You hear everyone talking about ‘blogging’, being a blogger and starting a blog these days.
So, what is it that people refer to? and how do they do it?
No rocket science!
Just a way to express yourself and your knowledge. That is called ‘blogging’.
Alright, so how do I begin blogging?
First of all, let’s know what the term ‘blog’ means. It comes from the word ‘weblog‘ which referred to creation of logs of websites. And then the term blog was born out of it to denote a person’s logging of her or his own thoughts on the website using a medium.
A medium like blogger’s BlogSpot from Google or WordPress.com or Tumblr and so on. There are numerous ways to start a free blog these days. The popular ones being the blogger, WordPress and Tumblr in my opinion.
In this short post, I will cover just the basics of a decent, simple and secure way of blogging for the world to see and read your thoughts.
To cover those topics, we have to look at a few more terminologies to fully drive the idea home:
1. CMS
2. SEO
3. Hosting
4. Domain
5. Frameworks
6. Themes
7. Plugins
That’s it. These are more than enough for a beginner to know in order to start learning to blog.
1. CMS: it stands for Content Management System. Simply put, it’s a system which helps you in managing your content. As I mentioned earlier there are so many easy ways today which will take care of your content. All that you need to do is just write.
2. SEO: stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is something that is actually optional to do if you are not serious about taking your blog to the next level for everyone to take notice of you and your blog. But assuming that you wouldn’t be reading this if you had intentions of working towards an anonymity status, let’s establish that SEO is inevitable to do. It’s nothing but ensuring popular search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo can find your blog posts organically.
3. Hosting: in order for your website/blog to be served to people across the globe, it has to exist somewhere. Isn’t it? that is what ‘hosting’ means. It saves your website’s files in a folder that can be accessed by only yourself – through a CMS software like WordPress or any FTP software, but then can be read by the entire world when you publish content in it.
WordPress is a CMS, by the way.
4. Domain: a domain is nothing but the address your website needs. Anyone who wants to access your blog would type in the domain address to reach and read your content. For example, pbarunsarathy.com is a domain. yahoo.com is a domain. quora.com is a domain. You get the point.
5. Framework: when a website needs a secure and optimized base to make our lives easier, we turn to frameworks. Example: Genesis Framework. It takes care of the SEO part, and some core ‘design’ part – when I talk of design it’s the way how a site should work.
5. Themes: when we construct a house it’s not enough to have just bricks and roofs, we also need the paint job done. Similarly, a website with good content is good but if it has a pleasing design then that completes the blog’s design.
7. Plugins: extend the functionality of a CMS’s ability to maintain and improve the content. WordPress community has a huge list of plugins that makes every kind of blogger’s job easy. From securing a blog to editing tools to SEO assistance, there is a plugin for everything in WordPress.
If you still have any specific questions, feel free to email me at arun at thekeyponderer dot com or simply tweet me @pbarun. You can also reach me on Quora.
Happy thinking! Don't forget to connect with me on Twitter.
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