If you’re a writer and you like giving you opinion on different topics such as politics, tech gadgets, gaming or even talking about personal stuff then you would probably love blogging.
Blogging is like being a journalist on your own online newspaper which will be your blog. You get to write about anything you want (within the rules of the website where you chose to host your blog that is), post it on your blog and hopefully get people to read it and comment on it. This is a great way to get your personal opinions out there and see what others think about them. Getting a debate going can be very exciting and exhilarating and helps to understand other peoples thoughts on the same topic.
The best part is the ability to moderate what people comment; although I am a believer of the First Amendment, I do reserve the right to delete comments as my discretion if I feel they don’t add to the discussion in a positive way. I enjoy blogging as it’s a great way to relieve stress (although sometimes it could create more stress 
) and get more informed on today’s topics of interest.
In this series of articles I will give you pointers on how to get your blog started, some tools that will help make it easier to post your articles and some websites that can help put your article out there to the masses in the hopes of creating a readership.
Step One: Research the concept of Blogging
If you haven’t already checked around the Internet (which would make me wonder how you decided you wanted to start blogging), you’ll notice there are plenty of blogs out there for all kinds of topics. The best thing you can do for starters is to go out there and sign up for some of these blog, check them out and post some comments. Become a reader or follower of particular bloggers and get the feel of what it’s like to be a reader and commentator; this can give you the perspective from a readers point of view when creating your own articles. Look at what calls your attention about the blogs, about the articles in the blogs. Look at the ones you are not really interested in to find out why you are not interested in them. Look at the ones with few comments on them as well. As strange is this may seem this is the best way to know what not to do by exposing yourself to something, understanding why you don’t like it then applying this understanding to your own blog. Basically “don’t do on to others what you don’t want done to yourself” as the saying goes.
By becoming a reader, follower and commentator on other peoples blogs you allow yourself to engage potential followers of your blog on their same level, as James Pruitt posted on his article Engage Readers to increase Blog Readership. To understand the readers you must become one yourself.
Tools to help your research on blogging
Here are some tools you can use to help with your research.
Google – A great way to start searching for blogs to join is thru Google. While Google may give you tons of options to explore and many will likely be useless links, it can still help you find what you are looking for. To help narrow down the searches and avoid so many useless sites, try using combinations of words that are likely to describe blog sites, especially words that may relate to topics you are interested in.
Google Reader – If you have a gmail account you can sign up to Google Reader to add subscriptions to many blogs that you can follow all on a single site.
What do you think so far? Were you able to find any blogs you were interested in trying? Share your findings as this will help others find sites they may not have come across at first. Do you know of someone who has a blog already? Post a link here so we can check it out.
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