Just out of interest, does anyone here run a personal or professional blog? I'm thinking about starting a blog... probably focusing on intermediate/advanced web development topics. Stuff like PHP best practices, design patterns, etc.

 

I'd like to know what the best way to get started is, should I run a standalone blog and give the blog its own name? or should I run it as a section of my freelance site? or should I start off with a hosted solution like blogger?

 

I guess I'll be doing it for professional merit but are there any financial gains to be had? google adsense for example.

I run mine as a subdomain or at least I will when I get the chance.

I guess I'll be doing it for professional merit but are there any financial gains to be had? google adsense for example.

 

I dont at the moment, however I have run a blog with adsense. I have found it hard to earn through it. I found affiliate links are much more effective. Product reviews with links to buy product etc.

Ask yourself what you want to achieve by having a blog. If it's professional recognition, then I don't recommend trying to earn money from it. Ads tend to make a blog look cheap (in my opinion) and the ads are competing with your content for attention.

 

If you want to earn money from your blog, then be prepared to spend a lot of time marketing and driving traffic to it.

 

As far as where you should host it, it doesn't really matter.

First you make a blog after that start marketing of this blog and get traffic on this.

I do its just my ramblings that can be accessed here:

 

http://webbygeek91.blogspot.com

If set up in the correct way, a subdomain functions as a separate web site so if you want to keep your blog app separate to your web site/web app then its ideal to do it that way.

 

Post about as much as you can really, even short snippets are useful to people. I find that posts in my personal blog do very well on Google as the blog engine has SEO friendly URLs.

 

 

Hmm thanks for the suggestions, I think I'm going to run a wordpress install off in a directory on my freelance site, which I guess might help drive more traffic to it. Think I'll forget monetizing it for the time being as well. Just need to write some articles now! I tried to write an article last night on how to create a Blueprint CSS helper for Zend Framework but it's total crap now that I've read it back this morning.