How to go from total obscurity to slightly lesser obscurity with just six months of hard work that doesn’t pay anything.

So you want to start a gaming blog. You’ve seen the Alpha and the endless assortment of other, lesser (but still amazing) sites out there and said to yourself, “Heck, I’ve got a computer and some minis, I’m gonna git me a piece of this here blogging-type deal. Dagnabbit!” Actually you most likely didn’t say it quite that way unless you’re a grizzled 1840s prospector, but I like writing in dialect, so there we are.

In any event, you’re thinking about starting a blog. Good for you.  However, make sure you have the time available to support the project. If you want anybody to read your blog, you need to update it regularly with quality content. Tycho, one of the creators of  webcomic/internet juggernaut Penny Arcade , once wrote that the single most important thing about blogging is to set an update schedule and stick to it, come hell or high water. That made a lot of sense to me, and I’ve done my best to live by it. In the eight months I’ve been publishing the Alpha I’ve only missed one Friday update because I was totally disabled by a health problem. Even then I managed to post an update explaining the absence of that week’s posts. If you’re not prepared to make that kind of commitment, maybe you’re just not passionate enough to make the project work.

Choosing a Platform For Your New Blog

Ok, so you’ve decided to forge ahead and you’ve managed to set aside enough time to write regular updates, or you imagine you have. Be prepared to massively overrun your time budget, especially starting out. Now you need a platform to host your new blog. There are a lot of decent choices, but really only three major ones.

First, you can use Blogger. This is a very popular and free choice. I have not used it myself, but I’m told that its’ major advantage is that it’s very simple to set up and use, making it a good choice for the less techno-savvy. Choosing Blogger also gives you entrée in to a thriving user community equipped with built-in tech that makes it very easy to swap links and gain coveted blog followers. The downside is that what you can do with a Blogger account is fairly constrained by the simplicity of the underlying architecture. Practically speaking,  all Blogger blogs looks pretty similar. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but it can be limiting if you grow more ambitious.

The second popular choice is a free WordPress-hosted blog. As a platform, WordPress is substantially more technically demanding than Blogger, but you gain a great deal of flexibility in exchange. WordPress has its own community of users that are very friendly and supportive and there are any number of quality tutorials out there to show you the ropes. You’ll find you have a much greater range of design choices for your blog under WordPress, offering all kinds of opportunities to make your work stand out from the crowd.

Finally, you can go with a self-hosted WordPress blog and your own domain name. This is the most technically challenging of the choices, and involves some expense, since you have to pay to register a domain name and for a hosting account to run your blog. The expense isn’t much, however, My registrar and host, Godaddy, charges just $1.99 to register a domain if you buy a hosting package at the same time, and I pay just over $4 a month to host the Alpha. That $4 gets me more resources than I’m likely to ever need in terms of storage and bandwidth, so I have plenty of room to grow.

Obviously, since I’m a self-hosted WordPress user myself you can guess which option I favor. Self hosting gets you total control over how your site looks and works, though getting everything set up just the way you want it can be intimidating and frustrating. The final results can be pretty impressive, even if like me you don’t know how to code at all. I also think that having one’s own domain name adds a certain air of legitimacy to a blog. It shows you’re serious about your work, and a memorable URL can really drive traffic by word of mouth.

A Picture Is Worth…

You’ve picked a host and set up your new blog. What else do you need? Well, if you’re going to write about physical things like minis you’re going to need a decent camera. Note I said “decent” and not “amazing” You can get a heck of a lot of camera these days for just $100 or $150. There’s no need to go for the fancy thousand dollar DSLRs to take good miniature pics. Just make sure your camera has a good “macro mode,” meaning a special setting for taking super-close-up pictures of minis. I use a Fuji Finepix S700 myself and have really liked it. My stepfather the professional photog uses a more sophisticated camera, but his workhorse is also a Fuji. Take that for what it’s worth.

Software Doesn’t Have To Be Hard

To go along with your camera, you’re going to need some image editing software. No matter how good a photographer you are, there’s always some tweaking to be done before your images will be ready for posting. Google offers an excellent free application called Picasa that does a good job at basic photo-editing tasks like cropping and correcting exposures. We have an excellent tutorial on Picasa here. If you want to get more ambitious you can step up to Adobe’s Photoshop Elements, an excellent and extremely powerful consumer version of the most powerful photo editing software on the planet. “Photoshop” has become a verb for the same reasons “Xerox” has: excellence and ubiquity.

That about completes the checklist of the blogging basics. The only remaining item is probably the most important: your writing. No matter how good your photography, it’s your writing that will entice visitors to come back and read your blog again and again. You don’t need to be a superb writer to run a successful blog (you will improve as time goes on in any case), but you do need to pay attention to the nuts and bolts of your writing. Spelling and grammar do count, and they count a good deal, so make friends with your spellchecker and be sure to proofread your copy at least a couple of times before posting it. You’ll be surprised how many typos even a quick glance can spot.

Go Get ‘Em!

Obviously, there are a near-infinite number of ways to approach the wild world of blogging. I’ve written this piece based on my own experiences, and while I hope it will be of value to the first-timers out there, your mileage may vary from mine. Regardless of how you do it, I encourage you to give it a shot. Blogging can be a fun way to share your enthusiasms and knowledge with the world, and perhaps learn a bit about yourself in the process.

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