How To Start Blogging

Learn the basic steps of blogging. If you have not setup an online blog, this article can have you blogging in minutes.

For those that have not started some sort of blog, what are you waiting for? Blogging is easy, addicting and can even generate some income for you and your family. You can setup a blog and start blogging within minutes if you really wanted to.

To begin blogging, you need to decide what type of blog you are going to create. Are you going to create one that is personal, business or maybe a little bit of both. You will need to determine some type of theme for it.

What are some ideas for a blog? Listed below are a few ideas for a blog.

Recipe Blog Post new recipes to your blog daily.

Personal Diary Post daily about your daily life as you.

Business Blog Post company sales, specials, articles, etc.

Article Blog Post a new article each day or more.

Pregnancy Blog Post about your daily life being pregnant.

Once you have determined what you want to start writing about, you will need to setup your blog. Do not limit yourself to one blog if you have more then one idea. If you want to start a business blog, you might want to start off with a personal blog to get the feeling of blogging and how the concept works. After creating your first blog, you might want to go a whole new way with setting up the second one.

The very first step in setting up your blog is deciding what type of platform you will be using. If you are new to building website or blogs, you might want to signup for a free service such as Blogger. If you have your own domain and are a little more internet savvy, you should use a service such as Wordpress or Typepad. As with Blogger, you login to their website, create an account and setup your blog from their site. You can choose to have the blog hosted on Blogger or your own server. For the other platforms such as Wordpress, you would need to install it from the control panel in your hosting account.

As a Blogger, you are going to want to update your blog on a regular basis. You can post daily, weekly, monthly. It's recommended to post at least a few times a week. The more you post, the more content that is created on your blog. The more content you have on your blog, the easier the search engines and spiders will find you. If you are using Wordpress, you can schedule your posts ahead of time. This is a neat feature for those with busy lives that want to make sure there blog is constantly updated.

Once you setup your blog and learn the tricks of the trade, you will be able to setup more blogs. You will also learn how to customize them buy installing templates, logos, graphics, modifications and more. Blogging is a learning process. Don't expect to know what you are doing right away. Once you establish your blog, you will then need to learn how to build massive traffic to it.

About the Author:
© 2006 Stefani Partin, a mom of three from CA who owns a network of sites for moms, blogs, a newsletter and more. Stefani dedicates her time to helping moms find ways to make money at home. Visit her blog at http://www.StefaniPartin.com or http://www.mommyenterprises.com
Submitted on 2006-09-15
Article Source: http://www.articlesalley.com/

The Blog Factor: Everything you need to know to start blogging - today!

So what is this "blog factor"? Well, what a few thought was a novel idea some years ago has now morphed into something no one expected. There are currently nine million blogs out there with 40,000 new ones being added everyday. Some are informative and some are just downright a waste of your time. And while we hear a lot about blogging these days, what is blogging *really*? Blogging in its simplest term is like an online journal but much, much more powerful. Blogs (short for Web log) is a place where surfers can get up to the minute information on a topic or voyeur into someone's life. Some blogs are nothing more than a daily glimpse into someone's life, while others are so sophisticated, it's hard to tell them apart from an online news service.

Why Blogs Matter

Google, the #1 search engine on the net, loves blogs. So much so that if you do it right Google will spider the heck out of your site. What does it mean to "spider"? Well spidering is when Google, or the like, searches your site’s content to establish ranking, and the more content you have (i.e. fresh content) the more Google will do its magic and push your site up the search engine. Another reason blogs matter is that they are interactive and, if you blog on your book’s topic, it will help to further your expert status on a particular issue. When we plan "Virtual Tours" for our authors, we include as many blogs as we can into a tour. Why? Because if you can get into a good blog that's seeing a lot of traffic, you can really start to gain some exposure for your book.

What Would You Talk About?

This is the question we get asked most often. "If I start a blog, what on earth would I talk about?" Well if your book is non-fiction it's pretty easy to figure out what your topic would be, but if your book is fiction it could get a bit tricky - but not impossible. An author I work with has a series of books starring one character - a private detective. I recommended that he "blog" this character, meaning that the character (not the author) would have the blog. It could be the character's diary or adventures and stories - a glimpse into the life of a private detective. This would give the reader (and fans of this character) a reason to return to the blog for an update on this ongoing adventure or story.

In another instance, I work with an author who wrote a fiction book about right and wrong with a new age/spirituality spin. I advised him to blog on issues related to that - right and wrong in our society and his own personal "spin" on these issues. Some of his blogs might be controversial but that's okay, you want to create your own "voice," your own take on a certain issue and if that opinion is controversial, all the better for exposure and for getting people to interact on your blog. Getting readers to respond to your posts is a great way to gain interest and momentum for your blog and (more importantly) getting people to talk about it will grow your blog like nothing else!

How to Start a Blog

Starting a blog is super easy. All you have to do is register at a blog site (like http://www.blogger.com) and get started. It's that easy. The blog service will link to your site; you'll need to ask your Webmaster to add a button to your home page so people can find your blog.

How to Blog Effectively

The best bloggers know that the more you add to your blog, the more traffic you'll drive there. Some bloggers I know post daily, sometimes even multiple times a day while others post weekly. How much you post will probably depend on how much time you have to dedicate to this. The challenge will be that if you want to keep driving people to your blog, you'll want fresh content. This doesn't mean you have to create this all yourself, in fact you can invite people onto your blog and interview them, or you can just post a one paragraph "thought" on your topic. It doesn't have to be complicated or long, it just has to be fresh. Also be innovative, as we discussed earlier, be different with your blog, have fun with it. It might seem complicated at first but once you get the hang of it, you'll quickly become a blog expert!

Penny C. Sansevieri:
The Cliffhanger was published in June of 2000. After a strategic marketing campaign it quickly climbed the ranks at Amazon.com to the #1 best selling book in San Diego. Her most recent book: From Book to Bestseller was released in 2005 to rave reviews and is being called the “roadmap to publishing success.” Penny is a book marketing and media relations specialist. She also coaches authors on projects, manuscripts and marketing plans and instructs a variety of courses on publishing and promotion. To learn more about her books or her promotional services, you can visit her web site at http://www.amarketingexpert.com


About the Author:
Penny C. Sansevieri began her career in the publicity, book marketing, and literary field over ten years ago. During that time she has been an author, publicist, freelance writer, and instructor. She has been instrumental in creating several highly successful marketing and publicity campaigns for author events and book launches. Her own company, Author Marketing Experts, Inc. has developed and implemented countless marketing and publicity strategies. Her clients have been featured in USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, MSNBC, Something You Should Know, The Heloise Show, many others.
Published 12/30/2005
Article Source:http://www.EzinePlug.com

Blogging Dollars In 7 Hours Or Less

Need to make money fast, but you don't want to spend a single cent to establish an online business? Fret not, dear friend. You could actually start earning from the web with zero capital, zero obligations and zero risks! All these can be accomplished within 24 hours! Read on and I'll show you how.

Hour 1

Try to find a profitable niche. Niches are highly specialized segments of a market where the demand is high and the supplies are low. There are few competitions in a niche, allowing you more opportunity to establish your online presence.

Think of a market that you could cater to. Then narrow it down by enumerating its subcategories. The more you are able to reduce the subject, the higher the profitability will be. For example, the general market you thought of is about dogs. A subcategory of this would be about Chihuahuas. A further subcategory would be about Chihuahua grooming.

Hour 2

Once you have found your niche, run a search at www.inventory.overture.com or www.nichebot.com . The results would show how many searches were made for that subject. The more searches there are, the higher the demand is for that topic.

Run a similar search of the same subject in any of the search engines on the net. The results would reveal your competition. Naturally, you would want a subject that has less competition. This would mean that you're looking for one that would produce few results in your searches.

Hour 3

Once you've found a lucrative niche, it's time to look for its relevant keywords. Run a search of the topic at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox to get a list of related keywords and keyphrases. Keep a copy of this list.

Hour 4

Open an account with a free blogging site. Or, if you already have your own website, download the Wordpress software at www.wordpress.com . It's free. And Wordpress can be easily integrated with any website.

Set up your account. Fiddle with the controls. You'll discover that using a blog is as easy as writing down your thoughts and clicking on a button to publish them for all the online world to see.

Hour 5

Enroll in any affiliate program of your choice. You could choose more than one, of course. Just make sure that such program is offering some products that cater to the niche you have chosen. Try to find a program that offers highly sellable products and generous commissions. Don't settle for a commission rate of less than 20%. Look for something that would give you at least 40% for every successful sale you would be able to refer. A good place to start is www.clickbank.com , but eventually you would want to "graduate" to something grander. But for your initial foray, ClickBank would suffice.

After enrollment, you would be able to immediately choose the products you want to pre-sell. Get the affiliate links for them. Do not lose these affiliate links.

Hour 6

It's time to put that blog to good use! The premise heart of this budget-friendly strategy is your blog. Blogs are excellent and cost-effective alternatives to websites. Search engines love them, and they have their own linking network as well. Also, they are easily updatable, and search engine spiders love consistently updated content.

Write an interesting piece about the niche you have chosen. It may be a personal review of one of your affiliate products, or your views on the niche in general.

The trick here lies in being able to strategically insert your affiliate links in your blog entries. It must be subtle. You won't want your blog to look like a blatant sales page. Your entries should be highly informative, first and foremost. Content is still king, and it is what will drive visitors to your site.

Hour 7

Go to www.pingomatic.com . Ping the blog directories and the search engines that can be found there. This would inform their spiders that your content has been updated, and they will check it out come the next relevant query. What does this mean? Fast indexing for your blog site!

So there you go. A zero dollar, seven hour marketing plan that would rake in some earnings. It doesn't stop there, however. Try to post a new entry everyday, and ping the search engines afterwards. Soon enough, you'll have a high traffic blog site where you could expose your affiliate links to a whole lot of people!

Good luck!

About the Author:
Mal Keenan
Discover the Secrets to Setting up and Running a Highly Successful Online Blog with Our FREE 7 Day Report. Send a Blank Email to mailto:freeblogreport@getresponse.com Top 10 Tricks to Wordpress Blogging Success Revealed: http://www.malkeenan.com/top10tricks/
Article Source: www.iSnare.com

Blogs: Today’s Internet Diary and Marketing Tool

The popular blogger.com owned by Google, Inc. has been around the internet for a while.

But still no matter how appealing a Blog may seem now a days there are still a few people that does not actually get to know what really a Blog is.

Well, a Blog is a type of website that allows you as its owner to easily put in your messages and publish it online.

It’s more like a journal or a diary type of site, but what’s interesting is it’s not hidden from others like a normal diary where in only you can write and see it.

A Blog is your personal site and your online diary at the same time. It is a place where you post something and other may post a comment about your post. It’s actually a great site to publish your own opinion and “what you think” thingy.

Now, with all those features how come it’s also a marketing tool? For some it may seem to be a diary or a journal but for some it is more likely to be a place to advertise products and market them.

Why? Because of the ability of Blogs to be crawled easily by search engines and because of the nature of a Blog that makes it look like an e-campus class that consist of a teacher and students. Advertisers, marketers and even programmers can make use of a Blog to post in messages about their products and users could post in their comments too.

A Blog is easily crawled by search engines because it is a content based site and search engines loves sites with great content volumes. I have a Blog my self at http://prialde.blog.com and with in 24 hours I can already search my Blog at Google Search.

A Blog is a great tool indeed. The answer now to the question, “Do I Really Need It?” is up to you to answer. Just remember no site is great without others knowing it.

Here are some of the Blogs I love to spend some time on.

http://prialde.blog.com
http://www.elf-ideas.blogspot.com/
http://ezinearticles.com/blog/

And here are some of sites offering free Blogs.

http://www.blog.com/
http://www.blogger.com/
http://www.blog-city.com/
http://www.blogdrive.com/
http://www.tblog.com/

And try this site http://simpleads.net/ to advertise your Blog.

About the Author:
Glenn Prialde is the owner and creator of iSnare – www.isnare.com a free articles site that offers unlimited free article submission and free reprint. iSnare can also write great contents for your site, visit http://outsourcing.isnare.com/?p=3

How To Boost Traffic To Your Blog: SEO for Bloggers

Let search engine index your blog and let people come to your fresh blog. Though you're in World Wide Web, nobody knows you're there. You need to pull kindly those who are potentially waiting for you but don't know where your are. This objective is related to generally known as search engine optimization (SEO). It's too broad to address all. But the most important things will I talk about. Though they're not all but more than enough will be covered. They are about...

• How to use keywords as a SEO technique
• What to consider when you choose blog templates
• How to construct your blog search engine friendly
• Ping your blog
  

How to use keywords as a SEO technique?

As long as SEO is concerned, the keyword comes at front line. You have to find the target keyword/keywords or niche keywords.

What to do with the keyword/keywords? Please read on.....

• Enter keywords in your blog name: If you named your blog for example, "Ryen's blog", it's not a good idea in the view of SEO. Instead name your blog something like "keyword blog". You need to substitute "keyword" with your "target keyword", for example "mountain bike blog", if your blog is about mountain bike.
  
• Enter keywords of your post in title tag: Actually most of bloggers don't need to concern about "title tag" because most of blog hosting applications such as blogger, typepad, wordpress, movable type, drupal, etc... care this for you. But you have to use the keyword in your title and then they will include it in the title tag for you.
  
• Enter keywords in meta description tag, if possible: This may be difficult for most of bloggers because most of blog hosting system don't support this. If this is your case, don't bother with this. To make it possible is almost impossible for the people like me who are not techie at all. But don't worry there is other solution: care your first sentence of the first paragraph.
  
• Enter keywords in the first sentence: Nowadays many SEO experts say that most of search engines don't look meta description tag. Instead they look for the few words in the first sentence. So care your first sentence to include the keywords, make it fit to describe your whole post and attractive.
  
• Repeat your keywords in your post: With this an English grammar teacher may not be happy. But as long as SEO is concerned, it's necessary: frankly to say, you have to. General rule says the keyword density should be about 2-3% of whole words in your post.

You may complain "heck, how do I know keyword density." Well, you don't need to count it manually. There is a free tool to check the keyword density. And actually I don't even check it all the time. I just keep in mind 2-3% and check only for some posts that I think worth checking. Having this in mind, the free tool is here. Type the URL of your post, keyword and click "analyze" button. It'll return you the keyword density of your post. If the keyword density is too low, consider repeat the keyword more but don't repeat too much (more than 3%)

• Use your keyword in your blog domain: This improves the ranking of your blog and hence more traffic come to you. If your blog is about "anniversary gift", for example, include it in your domain name so that your blog domain looks like "anniversary-gift.yourhost.com"
  
• Use your keyword in the link title: Many blogger don't know about this!
• Which one do you think better, "anniversary gift" or "anniversary-gift.your host.com" as your link title? The former is better. The reason? Because search engines value more. So keep in mind that whenever you get link try to enter your keywords in the link title.
  
• Enter keywords in your file name: When you save your blog, use your keyword.
  Which one is better, "mypost98.html" or "anniversary-gift-how-to-choose.html"? This time the latter is better because it includes keywords and hence get better chance to be listed in high rank in search engine.
  
• Enter keyword in alt tag: If you use images in your post, don't forget to put your keyword in alt tag. A 2 cent-tip related to this is that if your Google Adsense doesn't seem to show matching ads with your content, check your alt tag. Maybe it's because you put unrelated words in alt tag.

What to consider when you choose blog templates?

Certainly there is a search engine friendly blog templates. To know whether your blog template is search engine friendly designed, go to Crawler simulation (It's free.) Enter your blog URL and then it'll show you how it looks like when a search engine spider visits your blog site. If you see a lot of html code or java scripts before you see main content, it means your blog is not well designed in the point of search engine optimization. There is a way to hide unnecessary code from spiders, using CSS or div class "hide". Try to make your title tag immediately after head tag and to show up your body content as near to head tag as possible.

How to construct your blog search engine friendly?

Make your blog site structure as simple as possible. This may not be a big issue for bloggers because unless a blogger can design her/his blog system, they have to use a default system. What I mean by this is that most of blog system make permalink be for example, "www.blogcom.com/user/archive/year/month/date/apost.html". See how far the final "apost.html" is from root. It's 5 step further. This is not so good in terms of search engine optimization. You can reduce those steps but you only can do so one or two step because database recognition is concerned behind this story. So the bottom line is that try to make your blog simple but if it's not possible, focus on writing good content. I observed many top bloggers have a bit complicated permalink system yet have lots of traffic.

But if you can make your blog structure simpler without problem, please do so because it is much better for the reader and search engine as well.

Ping your blog

Do you ping? Many pongs will come,then. :-) This may not be an issue if you're using Movable Type, WordPress, Typepad, or Drupal 4.6.0. But consider pinging to Ping-o-Matic!, if your system is not configured to do so. Because it pings to most of important blog search engines and directories in one spot. If your blog application doesn't support to ping automatically to "Ping-o-Matic!", you can do so manually by visiting Ping-o-Matic! Once you type your blog name, blog URL, check where to ping and click "submit ping" button, and don't forget to bookmark. It gives you a convenience because you don't need to type blog name, URL and check where to ping again.

By pinging you make search engine spider crawl you more frequently and make your reader notified faster.

So far you have the most important SEO techniques for your blog. Say, how to use your keywords and where to enter, search engine friendly blog template design, structure and finally ping to "Ping-o-Matic!"
But one thing is missing!

Get inbound links!

Probably it is as important as your blog itself! You can read about this at Traffic to Blog: Part 4

About the Author :

Ryen Kim is an MBA, specialized in marketing research and analysis. His current focus is blogging and home based affiliate business as a work-at-home scheme. He is a founder of Blog Sites and running Hom Based Affiliate Business web site.