Blogging is an abbreviation of “web-logging”. The simplest definition of a blog is that it is an online log that is organized in reverse chronological order. It comprises of comments, declarations, links, or anything else of interest to the blog writer.

There are two basic requirements of starting your own blog. You need a software to run a blog and a place on the Internet to host your blog.

Taking into consideration the above mentioned two factors, there can be four categories of blogs:

1. Free Software + Free Webhosting

2. Free Software + Paid Webhosting

3. Paid Software including Price of Webhosting

4. Paid Software + Paid Webhosting

We have given descriptions of all these four options alongwith their pros and cons.

We have also given recommendations regarding the suitability of these options.

1. Free Software + Free Webhosting

This is a completely free way of blogging. Here you pay neither for the software nor for the virtual hosting.

But there are some drawbacks of this system. It offers very few features as compared to the paid services. You cannot post pictures online or design your preferred look for your site.

The companies that provide free software and free domain hosting frequently place a banner immediately above your site. This detracts the visitors from the look of your site. You also have no discretion over the content of the advertisements.

The key advantage of this system is that it is absolutely free. This option is extremely useful for a newcomer since he/she can try this method to find if they are really interested in blogging.

This option is recommended for those people who would not like to pay anything or for the newcomers.

2. Free Software + Paid Webhosting

This option provides you free software but you will have to pay for the domain hosting.

There is a cost factor involved in this option. Minimum cost of domain hosting would be $5 per month but a realistic budget would be slightly higher, around $7-8. The annual registration fee for domain name would be about $10-30.

This system will let you do certain things that you were unable to do with the free one. Here, you can modify the look of your site and you can also post pictures. But free softwares have fewer features than paid ones.

This option is highly recommended because by just paying the cost of virtual hosting and domain registration, you can avail great features and flexibility.

3. Paid Software including Price of Webhosting

This is a subscription-based option. There are ongoing costs involved in this option.

You have to pay at least $6 per month for basic services and for advanced features the fee would be around $15 per month.

The cumulative cost for a year would reach up to $200. That makes this option a very expensive one.

Apart from customizing the look of your site and posting photographs online, you will be able to use a software that provides more features than a free one.

This option is recommended for people who do not want to be troubled with virtual hosting and software installation issues. This is the easiest possible solution. It offers great features but at a reasonably high price.

4. Paid Software + Paid Webhosting

This option provides you paid software and paid domain hosting.

The cost of the domain hosting ranges from $5 to $10 per month while the cost of the software would be at least $45 (one-time cost).

This option gives you great amount of flexibility. You can select your own domain name and have a feature-rich blogging software.

This option is highly recommended for businesses since the cost is not a major consideration.

About the author:

Copyright Active-Venture.com’s (http://www.active-venture.com) virtual webhosting service. This article may be reprinted freely online or in print, provided the resource box, Web addresses and copyright information remain intact.

HHosting your own blog gives search engines a reason to keep revisiting your website. It is important as I mentioned before that you update your blog several times per week. Below you’ll find some recommended free software for hosting your own blog.

WordPress

All my blogging sites use WordPress as I believe it is the best blogging script available. It’s very easy to install and you can go live within just a few minutes.

Download: http://wordpress.org/download/

By default WordPress gives you the ability to choose if you want Search Engine Friendly URLS for your blog, but I’ve taken that a step further. You will only be able to follow the instructions I’m giving below if you already have WordPress installed.

If you have WordPress installed add this line of code to your “Permalinks” section: /%postname%.htm

Input the above code into the line that says “Custom Structure” and ensure that you have the check placed in the “Custom, specify below” under Common Options.

What this does is give your blog highly optimizable search engine friendly URLS. Every blog post you make will have a keyword rich URL based on the subject of your blog. For example if your blog post was “Caribbean Recipes” your URL would be http://yoursite.com/caribbean-recipes.html.

It’s a nice handy trick to get more search engine friendly URLS out of WordPress to ensure that your keywords appear not only in the subject but also in the page URL.

Blogging Themes

Now that you’ve got your blog setup, I know that by default WordPress skin may not be too pleasing to you. Let’s change that by installing a new theme. The sites below offer some free themes that you can use and customize.

WordPress Themes Viewer

http://themes.wordpress.net/

Alex Kings’ Theme Viewer

http://www.alexking.org/index.php?content=software/wordpress/themes.php

Kaushal Sheth’s Themes

http://www.kaushalsheth.com/themes/

Theme Porter

http://www.themeporter.com/tags/themes/

Browse through those four websites and select a theme that you like best. You simply download the theme and upload it to your wp-content themes directory, then activate the theme in the admin area of Wordpress under presentations.

Want to learn more about it? Download the free ebook, Steps to Article Marketing Success .

?Many first time bloggers on blogger.com choose to host their blog on the blogger.com server because it is the easiest to implement and is completely free. However if you do then your blog name is a subdomain of blogger.com, meaning it will look like this:

yourblog.blogger.com

and your blog pages will be physically located on the blogger.com servers. Although this can seem attractive as you have a blog, and it hasn’t cost anything it does have a number of problems:

• You are completely dependent on blogger.com- As with any free hosting the rules may change or the provider may go out of business or stop offering the service.
• Your blog name is not Brandable- This is because it is a subdomain of blogger.com
• Your blog and website are completely separate- This problem is a major one if you also run a website ,as with this configuration any links to your blog are not credited to your website. So if you blog becomes popular your site doesn’t see any benefit. Your blog and website are two different sites which you need to manually link

The solution is simply to host the blog on your own website. Blogger.com gives you the option of storing your blog on their servers or transferring it to your own server. To use this option you need both an existing domain name and a web hosting provider.

I use this on my own website and publish the blog in a subdirectory. I own the domain and hosting space, and so if blogger.com stops tomorrow I still have my blog, but would need to find a new way of managing it. The blog you will find here www.build-your-website.co.uk/blog

Many however choose to set up a subdomain and host it there. If I did this it would then look like this. blog.build-your-website.co.uk. The sub domain option tends to be the one favoured by most and the one I would choose for my next site.

About the Author

Stephen Cope is a freelance trainer and the webmaster at www.build-your-website.co.uk. Where You will find hundreds of articles on how to build a website , both business and personal,and where you can sign up for his free make your own website newsletter .

The fact that an estimated 40,000 new blogs are being started daily should be of great interest to anybody already in the web hosting business or intending to go into it. Especially those planning to go into the business as affiliates or as resellers because this group of online entrepreneurs are in a very good position to cash in quickly on this amazing growth rate of blogs with hardly any investment necessary.

While it is true that a vast majority of blogs are hosted free, it is also true that many blogs are gaining high traffic so quickly that they are forced to quickly find paid web hosting as they exceed their allocated bandwidth.

The other fact to bear in mind is that virtually all successful bloggers own several blogs. This is significant because it is not easy to own several websites since lots of technical know-how and time are required to maintain a single website, let alone several. This is not the case with a blog that mainly requires content and very little technical knowledge to run very successfully. In terms of business volumes this simply means that a web hosting business that targets blogs is bound to grow a lot faster than the one that only seeks clients from the ranks of traditional websites.

The other significant factor in blogs that should be of great benefit to any web hosting business is the huge traffic that blogs seem to enjoy almost effortlessly.

All a web host entrepreneur needs to do, is to find a way to advertise their web hosting services to this blog traffic. There are several ways of doing this. You can for example look for acceptable ways of creating as many links from the blogs to your web hosting sites as possible. You can even start your very own blog on the subject.

About the author:

Lois S. is a Technical Executive Writer for http://www.websitesource.com and http://www.lowpricedomains.com with experience in the website hosting industry.