Starting a Blog

Can blogging be therapeutic? There are many motivations for creating a blog. Some people feel that the blog allows them to express their thoughts or share ideas in a manner that gives them a sense of satisfaction and peace. However, blogging online and the thought of publishing openly can actually evoke anxiety.

Most blogs that are created to help their blog authors relax are not charged around controversial subjects. As a public publishing medium, even if your blog is closed to comments, someone may blog or cite your blog elsewhere on the Internet. Don’t expect that your blog will always be met with kind comments and positive feedback. Be sure you are prepared to receive all types of feedback. There are plenty of people online that would rather post mean and discouraging comments and you should be ready to take these replies with a grain of salt (these negative comments may actually be a way for this person to deal with their own stress and self confidence…) There are even automated robots and marketers that will comment on your blog with comments that make no sense - just delete and move on.

Using your blog to post photos, stories, and ideas and the resulting sense of accomplishment might actually be an excellent outlet for relaxation. You might even attract some friends and like minded bloggers that provide you an additional online community for expression.

Enjoy your new blog for fun or relaxation.

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Blogs are often used to provide commentary on the news. Bloggers provide a unique perspective on news stories and often can generate a strong comment based interaction for specific news topics. As media, press, and news release outlets recognize this powerful force in online viral news distribution we will continue to see more tools for bloggers that foster this publicity.

Prweb.com launched a BlogThis service last year to enable bloggers to quickly blog the news.

“Part of PRWeb’s growing social media toolset, ‘BlogThis’ leverages the growing influence of Web 2.0 technologies to provide additional online visibility for PRWeb press releases…”

PRWeb.com also offers a complete set of rss feeds for specific news stories allowing bloggers to monitor a specific news channel and respond when appropriate.

Bloggers can even subscribe to a specific rsspad.com (also by PRWeb) feed to track specific news for a channel or organization, like the PRWeb.com feed.

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It’s really up to how you plan to post content. If you plan to post periodic updates in a more informative and open communication model with your audience, then you can create a blog to function as your site. As mention in a previous post, you can also adjust the blog to function in more of a website presentation.

For others, having a simple website that you update with your basic company or service information will work fine too. There are many tools for starting a website such a Yahoo’s small business service now under $12/mo. Using a website platform means that new web features (including blog capabilities) can be added as additional components. If you need any type of e-commerce or plan to perform additional custom functions then you’ll want to setup the website even if your blog will come later.

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So you have a great idea for a blog and want to involve the other in your group or with similar interests to start their own blogs around this topic or niche. Well, how about starting your blog and inviting the other interested bloggers to your blog to become authors? The advantage here is that you keep the blog on topics focus and can use the authors, categories, and other tags to help organize the posts by different people.

There are many blog with multiple authors or contributors and you’ll be able to give each author their own access to the blog to make their posts.

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A common question I get is, “can I use a blog for a general website?” And yes, you can certainly use a blog cms (like Wordpress) for your website. By default, the blog cms will place the latest articles at the top of the page. However, you can also create static pages for any website content you need - including the homepage.

This tutorial by Mark McLaren of McBuzz Communications displays how to change your Wordpress options to change the homepage using the front page options (Options > Reading) in the blog admin.

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One of the best parts about customizing your blog is the selection of your blog template. There are many free blog templates that can get you started if you’re just experimenting. The blog template can give your visitors a unique experience and allows you to establish your brand. You can also purchase a professionally designed blog template and customize the look and feel to your own blog theme.

One of the popular locations to find new blog templates or just review blog styles is Template Monster. The Template Monster blog templates (CMS & Blog Templates) section provide you prices of templates that you can purchase and install to you own blog.

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