Well, people create blogs for various reasons. One of the most popular reason is that people wants to express themselves and internet is the place where they can write anything they want. Also there are people who like to share their experiences about a particular subject with other people of similar interests. There are business blogs where a business wants to keep its customers informed with news about latest products and services and blogging is a very good way to do that.

In simplest form a blog contains the following:

1. Domain name
2. Hosting space
3. Content management software

Here is the brief description of these main components:

Free or Paid:

However there are many sites where you can create a blog for free at no cost at all. One example is wordpress.com. They will let you create a blog free on their site and they will host your contents too. But there is a catch! You can not have your own domain name. Well, you can give a name to your blog, but that name will be only a part of the real names your blog. For example if you name your blog “myblog” then your real domain name will be myblog.wordpress.com. So my advice is – if you are looking to create a blog of your own for long term then it is better to buy a domain name for yourself. After all it is not that costly. A .com domain name will cost you just around $11 per year.

Get a Domain name:

A domain name is a name or address of  a blog or website. People on internet will visit your blog by typing this domain name on their web browsers. There are thousands of companies from where you can buy a domain name. I bought my blog’s domain name from Godaddy – they offer very affordable prices and their service is very good. Have a look at Domain Sale! $7.49*.com at GoDaddy.com

Content management software:

You don’t need to know html, javascript, xml or anything too technical to start blogging. There are great content management tools available FREE. Yes they are free. WordPress is such a tool which is very easy to use. Really no technical skill is needed to host a blog using WordPress.

Hosting:

Hosting refers to the space where you can put your website contents. Remember a domain name is just a name to identify your blog. You still need some space where you want to put your website contents and other softwares/scripts needed for your blog. Hostgator is such a very well established and respected hosting company where you get everything related to hosting at great prices.

When you are buying hosting space it is important to know what applications you can run/install on that space. For example some cheap hosting providers will not support MySQL database. Some might not support the content management software such as WordPress, Joomla and others. Read all the functionalities available very carefully, if you have questions better ask them before buying.

One great thing about Hostgator is that they have and support almost all major content management software, database and applications and they are free to use and ready to install, just a few clicks needed to install.

So once you have your domain, hosting and content management software the next step is just installing/setting up these components and then you can start blogging. There are lots of good help pages in Hostgator and Godaddy which should guide you in setting up your blog quite easily.

Once you have setup your blog and started blogging, you can start interacting with visitors to your blog. One way to do this is by allowing your users to comment on your blog. If you are using WordPress and a standard WordPress theme then your blog post should have comments forms. However please remember to use some kind of spam protection plugins ( I use math-comment-spam-protection) otherwise you will regularly gets a large number of spam comments.

I hope this brief article has been helpful to you.