Bloging

[Big Si]

To all those out there that have experience of writing there own blog. I'm considering it as a kind of therapy and an aid de memoir. I've looked at using the word press software. If any one has any experience of this could you please get in contact, what hosting site, advertising, getting people to follow your blog.

Si

 

[abominable_scouse_monster]

Well ok I have ran word press blogs before,
Lesson 1 - Get ready for SPAM, lots of it.
Lesson 2 - Have a clearly defined subject your going to blog about.
Lesson 3 - Unless you plan to do it professionally don't worry about advertising.
Lesson 4 - Cheep hosts are cheep hosts for a reason, and to be honest you get what you pay for. As for recommending a company ASO (A Small Orange) are good, and unless you go over say 100 regulars a day you won't need high bandwith.
Lesson 5 - SEO that's how you get visitors, but don't just go to a place like digital point and pay a Indian to link spam because that will get your site marked down and also if your not doing it professionally don't both with anything fancy just sub your domain to google and other engines and place a link in your sig on forums like this one and manage your keywords well make them descriptive and to the point don't use the words An / And etc they are not really indexed as they are that common.

 

[NS40]

I've used wordpress for a couple of years now and find it ideal. I use it for my fishing club's website which has a blog format for the main page and various other pages giving links to the fishing beats, club information, events etc.

It's simple, straightforward, quick and easy to use. I'd used a couple of other hosts previously but found them increasingly fiddly and lacking functionality. There's lots of good free layouts to use which can be changed fairly easily at any time. Anyone who subscribes by email or RSS feed gets updates and you can also set it up to automatically post updates on twitter and facebook.

There's also a great little wordpress phone app which you could use to post photos or blogs from the woods. I use it for posting from the riverbank to give live updates on work parties, events or incidents.

The site gets about 1200 visits or so a month and I've never had a problem with spam as the built in spam filter catches them all very accurately and seems to recognise legit comments.

For a domain name I use www.freedomain.co.nr which gives you a free domain name of your choice which you can link to your wordpress blog as long as you post a reciprocal link to their site. It's not a .co.uk or a .com domain (uses .nr instead) but it's not a great problem in practice.

I use photobucket to link to for images as it saves me using the wordpress storage allowance and means that I can easily move the whole site without having to move images/video links around.

I've had our club's website running for over 6 years years now and expanded into facebook and twitter a couple of years back...over all this time it's still been at zero cost.

For advertising, it's worth having reciprocal links on similar sites or blogs...just speak nice to the site owners an it will certainly bring you some extra traffic. Having a facebook page which also links to your site as well as hosting small snippets of your blog posts is also likely to get you noticed as people click the 'like' button and their friends then hopefully have a peek too.

 

[Big Si]

Thanks for all your help chaps, I've just been contacted by a mate who does this sort of thing for a hobby as well as computer programming, he is going to sort me out.

Si

 

[abominable_scouse_monster]

Si I used to run a hosting business, if you need any help with anything feel free to ask me.