I got a question from a fan named Laura – who also happens to be my cousin – about her need to express herself.  Her question goes a little something like this:

“Dean, I need my own blog…….STAT! I have things on my mind that I need to get out! Help a sista out!”

Needless to say, helping a sista out is where I excel.  Okay Laura, you want to enter the 21st century and hop on the web 2.0 bandwagon, girlfriend?  Well, here is how you are going to do it.

There are two ways to go about this: the easy way, and the hard way.  Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but what content you expect to produce will determine the route that you should take.

The Easy Way

The easiest way to create a blog is to use one of the many web hosted platforms that are out on the interwebs.  There are quite a few of them, and all of them have their own strengths and weaknesses (go figure).  But the cool thing about all of them is that you really don’t need any technical experience to use them, they are absolutely free (for the most part), and they usually have mobile apps that allow you to post from anywhere around the world using your phone or email.  I love free…

• Tumblr – This platform is quickly becoming my favorite.  It’s light, it’s a social network, and it’s very customizable.  The great thing about Tumblr is that it allows you to reblog posts from other Tumblrs, which is  great for community building and getting traffic to your blog.  They also host custom domain names (i.e. www.queenlaura.com).
  
• Wordpress.com – Wordpress.com is another free platform that is decently customizable and pretty user friendly.  I like it, but never really got into it.
• Blogger – Probably the most well-known free blogging platform out there.  It’s good, but whenever I run across a blogger site I have a negative reaction to it – I am not sure why.  Maybe it’s because most of the templates used are so similar.
• Posterous – Very easy blogging platform.  You email your posts to Posterous and it does the rest.  Although it’s great, I prefer Tumblr and I gave my reasons for my choice in a previous article.  Plus, Gary Vaynerchuk from tv.Winelibrary.com agrees with me too (I just finished his book “Crush It!” and I’ll be doing a review on it soon!).
  

The Hard Way

Sometimes you want to have a bit more control over your content.  In that case, I recommend a self-hosted Wordpress blog (this is not the same as a Wordpress.com blog).  With a self-hosted blog you can customize themes any way you want to, have your own domain name (i.e. www.laurarocksdahouse.com, instead of www.laurarocksdahouse.blogspot.com), and you can do pretty much whatever you want.  It’s harder, but anything that is worth doing is going to be difficult.  Without going into great detail, here is how you do it:

• Purchase some shared hosting – I’ve been using Bluehost and they’ve been pretty good, and their customer service is great.  They run about $5-$7 a month.
• Buy a domain name from a hosting service – I know that Bluehost will give you one for free, but they typically cost around $8-$15 a year.
• Log into the Cpanel at your shared hosting site and use Simple Scripts or Fantastico to install Wordpress.
• Check out 140+ free Wordpress templates that you could start off with.
• Go to http://wordpress.tv/ and start learning how to use it.

Okay, I’m done.  Hopefully that answered your question!