Day 4: Starting a blog

I started this blog because I wanted to document my pregnancy for my family and friends. Then, I wanted to document J's growth from infant to toddler and now beyond. I can't even imagine what I'll be writing a year from now, let alone 5 or 10 years from now! I can't even imagine what J will think of this blog if he ever reads it. Hopefully I haven't blogged anything too embarrassing!

Now that the blog's a little over 2 years old, I thought I'd share some thoughts on blogging, for those of you who may want to start your own or expand on what you've already got. Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

What to blog?
This is probably the toughest question that I still am trying to answer for expandng.com. Like I said, the blog was first of all, documentary. But now, I am considering the following questions: 

• What audience do I want to reach, if any?
• Should I consider changing the style of my writing? Funny? Informative? Currently, I'm mostly just blabbering.
• Should I consider narrowing the focus of my content? For instance, I was dabbling in shopping deals for a bit, but then realized that others do it much better, so I stopped.
• Do I want to make money from this blog? Personally, it wouldn't matter since I work outside the home full-time (and I don't have many pageviews). But if you want to monetize your blog, read this post from the Feminine Breeder about her blog's earnings.

Where to blog?

The options are ever-growing! This is Blogger, which is a Google product. I find that the blog templates are easy to customize without any knowledge of html or CSS.

I've also tried the free version of WordPress.com. They also have a self-hosted version over at WordPress.org. I found the free blog templates not as easy to customize. You can certainly customize your template with the self-hosted version (meaning you buy space monthly/yearly from another party such as BlueHost).

What I did like about WordPress was that you could tag your blog/posts so that other WordPress users could find your blog under that particular tag. So if I tagged my blog "momblog", other mom-bloggers could find me and vice versa. tumblr has this feature too.

Other places for your blog are tumblr and TypePad (I haven't tried these) to name two off the top of my head. Here's a list compiled in 2009. You can tell because Xanga is on the list -- oh, I used to have one of those!


Your own domain?
If you use free Blogger or WordPress, your domain will look like yourblogname.blogspot.com or yourblogname.wordpress.com.

There are good reasons to purchase your own domain -- yourblogname.com/org/net/etc. -- like if you're a business and .blogspot or .wordpress may just say to clients that you aren't serious about your business.

My reason for purchasing my own domain was just because I wanted to -- and it wasn't that expensive. I got expandng.com from Register.com for $5 (first year) and capturng.com from Network Solutions also for $5 (first year).

Self-hosted?
Let's say you purchase your own domain name, you can self-host it (i.e., create your blog from scratch -- I couldn’t even imagine doing that!), self-host and use WordPress's software (or similar product for other hosting sites), or continue using Blogger (or tumblr) and just direct your domain name there (my choice).

If you self-host, you have the advantage of choosing the storage limit (for a fee) for whatever files you may want to share via your blog -- pictures, forms, html files. I am limited to the storage capacity of say, Picasa, for the pictures I post on my blogs.

Hope these four questions were helpful to anyone starting or wants to start blogging or has a "new" blog like me! Later this week, I'd also like to share some tools/steps/tips that have helped me publicize this blog.

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