Blogging seems daunting for those who have never done it before. The easiest way to get started is to use an online blogging platform like Blogger or WordPress. Both are free to use, easy and need the minimum set-up. This blog uses the online version of WordPress and you can uses the links at the bottom of this page to find our more about how to use WordPress.
For Blogger go to www.blogger.com and click on the ‘Create Your Blog Now’ banner. Use an e-mail address to create a Google account, this takes no more than a minute and click the ‘Create Your Blog Now’ banner at the bottom of the page. Fill in a title and create a web address in the box below. You then select a design template and that’s about it. Well not quite, you have to add some content. With both WordPress and Blogger is a text editor into which you can type directly and you can add photographs by clicking on the icon on screen. It would be quite possible for you to have a blog online within 5 minutes of starting the process.
The ease of all of this means that quality sometimes gets forgotten. Blogs don’t have editors and there is no quality threshold that the blog has to pass through in order to be published. We can publish what we like. Without editors, bloggers are solely responsible for the output. The one measure that remains is that of popularity and readership. If the blog isn’t good very few will read it, none of them will come back and they will recommend it to no one. Never underestimate this. User generated content has accelerated the growth of the Internet, which passed the milestone of one trillion unique pages at some point during the middle of 2008. With so much out there most of it is going to be ignored. If you want an interested audience for what you are publishing and the content has to be of real interest. It may be obvious but search a few random blogs and you will see how often people forget.
PR and the Social Web 