Why You Should Plan Your Blog

Just like all other marketing efforts, you should take the time to plan your blog. Understand its purpose, determine its frequency, and develop the plan to create blog. I did pretty well on the first two aspects. However, the details for creating the blog were not as well planned.

Part of the reason for this is that I dove into creating my blog one weekend. I had been planning on launching a blog for my business, and like most other things I do, all of a sudden I get the urge to just dive right in. Since my hosting company had the blog software available as part of our hosting plan, I thought I’d take a look and see what it would take to build a blog. The diving was fun, I learned a lot about WordPress, diddled with the template to make it look like my web site, and wrote a few posts. I added the WordPress software to my web site as a subdirectory. Little did I know that my experiment would catch a few folks attention right away before I even launched the blog.

Next fun part was that my hosting company advised me to deinstall WordPress to determine if issues that arose were due to the installation of WordPress or some other issue with PHP. Well, bye bye posts, comment and my patience.

After reconstructing the site and re-entering my posts, I got the blog back online and added a couple more posts. Another comment appears. All is well until I decide to check and see if the domain name vistaviewpoint.com is available just for grins. Not only was it available, I also found vista-viewpoint.com available. With all the activity around Microsoft Vista, I figured I’d better grab those domain names now or they will be gone forever. So now I have the even more interesting exercise of creating the blog at the new domain name. I figure I best do it now before I get more comments, more visibility and subscribers.

I have just finished recreating the blog at the new domain name. You have to admit that being able to point people to www.vistaviewpoint.com rather than www.vista-consulting.com/vistablog/ is much neater.

If you are actually reading this post, then you found the new blog location. Wonderful! Welcome back. Better I do this on my blog than a client’s. Hopefully I have saved a few of you from this exercise. Planning all these details ahead of time certainly makes life easier.