Starting a blog? Start here.

I love it when people do my job for me. Darren Rowse at ProBlogger just posted a best-of series of links for beginning bloggers.

Written for first-time bloggers but not for dummies. ProBlogger remains high on my top 10 list of email/RSS resources for blogging and search optimization.

Here's a vital question the blogging guru asks right away:

"Does (your blog) topic excite you? Are you motivated enough to write about it for the long term? ... Be brutally honest about this because as I found, we can sometimes fool ourselves into thinking we are interested in a topic when we are not. ... If you’re not interested in your topic your potential readers will sense this and the chances of success will fall."

Almost always true. I have had the experience of starting a blog that's off-topic for me, only to find I've later become fascinated with the subject. (That blog covers the national debate over driving laws for cell phones and text messaging).

And then Rowse hits this major, major point:

"If you’re wanting to develop a serious blog and have aspirations for it to be used on a professional sort of level (whether as a business or corporate blog, as a blog to build your own profile or a blog to earn income from advertising) I’d recommend you go in the direction of a stand alone blog."

You may be a mere babe in the blogging world, but these are grownup decisions that can make or break any project.

By stand-alone blog the ProBlogger basically means WordPress, the self-hosted CMS system found at wordpress.org (not wordpress.com). Rowse goes on to recommend simple hosted platforms (such as Blogger or TypePad) for people who are in it for fun.

Once again, if you're serious, I urge you not to go with a one of these prefab blogging solutions. I made this error on my first blog, DVD Spin Doctor, which is on TypePad. This led to innumerable headaches, including serial problems with Google that forced me to do reverse-SEO on the site. Going with TypePad for a content-heavy blog with commercial aspirations was the biggest error I've made in this business (so far).

With self-hosted blogging, your URLs do not have some Net publishing company's name included. And you're not looking at a nightmare when you want to move the blog.

Here is a blog built on WordPress(.org), the home video review blog DVD Gift Guide. Try doing that on TypePad or Blogger or WordPress' separate prefab blogging platform.

Of course, I'm hosted on Blogger here, for this straightforward writing project. Aha! Is that the mask of hypocrisy we see? Nah. Having a presence on Blogger has helped me understand the platform and help clients. No biggie. The price is right. Probably will move it to WP at some point.

Back to ProBlogger's incredibly useful post. Rowse goes through almost all of the issues a first-time blogger should consider. I agree with pretty much all of it. Thanks, man.