Nothing spiritual here. Just some advise from a tech guy.

Can your readers contact you? You would not believe the people you will come into contact with through your blog. If there is no way to contact you, you can’t believe it because you won’t come into contact with them. Get a contact form. Here is the one I use. I am simply amazed at the number of blogs that give you no way to contact the author. It is a sure fire way to tell the readers that you are here to talk and they are there to listen. No conversation desired.

If you are new to blogging and wonder why nobody ever comments on your blog make sure they are able to. Do you require people to register to leave a comment? Unless you are running the New York Times (who by the way does not require registration to comment) this is not going to happen. If you had a contact form I would have sent you a note telling you to turn off the “require commentors to register” feature, but you didn’t have one.

And for those of you that maintain a church website: Is the location of your church clearly spelled out on an easy to find page? Nothing demonstrates small vision like having a map of your church that says “we are on the corner of Johnson and Peach.” What you are telling the world is, “If you don’t know this intersection, you would not be interested in our church.” There have been church sites that I went to that I could not even determine what country they are in. At the very least your church contact page (please tell me you at least have that) should have the address of the church, a phone number, and a contact email address.

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Now playing: Lecrae - After The Music Stops

I have been blogging for a couple of years now and have been reading other blogs for about the same amount of time. I have just shy of 20 web sites including a few blogs. In this time I have learned a few things that I would like to share to my fellow blogging faithful. If are about to start blogging, this list will be invaluable to you.

I will start with a few things to remember:

Free is not always the best - Now you already know this to be true but so many bloggers start out cheap and never move on to better blogging platforms because they think they are stuck with what they have. How many of you never switched versions of the Bible because you already have so much KJV memorized? This is no different.

One caveat to this is WordPress. I believe this is the best blogging platform and it is free.

Cheap may indeed be the best - There are web hosting packages out there that are close to nothing. They will give you great service for next to nothing.

Expensive is a rip off - Small companies cannot compete with the super hosts. They are great for design and control of a web site but this is unnecessary with a blog.

Step by step guide to starting your blog and becoming famous for your writing.

Get a domain name - Sure, you can do a blog without one but for less than $10 why would you do that?

Even if you use Blogger’s free service, one day you are going to grow out of that and your readers will not have to learn a new address if they always went to Your ReallyDeepThinkingBlog.com instead of thinkingblog.blogspot.com with a note to go to the new address. Most people use Godaddy.com but they have pretty racy commercials. Netfirms.com has a special where you can get a domain for $4.95 for the first year and privacy protection is free. I have a dozen domains registered there.

Get hosting - Websites are kept on computers called hosting servers. When you get a website, you rent space on these servers. The great thing about this is that you can host as many domains as you want. Dreamhost.com will give you an unbelievable amount of space and bandwidth for less than $10 a month. They will even pay for you domain registration. On top of that, if you decide to have more websites, one for your kids soccer team, one for your work, one for your ministry, you can add them on your account for free!

Tips for the Blogger faithful - If you still want to go free try wordpress.com. You can get used to wordpress while still having free blogging. If you are determined to use blogger, please observe these bits of advise:

1. Turn off pop-up comments. Yeah, I know it seems cool. But you can’t track comments with co.comments and often, the window is so small that you can’t use it in Firefox. These are two really annoying features.
2. Get a domain name. If you are even mildly serious about blogging, spend the $10 and get a domain name.
3. Get a custom layout. With this, you can drop the blogger bar at the top of the page. This is vital.

Now, if you have followed this advise, write some good stuff and watch the world take notice!