Stefan Nagey

You’ve decided that it’s time to start a blog. Great. Good for you. Congratulations.

Now what?

In this post I’m going to take you through all of the prerequisites to getting up and running with your own blog to start building your personal online portrait. Read on below the jump for the skinny on doing these setups, or you can just hire someone to do your blog setup if you’re lazy.

1. Choose a Hosting Provider

You could use a service like blogger or livejournal, but if you’re serious about building your online brand, you need to have complete control of your message. I use mediatemple because they have a great control center that makes it super-simple to do the things that I’m going to be telling you to do in this article.

2. Buy your Domain

I’m not going to spend time telling you how to buy your domain, there are a million posts that do that. If you’re using mediatemple, it’s easy to do, and part of the signup procedure.

3. Setup WordPress

Grab the latest copy of wordpress and unzip it onto your server. Alternately, use MT’s “1-click app” setup to create the software.

(2π-3). Make your blog trackable

Feedburner allows you to track subscribers to your blog, and lets people signup via email. Google Analytics let’s you track your visitors and get all sorts of fun facts and stats about them.

Once you have these installed, make sure you install both the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin and the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin.

4. Link Yourself

If you’ve been using the internet lately, you’re probably on facebook, and on twitter, and on linkedin, and on digg, and on last.fm and on myspace, and on two dozen other social networking sites. All of these sites have profiles, and all of them will let you link to your own website. Now is the time to do that.

5. Link Your Friends

Explore your social graph, look at your friends who have websites and blogs. Put them into your blogroll, and ask them to link to you. The sooner that you start getting links inbound, the sooner that you’ll have google indexing and ranking your site.

6. Create your message calendar

Now that you’ve done all this wonderfully fun work, you have a blog, but nothing on it. The next step is creating a calendar where you plan out what you’re going to be writing about, and how you create compelling content. Look for this in the next post.

This is tough/Technical stuff bores me/I’m Lazy

Then hire someone to do your blog setup for you. A good setup of all these technical pieces should cost you around $1k (it takes time to do), expect to pay about that much again for a decent design.