Anyone can write a blog these days.  It's easy.  There are so many different blogging platforms available and the good news is that a lot of them are free.

Find your topic

Before you even think about how or where you're going to blog, it's helpful to know what you're going to blog about.  Will it be a purely personal blog about your day to day thoughts and musings or will it be related to a specific topic?  Will it be a mixture of both?  Will it have multiple topics?  It really doesn't matter which road you go down but it will make life a lot easier if you stick to that path so thinking ahead is fairly important.  If you start a blog about programming computers and you write a post about your love life, chances are that you're going to lose readers whereas a personal blog that features occasional posts about programming is probably OK.

The big difference there is that topical blogs are mostly followed and read by people interested in the topic and personal blogs are read by those interested in the person.  Yes there are exceptions but successful examples are rare.

Set your goals

Even with a personal blog it's good to have goals.  What do you want to get out of your blog?  Are you trying to improve your writing skills?  Maybe you are blogging for a cause or an organisation and want to increase awareness.  Maybe you're looking for feedback on something you are doing.  Setting goals will kelp you keep your blog on track.

Writing for your readers

A lot of blogging "how to" guides tell you to write for your readers.  In some cases this is important.  A professional blogger for instance will probably need to keep the numbers up and growing but that's not actually the case for most.  For personal blogs the numbers don't really matter.  This of course depends on your goals.  For personal blogs it's almost certainly best to write your way and gain readers that like your way of doing it.

Find your platform

This is quite daunting for most people that have never blogged before.  There are almost too many choices but in my opinion you can't go too far wrong with a personal blog by using something simple like Posterous or Wordpress.  I use Posterous for almost everything I post online these days because it's just so easy.  Wordpress is a little more powerful out of the box but can be a little confusing for someone with no previous blogging experience.

Get blogging

Hopefully you've now got a better idea of how to get started.  There's no definitive right or wrong way to go about it, just do what suits you best.  That's all I do and it seems to work for me!

So you've got a business, you're on Twitter and you're auto adding people based on keyword searches in the hope that they will follow back.  Some do, some don't.  When they follow back you hit their DM inbox with a link to your product/service and you can tweet all day about your awesome things, right into their stream.  Perfect, right?

Someone had a moan today that the pics I was posting to Posterous were taking ages to load over 3G compared to pics posted on Twitpic.  Being the inquisitive type that I am, I decided to put the two sites to the test by uploading the same image to both sites at the same time.

I decided it was time to stop using Twitpic and start using Posterous for my iPhone snap shots.  Emailing photos is something the iPhone does very well and receiving emailed photos is something that Posterous does well so it's a match made in heaven.

Posterous is without a doubt the best blogging platform I've ever used and if you're reading this, you're looking at a Posterous blog right now.  Nice, isn't it?

That said, it isn't perfect.  For me it lacks a few features and needs a few tweaks:

1. Import from Wordpress - I like Posterous so much that I want to get all my historic blog entries over here too.
2. Posterous Pro - I don't care what features they add for pro accounts.  I just want to give them my money!
3. Less down time - It may be pure coincedence but the site seems to go down for maintenance quite often.  It would be nice if they could do mantenance without killing my blog each time.
4. Integration with ping services - like weblogs.com & ping-o-matic.
5. Categories/Channels - It would be nice to be able to point a web domain at a specific category or channel within a blog.  Also handy for podcast channels.

The best thing is that I know the developers at Posterous will see this and take note of it.  They're good guys like that.  Their level of support and communication with the members of their community is just another thing that makes the service so good.

How about it guys?

Stephen loves sharing.  He's nice like that.