You decided to start a blog. There is such a great variety of blogs today: photoblog, artlog, sketchblog, vlog (video blog), music blog (MP3 blog), audio (podcasting) and professional blog. Yes, it’s true – companies hire bloggers.

A couple of months ago I created a search for word ‘blog’ on www.dice.com – one of the major employment boards I’ve been using for years. I get consistent results for the last couple of months. I repeated the same search today. It brought me 160 jobs throughout USA that included the word ‘blog’. A couple of months ago the quantity of jobs that mentioned the word ‘blog’ was significantly less. Blogs are hugely popular today.

What should be your next step? You need to decide the type of application you will use. There is a variety of blog applications available today: Serendipity, Blogengine, DasBlog to name a few. In my opinion, the best platform for a blog is WordPress – www.wordpress.org . It gives you many benefits. You can have free flexible software that will perform a variety of functions for you. It is considered premiere blog software today. It allows you to have your own domain name. Free software is a great idea, it works for many people. After tinkering with free software I made a decision to buy the theme you are looking at right now – Thesis. I am fascinated by the quality and the support of the crew. It provides many features and can be fully personalized.

You need to decide where your blog will reside. Many companies offer free computer space for blogs: www.wordpress.com, www.blogomonster.com, www.livejournal.com, etc. The list of companies that provide free space is long. If your blog resides on free space you will have a sub domain name. You will not be an independent domain owner.