This is my favorite “I’m a pretentious writer” pic. By the way I grew up poor in the eighties and a Salvation Army typewriter sucked way worse than the keyboard on my laptop I’m using now. The ink ribbon would tangle and keys would get jammed and then God forbid you had to edit anything then you get a whiteout strip and type over your mistakes. Years later in the nineties I got to used a Smith Corona word processer and wow the difference. I had all sorts of journey entries saved a floppy disk to. So here I am in the blogsphere and you can be too. Though I warn you reader its a treacherous road that can lead to madness.

To begin

So you want to be a blogger. First decide what you want to write about and why. Is this business or pleasure to simplify? If it’s business than you need to narrow your writing to a specific niche and become an expert on search engine optimization. It gets very complex but people have found a way to make a living blogging about gluten free diets for corgis in Omaha, Nebraska.

I’m not that blogger this will be all over the place. From there you can advertise and get sponsors and affiliates. This helps monetize while you sleep or battle insomnia depending on your lifestyle. Get a name, sign up for hosting, and a platform. I used my Pen Name that’s another story I think I already told. I’m on Bluehost. Their customer service is excellent whenever I feel I need help. Through Bluehost I use WordPress. Now you need a Theme which is the first impression your reader will see. It can look simplistic, feminine, masculine, artsy, futuristic, etc. This is your face for readers to see. Then things will get complicated and technical.

Right now I’m trying to set up auto sharing for my blog posts. Basically that means I when I hit publish it will automatically go to twitter and my Facebook page. However in order to do that I had to copy some coding in a social sharing pluggin and had to walk away. So yeah that was fun.

Eventually you get to write and post pictures as you like. My best advice for newbs is to learn everything you can before you start. Expect to fail and learn from it. that’s it for now on my misadventures in blogging. As things go wrong I’ll post it to let you the reader know what not to do here.