Setting up your own blog has become so much simpler since the first web logs started to appear back in 1992 we are going to focus on hosting your blog with a web host as this is the only way to have full control over your URL and full control over the design of your blog.

There are so many blogging clients available such as wordpress and typepad, I started off with wordpress as it is free the most simple to get started with, and the most popular and hence the best supported so I will focus on them.

If you are looking to set up a blog you will probably have a pretty good idea about your subject matter, if not – take time to think about what content you are going to display, as good content is the most effective way of attracting visitors to your blog.

Next you need to decide upon a web host, all blogging software uses a database to populate your blog, this form of content management is what makes blogs so easy to maintain as the information (posts) are drawn from the database and then passed to a template for display – this achieves a nice uniform feel for your blog and requires absolutely no knowledge of web design (unless you want to – but that’s a post for another day).

Because of the database driven nature of blogging, choose a host which offers a MySQL database with access to it via the control panel, good examples in the UK are FastHosts, 1and1 and JustHost. In the USA JustHost again and HostGator provide a great service.

Once your hosting plan is up and running, you need to go to wordpress.org and down load the latest stable version of their blogging software, they offer a famous 5 minute installation guide, which involves unzipping the package, entering your database details, password and host server into the file called wp-config.php and then uploading the files within the wordpress folder to the location on your server where you would like your visitors to go – note if you just upload the folder, your blogs adrdress will become www.myweblog.com/wordpress as opposed to www.myweblog.com.

Once uploaded you can now log on to configure your blog, choose a password and write your first post, change the templates and add/remove widgets – there are thousands of free templates to choose from that enable you to customize the look and feel of your blog, many of these templates can be further customized to display your company logo and other information.

Popular blogs are the ones that are most regularly updated, so keep good content flowing to your blog cultivate a few links to your blog from others and watch your popularity increase.

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