Newbie BlogStep Five: Blogging Platform - decision time

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Following on from last Sunday’s step – Choosing a blogging platform – today I’m going to advise you of what you need to do when making a decision about what platform you want to blog on.  The great thing about it is that I’m really not going to ask you to make a decision to go with wordpress.org, but I would stress that it is a better platform that you can personalise more easily. 

For those itching to race ahead

I’m sure, if you’re following this newbie Blogstep series that you may find it a little slow for you, as you love to race ahead and ‘get blogging’.  That is ok, and I would suggest that you do just that.  Huh?  “Nick I thought this was meant to be a series and look at how we were going to setup a blog and get there in small easy steps?”.  It is, but I always love to rush ahead and do things on my own, I find I learn more this way and then keep up with a weekly dose of goodness, don’t you?  So, I suggest you play around with one of the blogs you setup, if it’s yourname.blogspot.com (or the wordpress equivalent) then write about your cat jumping out of the tree, write about other bloggers, it truly doesn’t matter, the thing that I want to concentrate on here is to getting into the ‘art of blogging’, get your writing (blogging) muscles warmed up and ready to do some serious work when I’ve gone through the setup of a wordpress.org self hosted blog.  Now, even if you’ve decided to just have a blogspot blog and nothing else then you can still follow with the newbie blog steps series, I’m not going to change anything I’m going to be writing about, but I am going to include references to blogspot.com and wordpress.com blogs.

What to do now?

Start to think of names that you want to call your blog (yes, we’re going to look at choosing a domain name), think of something that has a keyword to your topic or niche in.  So, if I was using the same niche topic of the Shubunkin goldfish I used in earlier blogsteps, then I could name my blogspot.com blog as shubunkingoldfish.blogspot.com, or shubunkin-goldfish.blogspot.com.  Have a look into this and check the availability of a few.  If you’re not using a free account to setup your blog, then I do suggest that you hold off on buying a domain name for the moment, go and play around with a blogger account and see what keywords are already being used in a domain name for other blogs.

Tomorrow, I’ll be looking into choosing and getting a domain name and what extra information you need to know about domains.  If you liked this post, then don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed for newbie bloggers.

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