Good Wednesday morning. It’s day three of our week on blogs that matter. We talked yesterday about finding experts to guide you to success. And we talked about how you must ultimately do the work for any venture to succeed. Today we are going to get into how I did it, what platforms or stages are out there to get started with an online blog. I’ll tell you about the ones I tried, the ones I currently use and why.
The very first time I put a blog out online was way back in 2005 when I was really going through life changes. If you went looking you might find them. I started out on MySpace. Very little of that work is still left out there as I’ve tried to have it all taken down. It was not professional but it still got me in the habit of writing out the thoughts in my head.
I moved on in 2010 when Rocker Life Coach was born. At the time, I looked at two platforms for a blog and several writing sites to get something out to further the message I wanted to take to the world. I tried out the Blogger.com format, and then went to WordPress.com. If you are not sure if you could work a blog like I post in the fashion I do, then I recommend either one of these to start with. There are advantages and disadvantages to both and you will want to spend some time on each of them to decide which one works best for you.
I started to get a message out and learned the format without having to purchase my own domain and dealing with hosting it. I remember the pain and money spent to purchase a domain and get a page up for my car wash business; but it did nothing to help. I’ve found WordPress is easy to use and would be easy to convert to a self-hosted page when the time came. It did have the feature of buying a domain name and linking so you didn’t have to use the [yourname].wordpress.com format. I found this blog looked more professional for a small financial investment per year.
The idea behind using the free services to start was to get into the habit of putting out regular content and gathering a following. I wanted to make the blog a regular part of my business but had no idea how big a part it would become.
One of the other ways to get your content out is on article writing programs and sites. While I’m not as familiar with them, I recommend you follow the blog my4hrworkweek.com. This blog is run by a young man named Eric. He has great ideas on how to build an online income himself. There are other sites that offer ways for you to get paid from the advertising dollars pulled in. Some of these are squidoo.com, ezine.com and infobarrel.com.
When I started my business the first thing I did before naming the company was to head over to GoDaddy.com and look for a domain name that matched my personality, defined my business, and described what I was going to do. The reason I chose the name Rocker Life Coach is the dotcom was available and it met the other criteria. To this day I could not tell you the other names I typed in that day that did not choose; this was available and I’ve spent the past two years building it into the brand you read about.
After working on my blog on the WordPress.com platform for about nine months, I met two people who told me I needed to take my blog to a business level. Mike O’Neill told me the WordPress.com look was not professional enough and I needed to bring my page to the next level, to “look the part.” Then it was Steve Scott who told me to go to having a real site and having it hosted at another site.
For hosting I use Host Gator. They have great prices and there are a few button pushes to set up the WordPress.org software to run my sites. Another option is Joomla programming and that is also available with a few steps on HostGator.com
In a nutshell, that is the story of how this site has moved from an idea to the site you read today. You can set up your blog in a matter of hours, head to GoDaddy.com and buy your domain, then go to HostGator.com and purchase your hosting package, download the software and set it up. You can have your site up and going almost immediately. Tomorrow we will cover the ways to get good content for your pages and the places to find advertisers and affiliate programs that match what your niche is about.
Until tomorrow, I’m Tim Gillette, the Rocker Life Coach. It’s time to live your dream, to love what you do and those you share life with. Build a blog that matters and be the RockStar at doing it.
