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Ok. This post is not for all you bloggers on the Jedi Warrior level. We know you know how to blog. This is for all those out there, and particularly women, who have a lot they want to say and just haven’t gotten the hang of blogging yet. ( We’re telling you this because, as you know by now, if you have been reading this blog, we are encouraging women to jump on to the Net and develop their own communities and blogs in support of other women.)

Maybe you haven’t started your own blog yet because you’re intimidated. Maybe you’re just discovering the blogosphere. Whatever the reason, we can almost guarantee there is such an ease and an immediacy and a sense of shared community with similarly minded bloggers, that once you start, you’ll be hooked, like the rest of us.

Whether you want to start a business or a women’s community or a news magazine, you can blog.

The start up is the hardest part – which is probably true of most things – and it is not so much hard as detailed.

If you want to spend a lot of time weighing your platform options and strategies, Choosing a Blog Platform at ProBlogger will walk you through all that. You may want a hosted blog at a company like Blogger or a stand alone platform powered by WordPress.org or MovableType or one of many others. You may want to build your own brand ( highly recommended) , and if you do, you will need a stand alone platform. Personally, I prefer WordPress.org. It is feature rich, continuously updated, with thousands of man hours in development time. It boasts communities of developers offering plug ins which automate hundreds of the most useful tasks imaginable, from SEO ( search engine optimization so your blog can be found) to spam catching to putting in Google Adsense or Yahoo ads on every post. New plug ins are offered almost daily and there is ample support for whatever your needs are. There are many ways to customize the plugins, widgets, and themes or change them with a single click. And did I mention, it’s free?

There are several ways to set up your WordPress.org blog.

WordPress.org offers its own Quick Start Guide, which, incidently points out the advantages of self hosting. It’s pretty straight forward and intuitive, with a well known “5 minute install”, but if you’re not comfortable with mildly techie tasks, such as using ftp, this is probably not for you.

Making A WordPress Blog adds screen shots to the process of walking you step by step through the set up of your blog, using a hosted platform at WordPress.com. Simpler, ( since there’s no ftp or techie tasks involved) but still, possibly not what you want if you are trying to build your own brand, which, one day, you hope to sell.

Paying a pro WordPress guru a couple of hundred bucks to install your blog is simple, stress free and a good investment. We Fix WP Blogs is one example of a provider who can perform this task for you, simply, seamlessly and relatively inexpensively. I just used We Fix WP Blogs for a pretty extensive installation of mine – 3 blogs – so I can personally recommend them. And the bonus is that you will have a WP guru already familiar with your blog, should you ever need help, an upgrade, to migrate servers or simply some quick advice on the fly. There are a number of WP gurus out there, some mentioned on the WP site and others you may have to Google to locate.

Once you’re at this point, you just have to be able to write in plain English ( or French or German or Spanish or whatever language you speak.) Although the program is really intuitive and very simple to learn you can return to Quick Start Guide or Making A WordPress Blog with screen shots, to walk you step by step through the process of writing your content, saving it, then publishing it to the Net.

Whatever moves you or stirs you, motivates or inspires you, we want to see it on the Net, in your blog. When you fulfill yourself, we are all one step closer to fulfilling ourselves and to creating real progress on the Net. So start your blog. And please do share your story and experience with us.

For more, see these:

Yes, Some Blogs Are *Very* Profitable – And Some Of Them Are Women’s Blogs

Community on the Net – The Platform To Network, The Power to Mentor

Women Power: From The Ballot Box To The Blogosphere

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