But as you can see, I start off on the right footing in following John Chow’s advice on Beginner’s Blogging Tips.

John Chow’s Free E-Book “Chapter 3, Page 9”.

Talking about passion; I love to write.  I can write my mind off and sometimes it doesn’t really matter to me if it made sense or not. I gather a lot of ideas from writing. Not to mention that it improved my language skills too. I love to elaborate on things that may seem simple. From there, an argumentative platform gets created and ideas pour in abundantly. I don’t usually save what I write, because it was there to just put my mind in writing and improve my skills.

I started off this blog in trying to write about making money online and find out how certain people reap in that success from blogs. Although I started with really no experience in making money online, by starting out really new, I can share what many bloggers go through; starting out. There must be a starting point at something. If I were to be a successful blogger, I must start blogging right? Well, so this is it, my first blog.

Domain Name and Hosting Your Blog

I could easily use a free blogging platform and start my blog. It wouldn’t cost me anything except time and passion. It would be a real waste if I were to see that blog grow into something and doesn’t have an identity of its own. I decided to purchase this domain and start off from there. Whether or not it makes a name out of itself is a separate matter. What is important is that I create an opportunity for it to grow with an identity and not regret later on.

Having wanting to own a domain name comes the cost of maintenance; domain renewals, hosting fees and premium themes. I treat this as a small investment for bigger things to come. More importantly, it gives me the drive of confidence and provides an anchor to avoid me giving up. It is always easy to give up on something if it doesn’t cost you anything. With this small investment it ties me down to make sure it works, or at least try hard to make it work. Also, I may not be as committed with a free blog.

Another good thing of having a hosted blog is that I can be flexible with the designs and whatever I want to be included in the blog. I can choose from thousands of themes, both paid and free. Even when its free, I can still customize it by learning some PHP and CSS codes.

I purchase this domain from GoDaddy.com and hosted it on HostGator. There are several discount coupons you can use if you just search them on Google.

Custom Search

The hosting fees are minimal actually starting at less than 10 dollars a month. I found a coupon that gave it to me free for the first month. As for the domain, I bought it for 5 years. Plus a coupon, it really isn’t expensive.

I hope this post motivates you to start a blog if you haven’t done so. You need to make that first step of being confident that you can do this and just put your mind to it. The rest of things should come freely after you make that first decision to start blogging.

See you at your blog…

Okay. I’ll skip John Chow’s e-book today. I had a much more urgent mission. I had to beautify my blog so that it’ll look presentable to my visitors. You would have noticed that it was a total makeover. I believe a good first impression is required to make my visitors stay and read my blogs. The last theme was good but this one turns out to be even better. I had to look for something much more refreshing and not turn off any visitors, as much as possible.

I went to look for a nice theme and found one at SkinPress.com … It was free although I was very much tempted to get the premium ones, well, of course for a price. I thought, let’s save that for later after I make some money from this blog.

I was on a roll to get it a little customized and learned a few PHP and CSS codes along the way. I also went to correct some wordings to make it even better.

The initial launch was not too nice with all the posts showing in full. I learned fast to add the “more” tag in each post. You can find out how and all other codes in relation to Wordpress usage from here.

I had a paid account with iStockphoto sometime ago and put it to good use here. I downloaded some pictures to accompany my post. If you notice from my featured posts, there’s an accompanying picture that I tried very hard to create a relation to the post.

And what else did I do?

Some other minor tweaking, like the font to the blog title. If you have Trajan Pro installed on your computer, you would see a different font on the title rather than the boring Verdana font. All this by learning some CSS codes.

I guess I only skirmished past the easy part of CSS and PHP in this session. The more advanced codes are very much complicated. I don’t think I would dwell in those in the near future.

Now that I am pretty satisfied with how my blog looks, I should concentrate further in making it work for me.

Till next time…