Build your website, almost free Pt 2 Blogs
In the first part of building your website for free I talked about how to get your domain and host a simple website. In this article. I’ve decided to cover only Blogs in this article and cover hosting and mail lists in my next one.
One of our featured Articles this week is about How To Blog. It’s a great resource for the operation and writing part of your blog and mentions some blog software. My entry will center around software and services to run your blog. Don’t have time? Micro-blog with Twitter. A couple startups I know use it to keep their customers and supporters up to date. So does LWL
Blogs
Everyone has one. There are many Software As a Service (SaaS) websites out there that provide blog software. You can easily setup your own blog on any of those. I’ve attached a non-comprehensive list of blog platforms below.
The first thing you’ll want to decide is if you want to just link your existing website to one of these services or run the software yourself. The advantages of linking to the service is that you don’t have to do almost anything. You can setup your blog at something like http://blogspot.com/SusanCosmetics instantly. You can edit the navigation on your own site to link to it. What you lose is some slight branding and complete flexibility. Some services let you create a sub-domain similar to what I covered in my last post.
If you choose to run your own blog software, I’m going to assume that you or someone on your team knows what you are doing. Basically you’ll have to have a place to install the blog. This means you’ll have website hosting with a database running such as MySQL. If you don’t know what I’m talking about run your blog as a service. Wordpress,Typepad, and Movable Type are all great blog platforms you can run yourself.
These are listed in no particular order. Wordpress and Typepad are the most extensible:
- Wordpress LWL uses a customized version of this. You can use their hosted version
- TypePad
- Blogger.com
- blogspot
- Twitter - The microblog
- Blog - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Philip Ives is Ladies Who Launch’s Chief Technology Officer. He leads the development team to build LWL’s website and media resources.
Philip, this is some great information. I regularly tell our LWL gals that they don’t have to spend $5K-$10K to get a website started. For $200-$500 you can get someone to personalize a blog for them and use that instead. When it’s done well, most people won’t even realize that it’s not a “website” but a blog. The best part, it’s not only less expensive, but it’s also much easier (and cheaper since you don’t have to pay your “web guy”) to update your content and increase your SEO.
PS - I’m a die hard Wordpress fan. It’s so simple to use and really let’s you easily add on all the tools and tricks you might need or want.
If I use blogger and I made a mistake and now have 3 blogs on blogger, I cannot figure out how to combine the 3 into one blog. They should all be under Style Like A Pro, not under titles.Now I have 2 blogs under these rather odd titles. Please help, if you can.
@sandytf You should try to unpublish 2 of the 3 blogs, Make sure you copy the text first. Then login and post. You might want to try Flock which I blogged about today. It supports blogger.
Hi Philip - Great post! I’m a huge fan of Twitter personally and think it’s a great resource for businesses large and small. We recently released an eBook on Social Media for Small Business in cooperation with John Jantsch and it provides more information on bloggging, Twitter and more. It’s a great resource for entrepreneurs who are just getting started in social media.
http://smallbusiness.officelive.com/socialmedia