One of the best things about being a blogger is it gives you the option to do it from anywhere in the world. It doesn’t matter if I’m at at home in Vancouver or the apartment in Shanghai, as long as I have Internet access, I can log online and blog away. However, blogging is about more than just posting to a site. To be truly mobile, you need to free other things that can tie you down to a desk. Here’s how to go about it.
Store Files Online
The key to being a mobile blogger is to alway have access to your information. There are many ways to do this but by far the best is to just store your stuff on the Net. For example, I use to carry a lot of important files on a USB flash drive, until the day I needed access to it but forget to bring with me. Now, I store files online at a service like X Drive. X Drive offers 5GB of free online storage for your files, apps, photos, etc. If you need more space, there is a 50GB paid plan.
The nice thing about X Drive is if you have an AIM account, you already have access to it. Just log in with your AIM username and password and you can start uploading those most used files. Now you always have access to your files and you don’t have to worry where that USB drive is.
POP To GMail
For branding purposes, I recommend all bloggers get their own domain name with their own domain email. Instead of using yourname@Hotmail.com or yourname@GMail.co, you would use yourname@yourdomain.com and access it via Outlook or another email client. The problem with this setup is it limit you to checking emails on your computer. If you move to another computer or laptop, you can’t get at your emails. Sure, you can enter your email information into Outlook Express on a computer at a Net cafe but that opens up an another can of worms.
Fortunately, Google’s GMail service can check your domain email accounts for you. Simply go to the GMail settings and choose Accounts. From there, you’ll be able to enter your blog domain email information. Now you can read and reply to emails sent to yourname@yourdomain.com from any computer in the world. The only downside to the service is GMail limits you to a maximum of five POP accounts.
Google Docs Is Your Friend
Since discovering Google Docs, I haven’t used Microsoft Office for a very long time. The key difference between Docs and Office is Docs is online and accessible at anytime from any computer, anywhere in the world.
Docs also has a really nice collaboration feature so you can invite other people to help you work on a project. For example, my CES party invite list was done with Google Docs. Myself, Stephen Fung and Bob Buskirk all had access to the file to add and remove names. It made it very easy to produce a final invite list that was free of dupes.
Think Remote Everything
As I stated at the start of this post, the key to being a location-free blogger is to always have access to your key files and information. The above is just three ways to do that. There are tons more. Feel free to share your remote blogging methods. You know you got it right when you can run your business not just from your personal computer, but from any computer.