Want to Start Your Own Blog?

Note: This is a paid review for www.thoughts.com. Compensation received for reviews in part goes towards the Money Movie Giveaways this year, and as the income from that grows, so will the promotions. :)

I’m really glad I started blogging back in July as I have met so many great members of the personal finance community and have learned and shared so much. I signed up with a paid blogging engine platform because I didn’t know anything about blogs or blogging – I just threw myself in and managed to float so far. :) In retrospect, I think I might have been better off using a free blogging software engine and just worry about paying for hosting (since I own a unique domain name).

Even better still, would be to not pay for the software, and not pay for the domain name and just use someone else’s resources for free! If you have been thinking about blogging, then perhaps you would want to check out www.thoughts.com as you can have your own Free Blog, with no start-up or ongoing costs. It also comes with an "instant community" so it might not be so lonely for the first couple of days or weeks. I remember the first few weeks felt like I was writing in a great big abyss, but 9 months later I seem to have almost 400 faithful readers and more and more interaction with the readership. I think it would be nice to have this built-in from the get go.

Also, note that you don’t need to set up your blog for the purpose of getting on a soapbox (like I tend to do), but also as a means to have a website for your family, association or other group to visit and check in on you (kind of like Facebook). Another good feature of thoughts.com is that you can easily make certain content private with other content remaining public, and there is turnkey facilitation of adding podcasts, photos and posts for those who don’t want to get caught up in the technical aspects of blogging. All in all, it seems like a great introduction to blogging or setting up a website without committing yourself to anything.

Thoughts.com seems pretty new so the community is still growing and of course only time will tell if it survives for the long term. One question I would have is how easy would it be to transfer your content to another platform should you decide to do so in the future. There are various reasons one might do this, for example if you want to monetize your blog (sell ads, etc), customize it in other ways, or if you are just unhappy with the service.

Anyways, thanks to Thoughts.com for ordering a review. That’s worth another movie to add to the list!