Now that you’ve carefully chosen your topic or “niche” it’s time to choose a home for your blog.

There are many hundreds of places on the web where you can set up a blog. Some are free, while others cost money. By learning about some of the different options and considering your personal technical skills and support needs, you should be able to settle on an option for your blog home that suits both you and your budget.

Generally, there are two ways to host your blog. They are known as remote hosting and self hosting. Hosting in this instance means housing, as in housing your blog. The computer server with your blog data on it is your host. Remote hosting means that to access your blog, you go to a website that houses your blog. Self hosting is for those with their own servers and domain names, or their own domain names and a paid web host.

Many beginning users opt for remotely hosted solutions. In some ways this path is much easier for a beginning blogger. The remote hosting company will often provide you with a template for your blog so you don’t need to do any web design. The host will handle all of the html code needed to make your site run smoothly. Often, your remote host company will provide you with tools and tutorials with step-by-step instructions to complete many basic blog tasks.

Some remote hosting solutions charge bloggers a monthly or yearly fee for their web hosting services, but some of the most popular hosting solutions are free. The big names you should be aware of are Blogger and WordPress. With each one you can get yourself set up rather easily and start blogging through one of their templates in a matter of minutes.

Let’s use Blogger as an example. Blogger has several advantages because it is simple, and it is a great site to get set up on so that you can practice your blogging skills if you are a new blogger. If nothing else you can easily put a quick site out and try a few sample blog entries to get a feel for blogging.

To get signed up, simply go to www.Blogger.com. It’s part of the Google family, so if you already use Gmail as your email provider, you will just need to log in to the members area in the upper right corner to get started.

If you do not use Gmail, don’t worry. A large orange button just below the sign in area is “Create A Blog” and it really only does take a minute! In fact, the hardest part of the whole process will probably be deciding on a name for your blog and choosing the template for your website. Even if you are use Gmail on a regular basis, you will still have to select a blog name when you log in to the Blogger application.

Once you are signed up, you can go through the process of selecting a template (colors, shapes, etc) for your blog. Automatically applied, you can modify the look of your blog several times by just clicking around. Posting is equally simple.

However, if you have been online for some time, you may not want to use these free sites or any of their pre-fabricated templates. Additionally, you may not like some of the features or feature restrictions, or perhaps you would just like to have more complete control over your blog. You may want to carefully customize every nook and cranny of your blog. If this is the case, and you have some web savvy, then you may want to pursue self-hosting for your blog.

Self-hosting tools that are available to bloggers are many and varied, but one of the best, and the software that this ebook will focus on for the rest of the text is the WordPress blog software suite. While the remote hosting side of WordPress (www.wordpress.com) is free, to use the self-hosting WordPress software you will need a domain name (less than $10) and some kind of web hosting arrangement, which will cost you around $7 – $12 per month. We will cover domain names and web hosting options more completely in a later post “Resources for Bloggers”. For now, just consider that while the free versions are convenient, when you use the self-hosting software you will be able to customize your site more completely and you will be free to run all kinds of advertisements, which can be a good money maker for you. 

To get the WordPress software for self-hosting, go to www.wordpress.org. You can download the software for free directly from the website. Once you have downloaded the software, you will need to install it. Do not worry about this being hard or overly complicated—WordPress brags about their “famous 5 minutes installation” and you will be up and running in practically no time.

Should you need additional help for only $17 you can download Blogging Made Easy With Wordpress® it’s a package of 10 Videos of step by step Tutorial, this package of Video Tutorials will help you build your own brand (Domain Name) recognition.

Till next time, happy Easter everyone.