If the title of this blog sounds a tad militaristic, fear not: The goal here isn’t to put you through a series of endurance-testing drills, or to act like a drill sargeant straight out of Paris Island.

That said, the notion of boot camp — and all the discipline and hard work it conjures — isn’t totally accidental.

Starting a blog is easy. By most accounts a new blog is launched every second. The hard part is posting to your blog every day, turning it into the kind of hub for ideas that give readers a reason to return each and every day. Suffice it to say, that’s hard work. It doesn’t just require discipline; it also takes a kind of obsessive enthusiasm for composing and creating and communicating your thoughts.

A successful blog — and by that, I mean, a blog that reaches a regular audience of hundreds, if not thousands — requires more than just great writing. You’ll need a compelling voice, photos or images to help illustrate your thoughts (to the more visually-oriented), and all kinds of audio and video, to boot.

For most traditional newspaper and magazine writers, though, that kind of multimedia storytelling isn’t exactly second nature. And that’s why this blog is here — to help you figure out how to translate your thoughts into the best blog posts possible. To help you understand the nuts and bolts of WordPress, our blog software.

To — forgive the lame pun — allow you to be all you can be, and blog all you can blog.

It’s worth noting that many newspaper sites keep training blogs like this closed or restricted to a company intranet. I’ve decided to keep ours open for all to see. Though this space is primarily intended for the reporters, writers, and designers at Gannett New Jersey’s newspapers — The Asbury Park Press, the Courier-Post, the Daily Record, the Home News Tribune, the Courier News, and The Daily Journal — I hope some other aspiring bloggers out there will stumble upon it and learn a thing or two … or, at the very least, save themselves the trouble of searching the Web fruitlessly on a Sunday night Googling for “WordPress screencasts,” only to stumble upon a handful of overpriced, pay sites.