How to Start a Blog in 60 Minutes

There are many options to consider when you begin to establish your new blog, and the best way to work through them is to take a minute to ask yourself the following questions:

- Is this going to be a personal blog, professional blog, or some other kind of site?

- Who will your target audience be?

- How frequently do you plan on updating it?

- Are you going to be selling anything on your blog, or do you have plans to place advertisements on it?

The most important question is whether your blog is personal or professional. When choosing web hosting companies and website templates in the next few steps, there will be options best suited to either type of blog, so be sure you have the answer at least to this question before proceeding.

One other aspect you should decide before you set the blog up is what its title will be. For businesses or professional individuals, the best option is typically to use the proper professional name so it will be easily located by clients. However, other types of blogs, such as personal or entrepreneurial blogs, generally benefit from short, unique, or witty names that are easy to remember and give the reader some information as to what the blog is about. Some real examples include “The Final Word,” a freelance editors blog and “The Casual Gardener,” an eco-activist’s blog. If you are at a loss for what will work for you, try brainstorming adjectives that relate to your blog's purpose, along with potential song names, lyrics, famous phrases, or well-known literary characters.

The foundation of your blog will be its hosting space. There are two basic choices for finding hosting space: free or paid.

Free blog hosting space is a fast and easy way to set up your blog because everything you need is prepackaged for your convenience. At sites like Blogger and Wordpress, all you need to do is create an account, pick a template, and start blogging. For this reason, free space is great for personal blogs. However, free sites typically aren’t the best choice for businesses as they offer limited flexibility for design, storage space, and naming convention. Domain names for blogs hosted at free sites are often the username followed by the site name, such as www.metrocoffeebeans.wordpress.com, which is not optimal for most businesses.

Paid web space can be bought from companies like GoDaddy or BlueHost for between ten and twenty dollars a month. It comes with templates, how-to guides, and the option to choose your own domain name, along with customer service and huge amounts of storage space. A nice aspect of paid space is that easy to use blogging programs like Wordpress can be uploaded to jumpstart blog creation. However, the cost and hassle of maintaining a paid space is not recommended for personal bloggers who are not using their blog as a storefront for their business or online resume.