The best, easiest, and most powerful blogging solution you could possibly use right now is a platform called WordPress. And although it's simple and you can do basically anything you want with it, it might be confusing and intimating to see it for the very first time. To help you along with couple of easy terms that you should right now about WordPress. And that is how to choose a theme, how to add a post, and how to manage your dashboard.
You might notice that many different people's WordPress blogs look drastically different. Some are blue, some are red, some are white, some are black, some have one column, some have three columns. This is the design or the theme of your WordPress blog. When you first create your WordPress blog or have someone set it up for you, you can easily change the theme by going to Appearance, Add Theme, and you can choose from literally thousands of free WordPress designs and themes and make it look however you like. I recommend that for now to leave the themes as the default but in the future you can easily point and click and instantly change the look and feel of your entire WordPress blog and do it as often as you like.
That's the theme but now, how would you add content to your WordPress blog? Forget about worrying about fancy plugins or categories for now, just go to the left hand side of the dashboard and click on Post and then go to Add Post. And you can type in a title and the content of your blog, maybe even add a category if you want to be fancy, but just start typing and when you're done, hit Publish. Don't save it as a draft and allow yourself to come back and edit it later. Write your blog post title right now.
Write your blog post content. Hit Publish because you can always go back and edit it later but what's the most important thing right now is to get some content on your blog right away. And once that blog post is published, you will then notice people coming to your blog, and if they like what you have to say, or even dislike what you have to say, or just want to add to the conversation, they will leave comments underneath your blog post. You will receive an e-mail notification every time someone new leaves a comment on your blog, then you can log back into the dashboard and approve or disapprove anything people add to your blog. This way, you can interact with your members, get new ideas for blog posts, and even enhance the blog post you already written by talking to people back and forth in the blog comments.
If you are new to WordPress and you're confused or just discouraged by all the terms that are there, keep in mind that the theme is the design of your blog, that you can easily click on Add Post to make new content, and use the dashboard to approve or reject comments.
Robert Plank will show you how to put together your own free and premium WordPress plugins at: http://www.wpcrusher.com
