There are a lot of people that want to have a professional blog for their business or just personal use or maybe even both. You may be one of these people and wondering how to start a blog so your clients and customers can find you. Creating a professional blog is not that difficult. There are just a few easy steps you need to take.
First, find a good hosting provider. The best thing you can do for your business blog is to find hosting that is paid for. This is because you will have more control with a self hosted blog (like those at Blogger.com, WordPress.com, Blog.com, LiveJournal.com, etc.) than you would with one that is free. You also can do more with the programming and coding and the set up of the blog if you are with a paid host.
One of the more important aspects that you may not have thought of is the design of the blog. You will want it to be unique and fun. You also may want it to reflect what your business is and how you run it. Finding a design that does all this can take time, so don’t rush this step. You can find nice blog designs for free at WordPress.org or any number of free wordpress theme design websites. The main catches to free WP themes are that 1) they come with links in the footer, 2) anybody else that sees the page can have the theme too so your WordPress theme is not unique, 3) sometimes they are poorly coded for SEO (search engine optimization) purposes, and 4) I have even found that malicious EVAL code will sometimes be implanted on free “premium” themes to be given away.
Premium themes are those which are considered very nicely designed and stand out from the design of normal blog templates. I have come across a few themes that contained the EVAL code in them which basically means your blog can be externally taken over later by a hacker. I’ve had this happen to me before and all my search engine traffic was redirected to a spammy commercial site. I ended up having to delete the entire blog because I couldn’t get rid of the malicious hacker code.
I refer to WordPress or WP often because I consider it the best and most easy to use blogging platform. The features and customization you can do with WordPress is incredible and most blog accessories and add-ons are tailored to WP.
The content of your blog can be written by you or it can be bought by someone else you may ask to do the work. It doesn’t matter as long as you have something to put on your blog from the start. You can always take and space out when your content will be placed on the blog if you want too. This also will help you to get and keep people coming back to read more of what your blog has to say.
Starting a professional blog is really not that hard and can be a lot of fun. All you need is to look at what you are doing and what you need on the blog. This will help you to find something that will work great for you and your business later on.
