How to Start Blogging

I saw a tweet yesterday asking about people who blogged and how they got started blogging.  This post is in reply to that question.  While I'm not an expert, I'll share my experience, and maybe it will help others.

First, went to www.blogger.com and signed up for a blog account. This is very easy and free.  Even those of us who are not particularly tech savvy (it took me two weeks to print an instagram photo that someone sent me) can do this quite easily.  It takes less than five minutes, and it's particularly fast if you already have a gmail account.

While I'd love to have a fancy blog page, I decided that it'd be best for me to Keep It Simple, at least for now. I picked one of the standard backgrounds that I liked, as blogger has a bunch to choose from, clicked on it, and went with it.

People have all different ideas on what you should do.  I wanted my blog page to be easy to read, not in terms of vocabulary, but in terms of being able to see it.  A dark background with white or light text is hard to read and very hard on the eyes.  From the research I've done and from what I learned as a marketing major a while back, such backgrounds are best avoided.

After that, it was relatively simple.  I could simply click that I wished to write a new post, write what I wanted, and tell it to post.  Posts can also be written in Word and then copied and pasted onto the blog page.

Of course, there is always the question of what to blog about.  I find ideas in daily life with my kids. Often I post about funny things they do. Sometimes I get ideas from television shows I watch.  As I stated earlier, today's post is as a result of a question about blogging which was posed over Twitter.  Other post ideas have come to me as a result of reading my Twitter feed as well.

When my post is completed, I click the "publish" button on the screen.  I "share" with others using the "share" option which pops up, and I also put a blurb on Facebook and Twitter about what I'm blogging about for the day, with a link to my blog.

There is a lot of information about how to blog out there, but what I've tried to do here is provided an overview into how to simply get started.  If you have a large following on Twitter or Facebook, you'll probably notice a lot of traffic quite quickly.  I hope this was helpful to you and that if you start a blog, you enjoy writing yours as much as I enjoy writing mine.