Setting up and Marketing a New Blog Part 1 – Introduction

I love to cook.  I have a store of adapted recipes and am always looking for more recipes to try.  I love the “kitchen porn” catalogs that are coming in the mail during the holiday season.  Normally I just bookmark interesting recipes, add cool gadgets to my wishlist, store word docs with my recipe adaptations and occasionally “spam” my family with my favorites.  Recently I realized that a better approach would be to set up a blog devoted to cooking and recipes.  I could combine my passion for cooking, collecting recipes and gadgets while honing my writing and marketing skills.  Fun!

I thought I’d document and share the experience with you – dear readers – in a series of posts devoted to the setting up and marketing of a new blog.  Please comment if you need more detail on any of the steps.  I can provide more information or write an expanded post on any particular step.

The first step is deciding what to call the new blog and where to host it.   These go together because the URL is driven by blog name (or vice versa).  I came up pretty quickly with For the Love of Cooking as the name of the blog.  The next step was to decide whether to use wordpress.com, host it at its own URL or add it as a subdomain to sherilarsen.com.  I did some research and found that http://www.loveofcooking.com was not available but also not being used (although info, biz, net and many others were available – .info for very cheap!).

I registered http://loveofcooking.wordpress.com with my Wordpress account, but in the end decided it would be better for technical reasons to host it at my own domain rather than at Wordpress.com.  I also decided that I would prefer to host it at http://loveofcooking.sherilarsen.com and leverage any branding for myself as an social media and marketing expert rather than try to maintain two separate brands.  Check it out – there are several posts with some great recipes!

Coming in Part 2 – WordPress Nitty Gritty