How to Set Up a Blog?

Chef Auguste Gusteau in the famous animated movie Ratatouille said 'anyone can cook'. I say, ‘anyone can blog’!! All you need is passion.

On the internet, there is little that separates a large media house from a small time blog writer. All you need to do is write awesome content on what you are passionate about. If your content clicks in the social world, you will be amazed at the visibility that you get. No money required, no god father required. Only requirement is great content. Ask Social Samosa team about it!

But there is one basic thing that needs to be taken care of before you launch yourself into your creative orbit. You need to create your blog! Oh, why did the look on your face change all so suddenly?I am not expecting you to write 10k lines of code to create your blog website.

Poor coders at wordpress have already done that for you and are providing their fruit of labour for free to people like you and me to exploit (wicked smiley)

You have multiple options to start off with your blog:

1. Create a free blog on wordpress.com or
2. Create a free blog on blogger.com or
3. Setup your personal blog at your own hosting

The third option is for people who want to be in control of everything they do. Though it sounds a lot of work, it is not. Head over to Dreamhost.com, my preferred hosting company, create an account, book your domain, go to one-click installs, click once and boom!! It’s done.

Your blog is setup and you have full control on how you want to make it look and work.

Now coming to the main part – writing content for your blog. Readers are not interested in what you had for lunch or what time you go to sleep. It is of utmost importance to be clear on what your readers are looking for and what you are going to write about.

Let me explain with an example. One of my dear friends, Naimisha, owns a popular blog – howtobuybest.in. She is passionate about personal finance and online shopping. She has combined these two passions of hers into a fantastic blog. Like all normal finance blogs, she could have made her blog very technical and full of jargons.

But she did not. She writes on topics that a layman is worried about and in language a layman understands. She does the same when she writes about online shopping. She understands what her audience wants and gives them exactly that.

A lot of her readers are people who shop online. Hence, she collects all top offers and coupons for shopping on popular sites online and puts them on her blog. Check the coupons here.

For me, the mark of a successful blog is how engaged the readers are with the blog. You can check that by looking at the number of comments the blog receives. Higher the number of comments, higher is the engagement.

As a blog writer, you should encourage comments and make sure you reply promptly to all the comments you receive. Look at this post on saving tax written. At the time of writing this article, the post had received a total of 480 comments!

I can keep on writing about things to keep in mind while writing for your blog. But the bottom line is that you need to love what you are doing and know what your audience wants. If these two items are in sync, I can assure you that you would be the next hot-shot blogger.

Featured Image By: FreeDigitalPhotos.net