Mike Agerbo: Well, we talk a lot about blogs on the show, we see them allover the web. How do you actually make a blog? We’ve got our blog expert, Darren Barefoot. Thanks to you, thanks for coming in.

Darren: My pleasure.

Mike Agerbo: So, I want to create a blog. What do I have to do, what's the step by step?

Darren: Yeah, I mean the simplest way is to sign up for like a service, like blogger.com or wordpress.com. So what I’ve got here is wordpress.com. It’s like the most popular blogging platform in the world, it’s incredibly simple for a starter, for beginner to setup a simple straight forward good looking blog.

Mike Agerbo: And do I have to set my own website or is that what this is doing.

Darren: No, that’s with this is doing for you, like for the more advanced people eventually if you got a business or person, you probably want to connect you blog more tightly to your existing web presence. But if we’re just demo or starting or just like dipping our toes in wordpress.com is a good way.

Mike Agerbo: It’s the way to go, okay. So what do we do now?

Darren: So, first we would—you got to create an account on the site which is very simple, just give me your email address and pick a user name and that sort of thing. So, we’ve done that already. And now I'm just going to click here, register a blog.

Mike Agerbo: Does this cost money?

Darren: Nothing at all. You can choose to pay for certain kind of add on but the actual basic model is free.

Mike Agerbo: Okay.

Darren: So let’s imagine that you ran an ice cream shop in Toronto, right? You need to choose a domain for your blog. So TorontoIcecream.com, that’s the domain and then we’ll make that the title of our blog which is what you see at the top of the page anytime you visit a blog. So I’ll just call it Toronto ice cream. This is also useful for a search engine optimization because you imagine people might be looking for ice cream or desert in Toronto and search for Toronto ice cream. And so, the language is English and there's a little privacy statement here, says I would like my blog to appear in search engines. That’s a key, you really want that a bit.

So, we’ll go ahead and click created blog. We’re essentially good to go. We can literally write our first blog post, we can change the theme of our blogs, the themes, the kind of look and feel. And there you go, it’s all set and ready to go. Really incredibly simple to do it, it’s also simple on a service like blogger.com and that’s the first step.

Mike Agerbo: And how the people then find out about it?

Darren: Well, that’s a tricky part, lots of promotional strategies both online. I mean the most basic one is tell people, right? Tell people you meet at the networking functions, tell people through your—maybe your email news letter, mention it on your websites. Those are certainly starting points.

Mike Agerbo: And how often should you blog?

Darren: We like to tell our kind of clients, if you can do twice a week as a business, that’s great. Sometimes you only do one week. That’s okay. If you can’t manage one a week, then maybe you want to rethink doing it. So, twice a week often.

Mike Agerbo: That was actually kind of a lot shorter than I thought. I mean it’s pretty simple.

Darren: Yeah, it’s incredibly straight forward, it’s almost as easy as sending an email. And once you’ve got it setup, it is as easy as sending an email.

Mike Agerbo: Can you put pictures and stuff in?

Darren: Yep, you get slightly sophisticated but it’s really easy—

Mike Agerbo: That’s when they get you.

Darren: They don’t charge you for that—

Mike Agerbo: Oh, no, they don’t, okay. If you want to use words like ‘under the’ in your blog.

Darren: Yes, vowels cost money.

Mike Agerbo: But you can put video and stuff in your blog?

Darren: Yup, you know, you can easily embed videos from YouTube. That’s an excellent way to go.

Mike Agerbo: So you don’t really have to have a large knowledge level to make this work here? It seems pretty simple.

Darren: No, you just have to know all these acronyms, like CSS and HTML and FTP. Don’t need to know of that anymore. Super easy.

Mike Agerbo: Okay. Wordpress.com?

Darren: Wordpress.com

Mike Agerbo: And I know you have a book out now as well—

Darren: Yup.

Mike Agerbo: Being a best selling author or hope to be best selling author.

Darren: We’ll see about that. Yeah, it’s called Friends with Benefits, a social media marketing handbook. So it’s about—I'm using the kind of social web and these new tools to market your organization or business.

Mike Agerbo: Darren Barefoot blogging expert. Checkout wordpress.com to start your blogging today for free.