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Blogging for business and personal reasons has now become very popular and I’ve read recently that there are tens of thousands of new blogs starting up each day. Why do people blog? Can be for any number of reasons:

• You may have a topic you are passionate about, whether business related, hobby-related, personal or whatever. Some use it for family news, and others as a diary for their wedding plans. Still others use it as a travel log for all their family and friends to keep informed.
• You may be a writer looking for an outlet (like me!)
• You can get a domain name pointed to your blog so could effectively use a blog for your own business website, many do.
• It’s a cost effective way to start your very own first website and you can then move onto something else once you have more understanding/confidence in how you want to develop it.
• Blogs have communities and a ready-made audience of people who are happy to view your blog and make comment, give advice, etc.

What are the benefits of having a blog?

• Blogs are hosted free of charge.
• Blogs have their own software so you do not have to know html coding.
• Because they have their own software you don’t have to have it saved on your site, so can literally log in anywhere around the world and update your site.
• A new blog literally takes 5-10 minutes to get started.
• You can use FTP so the blog can be hosted on your own webspace.
• There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of free blogskins if you’re prepared to spend a little time learning about how to tweak things in html. Some are very easy to use, others a little more complicated.
• Blogs can be managed by more than one person in different locations - you just add them as members of your blog.
• Blogs are meant to be updated regularly and you can post a new article to your site just by sending an email – often websites are allowed to grow stale whereas the nature of blogs allow for regular content to be added in the form of articles or short notes without the need for a webmaster to do it for you.
• Many people have had books published because of their blogs.

Blogger has a chat community through Google, Wordpress has its own support forum and possibly the other blogging programs have too. But what if you want to do comparisons on the different programs, work out what’s best for you or find out some general information? Where do you go? I did a search at yahoogroups but found most discussion groups were either related to a particular blogging topic, or they weren’t very active, or had been taken over by spammers. So I have set up a discussion forum specifically for learning about, and advancing knowledge of blogging. If you’re interested, feel free to join us. Learn to blog http://groups.yahoo.com/group/blogginglearners/

So, what’s stopping you now from starting your own blog? KMT

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