Where to Blog

I'm going to assume for this blog that you have a few posts to publish. If you don't, then perhaps you should start by writing your first post. After that, get a few posts ready, then get a blog set up.

Options

There are a lot of ways to blog. If you're inclined, you can certainly setup your own site and code your blog, but I wouldn't recommend that. You won't keep up with the coding, and unless your intent is to showcase your code writing skills, you shouldn't spend time on this.

Instead visit one of these places and sign up for a free blog:

• Wordpress - Very popular and I use them for one of my blogs
• Blogger - Also popular, hosting this blog (for now).
• TypePad - Not as popular, but a nice platform for sure.
• Tumblr - Not for me, but some people like it

There are other sites I'm sure, but I'd suggest you just pick one of these. Sign up and then link your Live Writer to it.

Custom Domains

You can choose to get a custom domain if you want for your blog. A custom domain would mean that instead of voiceofthedba.wordpress.com, which is one of my blogs, I could use www.voiceofthedba.com. If you click on both links, they go to the same places.

Domains are available from GoDaddy, eNom, NameCheap, and more. You need to pay for one and then point the domain to your blog. It's an easy thing to do, but a little work. I'm not going to cover it here, but you can Google, check your blog host for instructions, or just buy the service from the blog host.

I might suggest if you want to just keep things simple that you build a short URL for your blog using something like Bit.ly. They'll let you build one like: http://bit.ly/voiceofthedba. Search for providers.

Promote

The last thing I'd make sure you do is have your pieces sent out to various social networking sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. so that someone that might have an interest in hiring you can find them easily. Most of the blogging platforms have plugins to do this for you, so search the help sections for your blog provider.