How to Blog

1. Open a browser.
2. Enter the web address of your blog.
3. Enter your blog username and password.
4. Click on Write (or Create) a Post.
5. Type your thoughts into the data entry window.
6. Give the piece (post) a title.
7. Associate it with a category.
8. Save it.
9. View the blog.

That's it! Blogging is very simple. The blogging software takes care of archiving and categorizing by month/year.

The challenge of blogging is adhering to a schedule and blogging at the same frequency in order to keep your target audience and the search engines interested in returning to your blog.

What do you need to blog?

1. Blogging software installed at your website.
   Adventures Online believes that it is best to blog at your own website. See the two posts below in order to understand how we came to that conclusion.
   
   Blogging, at Your Site or a Public site - 1
   
   Blogging, at Your Site or a Public site - 2
     
   
2. A little bit of training on the blogging interface.
   Since the interface is not as robust as your desktop word processing tool, some training is recommended in order to become familiar with the icons, and learn how to upload images and podcasts, and create links within your blog.
    
3. A blogging strategy
   1. Identify your target audience.
   2. Create a list of topics that are of interest to them.
   3. Start blogging about those topics.
      
      
4. At least one "expert" to write in your blog.
   More than one expert? Yes. It is likely that you consider some employees to be better versed than others in different topics. You can leverage their knowledge by having each write the content for the topic in which you consider them to be the expert.
   
   Blogs allow you to define almost unlimited number of categories (topics). Caution: If the topics are sufficiently unrelated, or the amount of content for one category will be overwhelming, consider implementing more than one blog. The industry trend is to implement a blog per major topic.
     
5. A schedule for posting blog entries.
   Since the most difficult part of having a blog is writing in it with predictable frequency, it is very important to create a schedule that indicates when your experts will be writing in the blog. You may not stick to it, but, at least your intention is known.

Next Steps

You are interested in blogging and want to learn more...
Visit the Blogs topic in our "Web News and Blogs" blog. Still want more... Continue to watch our blog.

You are not sure that blogging is for you...
Create an account at a public blogging site and practice. Some popular blogging sites are: Blogger™, Bloglines, LiVEJOURNAL™, MOVABLETYPE®, or TypePad®. When you've developed the "habit" of blogging, and fine-tuned your ideas about what you want to blog about, have blog software installed at your website, and get blogging!