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4 steps to a really professional blog (RPB)

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More and more professionals are starting their own blogs. There is a growing realization that blogging can help advance a person professionally, or market a business. It helps establish them as thought leaders, create relationships with people they wouldn’t normally connect to, and increase search engine rankings for their corporate sites.

But it’s hard to know where to start. Here are some tips that can help you start off on the right foot, so that you can grow as a blogger and head in the direction of becoming a “really professional blogger” (RPB):

  1. Really professional bloggers have self-hosted blogs. A self-hosted blog is a blog that is hosted on a person’s own hosting account, as opposed to a blog that is hosted for free on WordPress.com or Google’s Blogger. To self-host your own blog, you need to install one of the blogging platforms on your hosting. This means an investment of about $10 a year for a domain name, and about $8 a month for hosting. So when I say investing, we’re not talking thousands. But it shows that they’re taking their blogging seriously. This also means that they are not at the mercy of WordPress.com and Google’s Terms of Service, and they also avoid the risk of being blocked in certain countries that block entire social networks like WordPress.com.
  2. Really professional bloggers have their own domain name. This means that the domain name of their blog is not something like miriam.blogspot.com, but is www.miriam.com, or www.company.com/blog. If the idea of hosting your own blog makes you nervous, but you do want to have your own domain name, sign up for a blog at www.wordpress.com, and then upgrade to their paid service that allows you to have your own domain name. This will also make it easier for you to move to your own self-hosted blog with that domain name in the future. (We just did that for a client and the move went really smoothly. All their URLs were preserved.) But just note that people will still know that you are using the WordPress.com hosted blogging service because theirwordpress-com-favicon favicon appears next to your URL in browsers. That just means you can’t personalize your favicon, but it’s not the end of the world.
  3. Really professional bloggers use WordPress as their blogging platform of choice. Some may argue with me, but many if not most of the leading bloggers (except Seth, maybe) use WordPress for their blogs. Bloggers love WordPress because: 1. It has a large user community; 2. It is really flexible and many cool and wonderful things can be done with WordPress; 3. It is pretty optimized for search engines out of the box, and can be optimized even more by WordPress designers and developers. If you don’t want to invest right now in your blog, and you’re just getting your feet wet, it’s a good idea to get started with a free blog at WordPress.com. This gives you a few advantages: 1. You can easily migrate (move) your blog over to a self-hosted WordPress blog when you feel ready; 2. You will be used to the WordPress user interface and features, since the admin is basically the same for the hosted and self-hosted versions of WordPress; 3. You look much savvier than a blogspot blogger. (Ok, that’s very subjective, but at least I’ll think you’re cooler!)
  4. Really professional bloggers have customized blog designs. This is a serious investment in your blogging career, but in a world of millions of blogs, it’s important to find a way to differentiate yourself and show people you are serious about what you are doing. But you don’t have to worry about that right now - WordPress makes it easy to change your blog’s appearance at any time. It’s like putting a different dress on your content: the content all stays the same, but it’s now wearing its fall wardrobe.

So if you’ve been bitten by the blogging bug, and want to get started on the right foot, I think the above tips can help you start a blogging career that lets your blog grow with you, and vice versa.

Happy blogging!

December 3, 2007 • Category Blogging • Tags: , , ,

8 Responses to “4 steps to a really professional blog (RPB)”

  • Comment by Lisa on Dec 04 2007 at 1:19 pm

    Hi Miriam,

    Very interesting post. I think which platform a blogger starts out on really depends on who the blogger will be blogging for. If the blogger is starting a corporate blog, than right away a professional blog platform such as WordPress or Movable Type should probably be used, but if the blogger wants to blog about a topic that is related to his/her professional interest but is independent of a company, using Blogger (which is the easiest to use) probably won’t negatively impact attracting an audience or any first impressions. After all, professionals, such as Jeremiah Owyang, started out on Blogger before switching to WordPress.

    Regarding the overwhelming popularity of WordPress, it’s very important to note that not all professional blogs use WordPress. John Battelle and several others use Movable Type which is on par with WordPress and — considering its move to open source last summer — has the potential in the next few months to even move ahead of WordPress. That said, as you have exhibited in this post, perception is reality, and in the professional blog platform world, WordPress certainly seems to be the best.

    For anyone who wants to read a comparison of the WordPress and Movable Type, here’s a link to a post on the Mashable website: http://mashable.com/2007/08/15/movable-type-wordpress/#comment-980202

    For anyone who wants to know the basics of blogging, here’s a link to a website that I have found to be invaluable for blogging advice: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/02/14/blogging-for-beginners-2/

  • Comment by Maya Norton on Dec 24 2007 at 4:44 pm

    Dear Miriam,

    I think you are absolutely right on all three counts. I am hoping to transition my own blog as soon as possible, so it was interesting to hear your take. (That’s part of the reason I was visiting your website anyway, so it’s nice to see the parallels.)

    Maya

    The New Jew: Blogging Jewish Philanthropy

  • Comment by Maya Norton on Dec 24 2007 at 4:47 pm

    Whoops, make that: I agree on all four counts. I automatically checked one off in my head as I already blog on Wordpress.

  • Comment by Miriam Schwab on Dec 24 2007 at 6:14 pm

    Lisa - your points about blogging platforms are very good. Movable Type certainly seems to be gaining ground, but WordPress still reigns in the professional blogging world, and if the guys at Automattic keep pushing ahead, they could probably maintain their lead.

    As for blogger, many people who started blogs there and later became successful say that they regret starting there. I suspect if you asked Jeremiah if he’s happy he started on blogger, he’d probably say no, since moving a blog from blogger to WordPress is no easy task.

    That’s why my point in this post is that bloggers might as well start out on WordPress, because while blogger is ok for minor blogs, a successful blogger can quickly outgrow it. So you might as well start off on a platform that allows you to grow with it.

    Maya - thanks for stopping by. Your blog is really impressive.

    You have started off on the right foot. I do recommend that you buy a domain name already and use it on your WordPress.com blog, since I think that your blog will become very successful due to the high quality of the content. Better to implement the domain name earlier rather than later, because moving a blog to a different domain name can be tricky if you want to retain all your search engine traffic.

    Anyways, good luck and happy blogging!

  • Comment by Maya Norton on Dec 24 2007 at 6:47 pm

    Hi Miriam,

    I actually own a domain name (since before I started the blog) and want to switch, but I don’t have the technological expertise.

    Thanks for your kind words about my blog. I hope they come true.

    Maya

  • Comment by Miriam Schwab on Dec 25 2007 at 11:40 am

    Maya - it’s a shame to have your domain name sit there and not use it. But I can understand why.

  • Comment by Lisa on Dec 27 2007 at 1:08 pm

    Hi Miriam,

    Thanks for the response. In the time since I posted the original comment, I have come to understand WordPress’s superiority over Movable Type regarding many things.

    I also now see your point about using WordPress over Blogger from the start. I sent Jeremiah an email asking him about his transition from Blogger to WordPress and he responded (as you suspected) that he did wish he had started with his own domain on WordPress.

    I still believe, however, that blogs using either WordPress or Movable Type or the latest rival, Joomla, would get the same respect in the business world, even though WordPress is more popular and easier to use.

    I think what threw me off with this post is that you had the theme of the definitive “Really professional bloggers…” As there are many exceptions to using self-hosting and the WordPress platform, I think using “Really professional bloggers tend to…” would be more clear.

    Thanks again for responding.

    Lisa

  • Comment by Miriam Schwab on Jan 17 2008 at 3:54 pm

    Hi Lisa - thanks for updating me on this. You’re right about MT and Joomla. I think that WP happens to be so popular because it’s managed to build up such a strong and vibrant user community. Before I settled on WP as my platform of choice, I checked out Joomla and found it way too confusing. It has so many modules and names for features that are unclear, that I gave up.

    What I needed was a system that was both easy for me to design sites with, and easy for my clients to use. WP is that. So far I haven’t needed any extra functionality for a site beyond what WP offers.

    As for the title of the post - I know it was too definitive, but a) I really find that 99% of professional bloggers use WP, so to me that’s pretty definitive and b) I was being provocative in a bloggy type of way :)
    Anyways, thanks for your feedback.

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