Start Blogging Now

The 5th Philippine Blogging Summit will be held tomorrow at Malcolm Theater, UP College of Law, UP-Diliman, Quezon City. It will be a whole day event with participants coming from 574 Filipino bloggers who registered online. It cannot be expected that all those who registered will attend because there are some who are from the provinces. I will attend the event and I am very excited to do so. This is the first time I will join this kind of event which promises to be very informative to the participants especially for newbies like me.

While at it, I wish to repeat my encouragement for i-café owners to do blogging as a pastime. As I said, blogging is perfect for i-cafe owners to go into because they already have the resources to do so. They have the computer with Internet connection all the time and the time to write during the lull in their i-café operation. Blogging may not immediately produce the extra income that everyone needs but those who will persist are sure to reap some harvest from the toil.

So what else do you need to start blogging now? Will it need an out-of-packet expense to do so? I say, unless you want a self-hosted site where you will be in total control of everything such as domain name, contents, site features, advertisements and others, there are just a few more things that you have to decide on.

First, you need to decide on the subjects and target audience of your blogs. Most blogs contain personal experiences and insights of the author so it is best that you choose a subject you are most familiar with. Choosing a familiar subject will minimize the time you will need to research on the information you will write on your blog.

Let us say you have enough experience on parenting especially about mother-daughter relationships, then I suggest you start organizing your thoughts on the subject. When you feel you can come out with topics about it then you are ready to begin blogging. This just an example, there are many other subjects that you can think of and engage in. You will find many of them already on the web but do not be discouraged to write about the same subject. Remember that your experience and insights are unique to you and this is what you will share to your readers.

The second question that you need to immediately decide on is where to host your weblog. As I said, unless you want a self-hosted site and ready to spend for it which I do not advise, there are many nice free-hosting sites taht you can use. BlogSpot owned by Google and WordPress are two of the best blog platforms that you must consider. I shall deal more about the free hosting sites in my coming blogs.