Me: Hi. My name is Chris. I’ve been working in Marketing IT, Online Marketing, Product Development and eCommerce for 11 years. And I’ve never built my own blog.

(Voices of other Online Marketing professionals who’ve never built their own blogs): Hi, Chris.

Me: So, I guess it all started back in 2001. I was working as a creative director for a web dev shop in Minneapolis called Ciceron (they’re still around!) and they had a company blog, which I contributed to once or twice, but never built my own. I actually tried once. Used an early version of Movable Type. It sucked. I gave up after a few hours… (sob!)

Moderator: It’s OK. Go ahead, you’re among friends.

Me: (Pulls self together) Thanks. So I’ve doing ebusiness consulting lately and realized I really ought to build a blog to share and learn from others as a passionate practitioner of marketing, innovation, and product development. After all, I’ve been working in roles that require varying degrees of knowledge in these areas for most of the last decade.

(Voices of other Online Marketing professionals who’ve never built their own blogs): (Fearful Moan…)

Moderator: So, Chris, what did you do?

Me: I discussed the issue with a few colleagues to confirm what the best platform might be for my particular purpose. They suggested WordPress. I set up my own domain, and installed the software on my web server. I set up the database using cPanel. It was actually pretty easy!

(Voices of other Online Marketing professionals who’ve never built their own blogs): Oooooo!

Me: Yeah, I was surprised. As a design guy, I ended up doing a lot of futzing around with php to get everything looking and working the way I wanted it to, but it took me back to my old coding days a bit. The main differences between now and 2001 is the software is way easier to use and there are resources everywhere online to help with every aspect. Nice to see things have evolved.

Moderator: Well! Sounds like you’ve had quite a breakthrough. Let’s give Chris a hand. (Applause)

Me: Thank you… thanks… I’m glad I got that off my chest (takes a deep breath). Whoooo-yah!