This is not going to be a comprehensive list by any means, but it is something that I tell people all the time (including this morning) and something that Fred Wilson blogged about today.
When thinking about starting a blog for you or your organization:
1. Get your own domain name. What are we talking $8.95 with GoDaddy? When you own your domain name you own your destiny. I have dealt with a few clients that have built their entire following (and links, and google juice) at name.blogspot.com or name.typepad.com. When they hit a feature wall or become dissatisfied with the service they are stuck.
Services like TypePad will allow you to map a domain name and that will do the trick, the trouble is convincing people to spend a few extra bucks at first to do so. Do not think that buying a domain name and then 'forwarding' it to Blogger will work. Sure you have a domain name to direct visitors to, but all your permalinks and archives are still at name.blogspot.com. Another common problem is domain forwarding that uses frames.
If you already have a domain name for a company think about creating a subdomain, i.e. blog.domain.com or integrate your blog within your existing web site, i.e. domain.com/blog/. Ultimately you have complete control over where you blog content can be. If you're not happy with a service or web provider you can move.
2. Use FeedBurner. By default many blog tools will create a number of different RSS feeds for you and you end up with subscribers across all of them and very little ability to track metrics. If you use TypePad then your prayers have been answered by the TypePad and FeedBurner partnership that was announced this week. As Fred wrote he had subscribers to his FeedBurner feed and his Atom feed.
Creating the feed within FeedBurner is only half of the equation though. You need to promote/link to that feed alone. One problem is the meta-data that blog services put in the header of the blog posts. General users never think about this and need to edit their templates to get this changed, so it's not an easy fix.
3. Have Fun :-)
Visitor Comments
You mention tracking metrics with Feedburner, I would add that if you are going to have your own domain and host your own blog make sure it's compatible with Mint (www.haveamint.com) (php, db, etc.). It is hands down the best way to track personal site metrics.
Posted by: jharr | June 8, 2006 7:36 PM
Josh, here's another reason to use Feedburner:
We've set up a Community Alert system for our local Red Cross and EMA. We're distributing branded RSS readers so more people can plug straight in without any programming or RSS experience.
Both of our Alert pages are actually blogs sans comments, but we chose not to use the native feeds. Instead, the installer package points to Feedburner feeds. This allows us to strip the HTML for a cleaner read, AND the flexibility to move the blogs in the future. If we tire of Blogger outages, we can fire up a different page and change the inflow feed within Feedburner.
This way we don't have to explain to our existing user base how to point to the new feed.
Posted by: Ike | June 9, 2006 10:51 AM