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How To Start A Blog – Step 2 – URL and Hosting

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Start A Blog - Step 2 - URL and HostingWelcome back to How To Start A Blog.  This is step 2, URL and Hosting.  If you missed step 1, you can find it here; How To Start A Blog – Step 1 – Theme.  To recap, here are the steps you need to have completed before you move on:

  • Think about your subject
  • Decide on your overall theme
  • Compile a list of 25+ specific blog topics you want to write about
  • Start writing a few posts in a text editor or word processor

Ready to start a blog?  Good.  Let’s get started

Selecting a URL

Selecting a URL and hosting is a big decision.  Let’s start with the URL.  A web address or URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is one of the most important parts of your blog.  It should convey the main focus of your site, not be too long or difficult to spell, and be memorable.  Most importantly, it must be available.

One bit of advice I try to follow is from Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg: You need to be able to tell someone what your domain is, in a loud room, without having to spend 5 minutes trying to explain it.  Take for example his site Digg.  Simply a word with an extra letter.  Easy.  Now, consider SCVNGR which is a really cool app and site but difficult to explain quickly.

This advice came from an episode of the Random Show (not sure which one) where he and Tim Ferriss talks about … well… random stuff.  Great series with a lot of info.

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How to start a blog – Step 1 – Theme

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Start a blog - buttonThere are thousands and thousands of people that will start a blog today.  Each one will have high hopes for the success of their creation.  They will be dedicated, at least in the beginning.  But in the end, most will let their blogs die, unable to consistently feed their new creation the diet of content needed for survival.  How could this have been avoided?

If you are reading this, chances are that you are at least vaguely interested in how to start a blog.  What steps do you take?  Where do you go for answers?  What is this blog thing everyone keeps talking about?

First off, what is a blog? According to Wikipedia, a blog is a personal journal published on the internet consisting of discrete entries or posts displayed in reverse chronological order.  Does that make much sense to you?  If not, a good working definition for me is this: A blog is a website that gets updated often.  In the past, websites were very static; once built they rarely changed.  Now, you and I want to interact on the web, not just read the same information that was published years ago.  The benefit of a blog is the ever changing content.  That’s what keeps visitors coming back.  So, how do you start one? [Read more…]

Do I need a resume?

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Businessman climbing toward the goal in his resumeMost people have a resume.  At times of uncertainty and change, we go through the process of updating it.  But what is a resume?  Is it our lives?  Is it the sole record of our worth?  Maybe, maybe not.  Personally, I have placed a high emphasis on the contents of my resume in the past.  As men, much of our self worth derrives from our work and what we do to earn money.  The resume is what gets us the job, gets us more money, and allows us to provide for ourselves and our families better.  A resume is important, except when it’s not.

Do you need a resume to start a business?  Do you need a resume to do great work?  A resume is only a document that lets others know what we have done in the past.  If you have ever heard advertisements of investment profits, the commercials say, “Past performance is not indicative of future gains.”  Our resume’s do not guarantee our success any more than the lack of a great resume spells out our certain doom.  Much like a travel journal, a resume is only a record of where we have been, what we did that was interesting along the way, and what we learned.

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