By Staff Writer – Boonsri Dickinson (@boonspoon)

If you wanted to set your own blog up today, it would take you less than 10 minutes and would cost about $20. I wanted to set up a personal blog about genetics that I’ve been talking about for weeks.

I bought the domain name DNAdoll.com from GoDaddy. But buying a domain isn’t enough. I needed to figure out which company I wanted to host the blog. I could either do this through GoDaddy or another site.

Kris Smith, the senior editor of Techstartups, sat with me at a coffee shop today, to help me set up my blog. After discussing the options with Smith, I decided to host the blog through Wordpress.com and pay $9.97 for domain mapping. This allows me to have a Wordpress.com blog that has the domain name DNAdoll.com instead of the generic, standard domain offered by Wordpress.

After I successfully mapped my domain by following these directions, I picked a template. Now I just have to produce blog posts.

It takes a while to build up traffic and to build an audience. I work for several websites, including Techstartups.com, that are growing everyday. But you have to start from somewhere.

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