Starting Your Blog

Is creating, writing and maintaining a blog really worth your time and effort these days? Well we say yes, absolutely.

The internet is an information goldmine. In the early days before ecommerce really took off people were searching for information as there were limited products online to purchase and security of credit card information was an issue.

The questions people posed were to answer something that they had an issue about or a problem they needed solving. It was great.

Really the same holds true today but most sites don't actually just provide free information about their subject because everyone is trying to monetise what they are doing and turning their thoughts into profits. This is no bad thing because after all, most of us are in this world to have a happy life and in order to do that you need income.

How Will Blogging Help Your Business ?

If you go back to the initial thoughts about people looking on the internet for information then a blog is the perfect way to get your ideas and experience onto the internet. If you add articles onto your blog every few days or weekly you will start to get regular readers who come back time and again and your bland business site suddenly has a personality.

Blogging Software

Initially blogs were online diaries for people but the blogging software that is around today are really simple to use content management systems (CMS). The most common are Wordpress which you can host on their servers or your own or Blogger which is hosted by Google.

Wordpress is probably the most popular and the easiest to use and change for what you want to see on your website.

Additionally many companies make it easy to get your site indexed in the search engines and for people to sign up and receive email updates. You don't need to know much about anything to start.

Then back to the information. Most pages online are pretty short and don't go into much depth about anything. Generally you'll find something about the issue you are looking for but it doesn't quite cover it all. Then you have to go back to the search engine results and find another site that covers the other 20% of what you need or even go to another 3 or 4 sites to find the answers.

So if you found a site that answered everything on one page wouldn't that be the best ? And that's where you come in. Everyone in the world is an expert in something. Whether that is home cooking, managing children, running a business, being an expert chess player or whatever, you have something to say that other people want to hear and learn from.

Don't think that you know nothing. Even if you are unemployed and heavily in debt you have a story to tell on how you are managing your life and how you are getting out of debt.

Writing For Your Blog

So that summarises what you can write about and that's the easy part. When you write just write as you would discuss your topic with your friends or other people in the street; and don't be too afraid just to write what you believe and how it affects you as these are the best articles.

Setting Up a Blog

To set up you'll probably need your own domain and some hosting. These are straight forward. Then once you have these just go to Wordpress and set up your blog. The basic template is , well, basic but there are loads of free templates you can download to make you blog stand out from the crowd.

1: Choose your blogging software. There are 2 main types of blog software. www.blogger.com is hosted by google and is where most people start off. It's really easy to create your blog - just go to the blogger site and follow the instructions. Straight away you'll have a blog such as yourblog.blogger.com and you can start to post away.

The same can be said for www.wordpress.com where you can do the same thing. Both Blogger and Wordpress offer the chance for your blog to be hosted by themselves where you don't need your own domain or hosting - it's completely free. Additionally because these are trusted domains you'll get search engine traffic almost immediately although building your own links to improve rankings is a must.

2: Host your blog. It's always best to attempt to host it yourself. There have been reports that google or blogger delete blogs for no reason. And if you don't post to your blog for a while you may find it is tipped out of the search engine results. To host your own blog you set to it in the same way as if you were developing a new site.

After you have gone through with your domain name registration and have your web hosting services set up you are ready to go. Many Linx hosting provider give you something called "fantastico" via your cpanel which is a list of all additional popular software products which includes blogging software so it's easy just to click a link and all the software is added to your account and you can begin to customise it.

If this is not provided then simply download the software from blogger or wordpress and ftp it up to your site.

3: Link to your blog. Add your blog to some of the blogging directories (search for blog directories in google) and add your blog and key words so your blog is spidered and indexed.

4: Ping your blog. The best way to get the search engines and all the readers to know you have updated your blog is to use something called "blog and ping" - there are many external services that will "ping" all the popular feeders to let them know you have some new posts to tell them about although Wordpress has this feature built in which you can add additional services to under your admin account. This means when you publish a new article the software automatically "pings" or tells the search engines a new article is on your server. The "spiders" will come along and then index the article, sometimes in minutes but certainly within the hour.

This is faster than simply adding new articles onto your website and waiting patiently until Google comes along to find a new article.

5: Ensure you have your rss feed visible. Wordpress and blogger automatically update the rss feed and you'll see this on most pages. Just make sure the comments and posts rss is available. This is where external feeders find the information on your blog.

6: Undertake SEO - As time moves on people will start to link to your blog naturally if you write interesting or perhaps controversial articles. To get the ball rolling either ask people to link to your site or once you have posted something of interest email people and publications you know about and they may then write about your post and link to your article. It can be a slow process but as your blog is a long term project then don't worry too much as traffic will start to come along soon enough.

7: Write lengthy articles - As the internet grows more and more people are going to write about the same subject and you need to ensure that your article is better and more substantial than everyone else's out there. A few years ago articles of just 300-400 words would rank highly in the search engines because there was less noise but today you really need to be writing at least 600 words if not more. Add in links to external sources and pictures of your subject matter to really do justice to your work.

8: Monetise your blog - Many people set blogs up to earn an income from them. There are several methods with the most popular being adsense revenue. Read our article about improving adsense revenues to increase revenues and CTR. You can also sell your own products or other peoples' products via affiliate marketing. To begin with we recommend you don't monetise so that people will sign up for updates and also link to your blog. If it's full of spammy adsense looking links and offers limited benefits from the information provided then people are unlikely to link to it. Only once you have maybe 400 visitors a day for a few weeks so the blog has traction would it be worth starting to monetising it.

9: Keep going - don't worry if you have a new site and write 10 articles and only get a handful of visitors. This is where most people give up because they don't see instant results. Think about how Google may view this - you have developed a brand new site that has no trust and no one is linking to it and you're expecting it to rank highly. This won't happen. If you are patient and keep writing on a regular basis AND start to get people to link to your article pages (rather than just the home page) your blog will begin to earn trust and get in a high number of visitors

Writing For Your Business

The blog for your business activities is normally reserved for announcing important news or when you have views on industry matters or events. Because a blog pings Google when new information is added this tells the search engines that your website has new information to add.

If you only have a 10 page brochure website and nothing really changes Google may not believe this is as valuable as one of your competitors that adds new information about their products, people and trends in their industry. You can become the leading voice in your industry by adding your take on what's topical so that people know where to go for breaking news.

If you run a business and have 30 minutes spare a day (or someone in your organisation has) then start blogging today - because it really can be worth that short amount of time to get your story out in the internet world and earn some cash from it as well.

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