easiest blogging tool to use, however, longterm I didn’t want to be using one of these free blogging services. I wanted to take blogging seriously, I wanted to use a blogging tool that would assist me in furthering my knowledge and development in the future; something that would help me to develop enough confidence to tackle the more advanced blogging setups that provided me with full control over my blog. In WordPress I found the answer.

 

WordPress is for the Newbie who wants to leave their options open

I decided to choose Wordpress  as the setup for my first blog. The reason for this was rather straightforward. As I learned more about blogging I started to become more confident in my ability to deal with a little bit of programming. With that in mind, I discovered that there is an actual difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org - which initially just didn’t click with me.

  • WordPress.com - is a free blogging platform that is hosted on the WordPress servers. Very easy to use and has a large online network of blogs supporting the platform. They also have a number of good blog templates you can use and widgets you can customize.
  • WordPress.org - is a free blogging platform that you use on your own hosted server that you must pay for. This also has a large developer and community built around it. They have an almost endless number and supply of blogging templates to choose from and additional features called plug-ins that I will discuss in a future post. Compared with TypePad, this seemed like a much more rounded, robust and feature packed blogging software tool.

As a newbie looking into the future, WordPress made perfect sense. I would start with a blog hosted on WordPress.com and build a “test blog” just to get a feel for the blogging world. This wasn’t going to be anything serious. It was rather going to be a testing ground for experimenting with new ideas and getting familiar with the Wordpress administration console. By gaining experience on a free blogging platform that I could then use and convert to a self-hosted blogging platform made perfect sense. A WordPress.com blog would naturally be a transition phase for me as I move forward to something that allows me a greater depth of flexibility in my look and design.

And so my blogging journey began with the decision to use WordPress as my primary blogging platform. At this stage, I knew what I was doing (or so I thought) and the grass obviously looked greener on the WordPress side. Yet, with my first blog up and running I quickly realized the limitations that confronted me in the weeks ahead.

In my next post I will talk about the Blog I setup on WordPress.com and the lessons that were learned along the way.

Share This