Publishing your own blog can be easy to set up and free - you can even make money with a blog if you put some work into it. There are two basic platforms used most commonly by people for free blogging. Both Wordpress and Blogger allow you to easily and quickly create free accounts and get your own page (e.g. mycoolblog.wordpress.com). They both allow forms of for-profit advertising, though these vary between the two. In both cases, you can also sign up for blogging communities within and beyond their sites to attract more readership. Signup is easy - all you need is an e-mail address and the site will walk you through the rest of the process!

1) Wordpress - Wordpress.org gives you a lot of options in terms of the form and layout of your blog. There are literally thousands of free 'templates' (which is to say: pre-built visual layouts or formats) you can use. Wordpress gives you somewhat more freedom to design and create within your page, but doing this can be tricky if you don't know HTML. Wordpress also allows in-text advertising (i.e. putting underlined links on a page that link to merchants who, in turn, give you a commission if someone buys something from their site). However, they don't allow the most popular and common kind of blog advertising: contextual ads, like Google Adsense, MSN Adcenter and Yahoo MS.

2) Blogpot - Blogspot is directly affiliated with Google and allows even easier setup and modification of pages than Wordpress does. The trade-off is that you don't have a lot of creative freedom to make highly-detailed edits to your page. So, if you're not interested in getting into complex page design but want a lot of easy options at your fingertips: this is the choice for you. Blogspot also allows (and makes it very easy to add) Adsense on your page. Adsense puts up contextual ads that relate to what you are writing about. You get a few cents (or more) each time someone clicks one of these ads.

On both platforms adding new pages and posts and editing old submissions is made very easy, as is creating links outside of your page. I would recommend Wordpress to the slightly more serious blogger who plans to edit and customize their pages over time and Blogspot for the quick-and-easy approach.

Once you have your blog set up, you can go to various sites to get your blog listed and use 'tags' with your posts (keywords that attract attention) to draw in readership. Also, you can use built-in functions to track where your readers come from, how long they stay and where they look on your page. This is essential for figuring out what you are writing that is successfully interesting to people and what isn't working as well.

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