Today’s internet society, blogs are a staple in hot tools of web communication. Blogs give people the chance to produce their free personal website, where they can share opinions and communicate with others. Such blogs have also made it into the government and corporate sections of the world today. What was once just a form of grassroots journalism and teenage expression has transformed into a real tool of communication for businesses, whether large or small.

Corporate blogging deals with companies who make or support certain blogs, which they then use to achieve their business goals. As with everything else in this world, there are several practices that can be considered the top-notch ones in letting the company get the most benefits. Here is how to turn your blog into a huge success.

1. Always know what it is that you are doing.

The legal and corporate communications department should thoroughly teach senior management what these blogs are and how they can truly affect the business in the long run. By doing this, those in senior management can even start contributing to the blog, enhancing employee relations in the process. The participation and support of such members usually makes blogs much more effective.

2. Make policies for your blog.

No matter what medium is used to share information with an employee, there is always that chance that financial information or trade secrets will leak. Blogging may also end up becoming too personal. Because of these reasons, companies should make policies for their blogs to make sure that everything is kept secret and that personal lives will not get in the way. Such policies could include a sanction of severe consequences if financial information leaks.

3. Keep your blog fresh at all times.

Blogs are only interesting if they are constantly updated with new content. Fortunately, blogs are easy to use, so they can be updated all the time. In order to keep readers interested enough to keep coming back, the content must always be new and relevant. Remember that content can be about anything, from job openings to product releases to recent news. It is pretty much impossible not to have anything to post about.

Keep in mind that your blog is there to show what your company is thinking, as well as to share your company’s goals, missions, and views of life. Blogs are there to be used to communicate with employees and customers alike, and it is also a factor in brand experience. Keep it consistent to save your company’s impression the way you want it to be saved.

The best blog hosts for web hosting can be found at our web hosting reviews from the homepage of the site. First find a good host and choose the blog of your choice as there are many blog software to choose from. most are free and some you have to pay for, but it's all up to you.

By Mitch Keeler

Blog hosting is a big part of what made the Web hosting industry grow by leaps and bounds in the past ten years or so. Everybody and their grandmother wanted a place to tell their stories, post their options and share their thoughts. Now just about everybody has one.

The only problem is that some of the best tools out there are intimidating. I’m here to hopefully take some of the intimidation away and get you started with your own blog about whatever your passion is.

Finding the Right Web Host

When it comes to picking a good Web host for setting up a blog, there are a few things you must keep in mind.

You want to first make sure that they are going to deliver you enough disk space and bandwidth to keep your head above water for a while. If you expect to write five or more posts a day - you could fill up that space pretty quick. Also make sure that you have an upgrade you can make when you need it.

It might be to the next largest plan - or it might be to a VPS or dedicated account. If you are a nobody just starting your first blog, you could probably just go with the least expensive plan and move on from there. Find some of blogs out there and see who they use for hosting.

Uptime is always important too - because you never want your readers to be left looking at a “this site is not available right now” message too long.

Even though we haven’t picked our blogging engine yet - you must keep in mind you need a Web host that will support the features you need. So you might pick a few good candidates first, and then go on to finding the content management system you need.

Picking the Right Publishing Engine

Now this is where the real fun starts to happen. There are a million and one different content management systems or CMS scripts you can pick from. If you need a good resource on where to find the one that will work best for you I would highly suggest checking out OpenSourceCMS.com.

Here are some other good content management system resources to check out:
● The CMS Matrix
● CMS Web Links
● CMS Watch
Now for the sake of keeping things simple - for today’s show we are going to go with my favorite WordPress. Now should you download WordPress from its Web site and install or install via your control panel’s easy “one-click” install? I would say do it the hard way. Navigate your favorite browser towards WordPress.org, hit the download link and pick up the .zip download file.

Here are a few other suggestions for blogging scripts you could use:
● Drupal
● Joomla
● Mambo
You want a blogging script that will be easy enough for you to manage and that has plenty of other users. The reason you want to use one of the more popular choices out there is because when you run into trouble, figuring out a problem is often easier to do in a group. There are a lot of WordPress resources out there so that would be why it would be my suggestion for the best script you could use.

How to Install WordPress

How do you install WordPress? We are getting to the meat and potatoes of all of this. Now that you have WordPress downloaded to your desktop and a Web host ready to host it on we can start worrying about how we are going to get it installed on to the server. Before we get started make sure you can or have these ready:
● You Have Access to MySQL via Your Control Panel
● You Have a FTP Client Handy for the Uploading and Downloading
● You Have a Paper and Pen Ready to Write Down Your MySQL Database and User Information
(and password!)

Thankfully for 95 percent of the population the easy “five minute installation” of WordPress should do the trick. I have edited this down a little ‘bit so if you want to check out the original please visit WordPress.org.

1. Download and unzip the WordPress package, if you haven’t already.
2. Create a database for WordPress on your web server, as well as a MySQL user who has all privileges for accessing and modifying it.
3. Rename the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php.
4. Open wp-config.php in your favorite text editor and fill in your database details.
5. Place the WordPress files in the desired location on your web server. If you want it to show
up under your main domain name, drop all the content inside of the wordpress folder into
your public_html folder.
6. Run the WordPress installation script by accessing (your domain)wp-admin/install.php in your
favorite web browser. If you installed WordPress in the root directory, you should visit:
http://example.com/wp-admin/install.php

There you have it, now WordPress should be installed correctly. If you run into any problems, the first place to check for errors is in your wp-config.php file. Make sure you got the database name and the user name in the right spot. I often get these confused. Also you might need to also put a prefix before the name - such as “username_databasename” in the file as well. When you setup the MySQL database it should tell you the exact names. Just copy them from there as they are shown to your WordPress install and you should be alright.

Get WordPress Configured to Your Linking

Alright we got WordPress up and running but you are not ready to blog just yet. I have a few tips and tricks to hope you get the most out of your WordPress experience. Here are some of the first things that I do after installing WordPress for the very first time.

Edit the Default User - Login to WordPress and then click on the “User” Tab. After that you should be brought to a page that has the default “Admin” user. You need to go into here and customize it for you. Set your own password, your name, your link, your nickname and more. This way when you post something it won’t show up as “admin” it will show up with your own name.

Make SEO Friendly URLs - From inside of WordPress click on “Options” and then “Permalinks”. By default WordPress has a pretty crappy way of setting up your links. You want to use something that is a little more search engine friendly. Click on the radio box for “Date and name based” and then hit the “Update Permalink Structure” button. You might have to set your .htacess inside of your WordPress install. You must chmod the .htaccess file to 666 to allow WordPress to write its rules to it automatically. If not, then you can download or create the .htaccess file by hand and do it yourself.

Check the Other Options - After getting into the “Options” tab inside of WordPress you might check each tab under that section to make sure things are configured the way you want them to be. You might have to use WordPress for a while before you start noticing little things you’d like to change here or there. Click each sub-tab under your options to get familiar with where to find what also. This way you won’t be left hunting for a half hour to figure out how to change one little configuration.

WordPress Themes and Plugin Help

Now that we have gotten WordPress ready to go, you can now start working about plugins you need and themes you can use. One really nice resource for WordPress themes can be found at themes.wordpress.net. There are dozen there to choose from.

Just make sure if you do decide to use one of those, you pay attention to the author’s notes. Some require that you keep certain links on your Web page back to them - and others have “sponsor links”. I would suggest to stay away from the “sponsor links” ones because that is just a little slimy in my opinion.

For plugins I would suggest that you check out the plugin directory at WordPress.org.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

There are a slew of ways there to extend your WordPress install to do a number of things. Now for most themes and plugins getting them installed it a pretty easy process. You will need to startup your FTP client and get yourself into the “wp-content” folder. From there you will see a folder for themes and a folder for plugins.

The rest of this pretty much explains itself.

Put themes in the themes folder and plugins in the plugins folder. Plugins are often just one .php file so getting them in there should not be a problem. When uploading a theme, make sure you grab the entire folder for the theme and upload it. Themes have multiple files inside them so if you don’t grab them all - often they won’t work. Each theme and
plugin should have a “Read Me” file with it to give you more specific instructions if needed.