Tips for finding Out a lost blog

I know about six months ago I started a blog, I just don't know where it is now, can you help me find it with the little bit of information that I do have?

— Kavin

Dear Kavin:

In this case I would have to say that Google is my friend! Whatever information that you do have can be typed into a search engine in order to try and find your blog. Use the quotes as a tool to narrow your search. For example if the name of your blog was “Writer's Heaven,” you would type it into the search engine just like a I showed, quotes and all.

It can also be beneficial to search for your name; again quotes may help in this instance. If you have a common name this technique may not be as beneficially, but for those out there that have a unique name this may be the only search you will need to do.


If you come up with a blank, then it may be lost for good. There are a few reasons for this.

1. If you were using a free blogging service, the service may have gone away. There a few one-hit wonders out there like Twitter, which don't seem to have a revenue model and yet it can constantly pull in millions of dollars in venture capital.

2. The site that you used may not have enough of a site ranking to show up in the searches. Your blog may still be there; it just is buried on the one hundredth search page and the time to find it will outweigh the desire to find it on about page 10.

3. If you do not have an e-mail or other communication from the site that you started blogging on, you may not remember enough information to actually find the blog.

There is still hope. If you were blogging in the past and you are simply interested in starting again there are some great places to blog for free.

In a previous column I talked about www.WordPress.com as my recommended solution for free blogging; this is the same blog that backs www.CNN.com. There is also www.Blogger.com which has become a large blogging community.

In the end, if you cannot find the blog you started six months ago, it may be much easier to just begin again. To make sure that you keep blogging, you might want to take a look at www.BloggingEmergency.com; it is a place that you can go to find videos on how to sign up, or get questions answered.

I would have to say that outside of actually losing where you started a blog, the second reason that someone will stop blogging is coming across a problem in how the blog runs. I used to say that blogging was no different than opening up your word processing software and writing up a document. However, blogging has transformed over the past two years to include many fancy new features that in the end can complicate matters and make it harder to know what you really need to be doing in order to blog.

The good news, there are more and more blogs that are being used as websites. This is a cost effective solution to allow your business to be online. In many cases it is hard to distinguish what is just a traditional website and what is a blog. Would you have ever thought that www.CNN.com is a blog?

Thank you for asking a question that I know others in the reader audience may have had. I know in your particular situation you will need to start all over, but I commend your business mindset that you are not going to let a little technology glitch stand between you and success!