I have received a couple of requests lately for people wondering where and how to they start blogging so I thought I would do an explanation here. Please let me know if I have left any gaps or if it is hard to understand and I will revisit.
I recommend using wordpress for your blog – it is a relatively easy platform to use and can be integrated into a website or a website can be created from it – there are so many reasons to use wordpress.
You have a choice of signing up for a wordpress.com blog which means your url will be something like www.myblog.wordpress.com which is free. WordPress also offer a fairly competitively priced url package too which I used for my Irish farmerette blog so while my url there started off as www.irishfarmerette.wordpress.com, I then changed it to http://irishfarmerette.com for $17 for the year. You’ll notice it doesn’t have the www part in the url. The disadvantage of the wordpress.com sites is that you don’t have the full functionality of the .org sites with the extra plug ins and SEO functionality.
You can also sign up for the wordpress.org which means you have a self hosted blog. This is more expensive, the price will depend on the url you want but is generally less than €50 for the year. The advantages of this is that you have access to so many more plugins including the All in One SEO plug in for example, so this is definitely the way to go if you are thinking of developing your blog into a website /business.
To set up a WordPress.com site
- Go to wordpress.com and click ‘Get Started here’ in the bright orange button.
- Fill in the name for your blog (as seen below)
Kro have done a good job of showing how to set up a wordpress.org in this youtube video so I’m not going to reinvent the wheel but if you do have any questions having watched the video, then please do ask in the comments below.
Coming Up: How to choose a theme, how to change your header image, how to add a new post, how to add images and videos, how to add a new page and how to add widgets to your blog – along with all the recommendations too of what you should and shouldn’t do.
And of course, if you feel you need some help with content / a strategy / or the techie side, Marie and I offer blog coaching and mentoring sessions so don’t hesitiate to get in touch 
Lorna
