I’ve been asked by a fellow musician to provide a true beginner’s guide to blogging. “What exactly,” the saxophonist asked me, “is a blog?”
This is not a guy who wants to know how to craft winning intros for the auto-posts at his main corporate blog. In fact, most of the things that I write about blogs have not been useful to him, because he doesn’t know how to get started.
“Blog,” then, to start at the real beginning, is short for “weblog.” Initially, a blog was a list, or log, of cool sites the author had visited. Pretty quickly, though, it became on online journal. Individuals kept them as diaries, and gradually they grew into communities of related blogs, and then into a modern form of journalism. Now, they’re an essential means of communication for businesses as well.
So, if you’ve never had a blog before, how do you get started? You need to choose a place to put your blog, and make yourself a blog — sort of like getting a blank book to write your diary into.
Let’s start with a Blogger blog. You’ll need to create an account, sign in, and create a blog before you can write any posts.
Go to Blogger.com and follow the instructions. Here’s a quick slideshow to show you what to expect:
Essentially, you fill in a few boxes and prove you’re a human, choose a name and a template for your blog, and Blogger does the rest. Once you’ve created the blog (which really means that you’ve allowed Blogger to create a blog for you), you’ll be sent to the “new post” screen. If you don’t feel like posting right away, you can find your way back to it by clicking on “new post.” Here you can see what the process of posting is like:
Basically, you type into a text box. I’ve shown you how to get a picture from your computer into your post as well.
That’s all there is to it.
Now that you’ve got the concept, here are some posts that might be useful:
Where Should You Put Your Blog?
Who Should Be Writing Your Blog?
What Blogging Can Do for Your Website
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