Blogging: A Comprehensive Beginner's Guide

Here's a good resource from "Social Media for Organizations."  It puts blogging in perspective and provides guidance for getting started.

This blogging beginner's guide is intended for people who want to incorporate blogs into their organization’s social media efforts but aren’t sure where or how to begin. Individuals interested in blogging for personal/career management reasons, as well as folks aspiring to be professional bloggers, may also find the guide useful in helping them get started... Read More 

FAQs

When students are working on their individual blogs, there are several common questions that arise.  Those questions and brief responses are as follows:

• Q:  Where do I create my blog?
• A:  You are welcome to use a wide variety of blog services.  Most students choose WordPress.com and Blogger.com, probably because they are free and rather user-friendly.

• Q:  How do I make my blog entries private?
• A:  Most blog services have privacy settings that allow you to limit access to your blog.  In addition to password protecting your blog, you can generally prevent your blog from being indexed by search engines, thus eliminating the likelihood that someone would randomly come across your blog.  For Blogger, privacy settings are described under the topic: "How do I control who can view my blog?"  For WordPress, privacy settings are described under the topic of:  "Blog visibility."

• Q:  How do I create hyperlinks within my blog entries?
• A:  The system for creating hyperlinks will vary somewhat depending on the service you choose.  The instructions for Blogger are posted under the topic: "How do I make a link to another webpage?"  The instructions for WordPress are posted under the topic: "How to create links with the visual editor."

• Q:  How do I incorporate graphics or pictures?
• A:  For Blogger, the instructions for adding images are posted under the topic: "How do I post pictures?"  For WordPress, the instructions are posted under the support heading: "Images".

• Q: Where can I find graphics and photos to use in my blog entries?
• A:  To avoid any copyright violations, you should be cautious about which images to include with your blog entries.  Fortunately, Creative Commons licenses allow you to use images that others have created and avoid issues with copyright violations.  I suggest searching for images via the search service offered by Creative Commons.

• Q: Where can I find examples of other students' blogs?
• A:  I've created a separate blog for reposting some of my favorite blog entries from students.  It is a WordPress blog titled Best Leadership Blogs.
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If you have additional questions to add to this list, or if you find any of links to be broken, please add a comment to this blog entry.