Blogging basics

I am going to try to boil this down to the essentials. There are whole books written on this subject, so I am not going to try to cover everything here. If you are looking for a good book about blogging for beginners, I suggest reading Darren Rowse’s “31 Days To A Better Blog”. But for a quick, bottom-line version keep reading…

What is a blog?

A blog originally was a personal website meant to be like a diary or journal. If you are familiar with Facebook or MySpace, these sites and their user pages are a derivative of blogs. The word blog is the shortened version of the word weblog. A person would usually create a blog as a hobby to share their information and experience on a particular subject. The blogs are designed to be very easy to add new entries to, so the information on blogs is updated much more frequently than a traditional site. As the blogger adds entries to the blog, the viewers can add comments to the entries, so the blog becomes an interactive site. If the blogger is interesting it does not take long for that blog to create quite a following.

Blogs have been around for a few years now and have been heavily commercialized for business blogging so that today as you surf the web you often do not know if you are looking at a blog website or a traditional html website. Truth be told though it does not matter what type of website it is, they are both designed to do the same thing…. get information out to the public.

There is a common misconception that blogging requires a certain level of sophistication and that the whole process is complicated. I assure you that driving a car is much more complicated than blogging. The fact that you have found this article is proof enough that you can blog. If you have a passion for something, whatever the subject is, and you want to tell others what you know about that subject, you can be a big help to someone else who is interested in the subject but does not have the experience or knowledge about it that you do. That is the spirit behind blogs and it is why blogs are such a huge part of the internet culture of our day.

If you want to know more about blogging, how you can create your own blog, what kind of topics can you cover, the costs ($0) or requirements involved, check out this blogging guide but at least for now you know what is blog.


Is it easy to start a blog?

It is very easy. Even if there are steps along the way that are confusing, there are plenty of resources to get the help you need. There are over 20 million blogs in existence, so it can’t be that difficult.

Getting a blogging platform

All 4 of the options listed are free. The first 3 options are the easiest, but the are also limited on features. If you are just trying to make an extra few hundred dollars from your blog, these options could work. But if you are really serious about trying to make good money from your blog, I recommend self-hosting your blog (which we talk about in the next section…).

 Blogger.com

Blogger is also very good, easy to set up, owned by Google, you can customize the theme, and the domain name includes “.blogspot.com” (in some people’s opinion a little less professional). Blogger continues to become more customizeable and currently has a lot more options than they did a few years ago.

Tumblr.com

This is probably the simplest blogging platform to use, but it also is the probably the least customizeable. So, it might be something good to start with, but it would be more difficult to build an income-generating website with it.

 WordPress.com 

I like wordpress.com they are completely free, easy to set up, you can customize the theme, but other customizations are limited, domain name includes “.wordpress.com”.

WordPress.org

I like wordpress.com they are completely free, easy to set up, you can customize the theme, but other customizations are limited, domain name includes “.wordpress.com”.

How to setup a self-hosted blog

If you are going to be using one of the first three options above, you can skip this section. If you are serious about blogging and are looking for the best way to customize your blog’s look and other features, then getting a self-hosted blog from WordPress.org is probably the best way to go. It is currently the top choice for most bloggers. It does require more work up front and does have small costs associated with it: buying a domain name ($10/year) and hosting your blog ($10/month).
One of the big advantages is that you can use your own domain name (i.e. yourblog.com). While this might not seem like a big deal, it is a lot easier for people to remember yourblog.com rather than yourblog.blogspot.com which is what you will be given if you use Blogger. I will warn you, being a non-techie myself, this took me some time figuring out how to get my self-hosted site set up. WordPress.org has a great step-by-step guide for getting you set up. While it is more work on the front end, I am really glad I got good advice and did this at the beginning, than having to do it now.

Pick a domain Name 

1.You sould start a domain name.
is a great tools to see what names are still available.I would suggest going to for a .com rather than a info or .us or any thing else for that matter. It is just too easy for people to get confused. A.com is always going to hold more value than any other extension.
2. Once you get it picked up you need to find somewhere to purchase it.now let me tell you.......
 
What’s in a domain name? 
In a word, everything. Your domain name is, for all intents and purposes, your online identity. Choosing  A Domain Name is like choosing a name for your baby: You want to choose a name that fits just right, one that is memorable for all the right reasons.



Just like your child will have his or her name for the rest of their life, the domain name you choose should be one that can last for the online life of your business. When you make your own website, your domain name should be one of the first things you consider.



But choosing a domain name is more than just choosing what sounds good. A domain name works hard for your business, so the choice needs to be one made carefully. Here are a few tips to help make your decision a little easier.

1. Include Your Target Keyword

When it comes to Choosing A Domain Name, using your target niche keyword or chosen brand within the domain name is very beneficial as far as search engine optimisation (SEO) goes. Adding to that, having your target keyword as close to the left of your domain name is even better.



For example if your target keyword is “gardening” you would be much better having gardeningforpleasure.com than besttipsongardening.com. If these two sites were exactly the same, the first one would achieve higher search engine rankings than the second, simply due to the keyword placement within the URL.

2. Keep It Brief

No one wants to have to try to remember a domain name with 84 letters. Give your potential customers a break and choose a name that is as short as possible. It still has to be memorable and easily associated with your business. Use this as a general rule: The human brain can most easily remember up to seven digits (that’s why phone numbers are seven digits!).



Short domain names are becoming extremely rare these days, but if you can be creative, you just may find what you are looking for. Failing this, the next best thing would be using a short, easy to remember phrase containing your keyword (see point 1).

3. The Dot Com Is Usually Best


The most common website extension (the part after the “dot”) is “com”. It’s the most-often attempted suffix for web users who can’t remember an exact URL, and it’s the oldest extension. So, if you want your business to have an air of legitimacy, longevity and permanence, and to be easily found online, choose a domain name with a .com extension.



An exception to using a dot com would be, say: If you are promoting a product solely for an Australian audience, you would be better to go with the .com.au extension, as a percentage of Australian internet users will specify to search for products and services within Australia only.

4. Fire Your Lawyer

Well, at least tell them to put away their trademarks textbook. Why? Because you are going to promise, no, vow, to steer clear of any trademarked names in your quest for the perfect domain name. Once upon a time, companies would simply write a cheque to the owner of a site containing their trademarked name and make the problem go away. It’s not that way anymore. If you step on the wrong toes, you’ll find yourself seated next to your lawyer at a very nice mahogany table. It’s not worth all that. Choose something else.


5. Grab Your Domain Name Now
Every day, more and more domain names are being taken off the market. If you want to increase your chances of getting the domain name you want, act fast. Otherwise, you’ll have to settle for something less than perfect and that can have a significant impact on your business’ identity.

6. Cover Your Bases

Yes, it’s always better to register the “.com” version of a domain name as your principle domain, but if you want to prevent someone else from swooping in and registering a site that is too close for comfort to yours, register your domain with all available extensions. You may also want to register common misspellings of your company’s name and possible abbreviations. Don’t worry, you don’t need a separate website for each domain name. They can all point to the same site. It’s just a matter of protecting your company’s identity.

7. Keep It Simple


Although you can use any combination of dashes, letters and numbers in your domain name, keeping it as simple as possible will serve you best. The simpler the name, the easier it will be to remember. And bear in mind that your name cannot contains symbols (such as an ampersand) or spaces, and they are not case-sensitive.

8. Take A Poll

Toss out a few of your possible domain names to some friends. What is their reaction? Ask them a couple of days later if they remember the name you told them. If they can’t, it’s not a good choice. Ask them to spell the domain name to you. Did they get it right? If not, maybe it’s too difficult to spell. Ask them to explain to you why they think you chose that name. If they have trouble decoding your name, revisit your choice.

9. Don’t Sell The Farm


Registering a domain name doesn’t have to be costly. Shop around for the best rate!



Hopefully this article has given you a few tips to consider when Choosing A Domain Name. Your domain name is a very important part of the equation for SEO, branding and website traffic, so it’s best to choose wisely right from the beginning.






How I make money with this blog

When I go to family functions or social events I often get a blank stare when I explain what I do for a living. I think people understand the part that I write articles and put them on a website, but when it comes to making money from it, they don’t get it. In this section I will lay it out and hopefully it will help bring some clarity…




CPC Ad Networks

There are a few different ad networks that I use on CPF. The most successful one has been Google Adsence Program.Basically what they do is read the article that I write and find ads that are relevant to it and display them next to the article. The great thing about it is that by having extremely relevant ads, it actually can be quite beneficial to the readers as well. For example, if I write an article explaining what an IRA was, but didn’t mention where you could open one, Adsense would likely be displaying ads of places to open an IRA. So as a reader, if I read that article and decided that I did want to open an IRA, the ads would be providing options that the article did not. I am currently doing a few tests with another CPC network called Chitika. Apparently, you can use it in conjunction with Adsense. The jury is still out, but I am interested to see how it compares to Adsense. All things considered, I have found that if optimized correctly, Adsense really can work well. I will explain more about how to optimize it in sections below.






CPM Ad Networks

While Adsense pays on a click basis (CPC), I use other ad networks that pay by the total # of impressions (CPM). At the beginning, these networks didn’t produce much income, but as the traffic grows CPM networks seem to work well in conjunction with Adsense. I use (or have used) ContextWeb, AdClickMedia, Adbrite, Adify, BuzzLogic, and Casale Media. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses and may be suitable for one kind of a site and not another.




Affiliate Product sales
 Basically an example of an affiliate sale would be if you sold lawn mowers and I referred a customer to you, if they purchased you would pay me back a % of the sale for referring them. There are a million options for this on the internet now. The main programs I use are Amazon’s Affiliate program, FlexOffers, LinkConnector, CommissionJunction, Shareasale, E-Junkie, and LinkShare. There are many others, but these are a few of the more popular ones available.
I recently found out about a new site called Viglink which allows you to automatically turn all our links on your site to affiliate links. I am testing it out and am pretty excited about it since it greatly simplifies the process of adding affiliate links.)



I have a very strong policy about honest recommendations. I give my honest opinions about products that I find regardless of how it will affect affiliate sales. This is probably why I don’t really make too much with affiliate products. For example, I wrote about Cash Crate and updated the article to show what I didn’t like about them. Because Cash Crate has such a generous referral program, I know some people making lots of money from it, but I just don’t feel comfortable recommending it since I had a bad experience using it. 

On the other hand there are products like ING Direct, Ebates, Perkstreet Financial, Mint.com, and Sharebuilder that I recommend and also have some sort of affiliate or referral program as well. These are what I love because I can help readers by pointing them to good resources and tools that have helped me and get paid in the process. I know some people don’t have a problem promoting anything that will pay them, but I just can’t, in good conscience, recommend something to someone that I don’t genuinely believe will help them.




How to get traffic to your blog


So now are getting to the point of this article where I start sharing everything I have learned over the last couple years about blogging. So, if you are like most, you want to create a blog so that others can read what you have to say. Sadly, people will not find your blog (in the beginning anyway) unless you do a little legwork. These are some of the things I did to get traffic and some that I still do. The first thing I suggest doing is writing a few great articles about your topic and feature them in your sidebar. Then I would start working on generating traffic, because you not only want traffic, but you want returning traffic as well.

Guest Posting!!

I think this is one of the best ways to start getting some quick traffic. Almost every blog I know allows guest posts (Even this 1) – and almost every one of those does not discriminate. What I mean is that most bloggers (that I know anyway) will accept or reject a guest post based on it’s quality, not on whether they know the person or not. This provides a great opportunity for a newbie to write an article that could be seen by 20,000 readers.



I don’t know of any other method that could bring traffic as quick. I must admit, I could still do more guest posting myself. I have been pleased with the results in the past. The key is to write a great article – don’t hold back your best stuff. I have seen people grow their blogs very quickly by giving some of their best articles away as guest posts. Also, only submit unpublished content as a guest post. If it has already been published, then the blog that is allowing you to guest post won’t get any search engine traffic for that article. But there are places to republish your articles you have already published – we will get to that in a minute…




Sign up for blog community sites
 Just a few off the top of my head are mybloglog.com, technorati.com, and blogcatalog.com. Look for other blogs in your niche and join their networks and ask to become their friends. Networking with some of your fellow bloggers here will send a few visitors your way and is a good way to get started.

Submit to Blogcarnivals

One of the best things beginning bloggers can do is to sign up for blogcarnivals. At this site you can submit articles that you wrote on your blog to be included in a list of articles by the hosting blog. It is kind of like “open mic night.” If you have a good article with a good title, you can get some good traffic from blogcarnivals, not to mention incoming links from other related sites.

Join Directories
 If I were starting a blog today, one of the first things I would do is Google “whatever topic I want to blog about” + “directory” This should return a list of web directories about your topic. Getting added to these directories will only help. You may not get a lot of traffic from them, but ultimately they will help you get more traffic from the search engines. A few of the more valuable ones to get you started…









Blog Commenting

One of the absolute best ways for new blogs to get traffic is just to comment on other blogs. Commenting with a thoughtful and provocative response will often send a few visitors your way. The blogging community is generally a very social community and those who are active in the community often reap the rewards of it.

Forum Commenting


Becoming involved in forums related to your topic and having a link to your blog in the signature line can send a few visitors. Google “your topic” and “forums” and you are sure to find a few. Just don’t be annoying and go in just to promote yourself. People can see that from a mile away. The new age of the internet (aka Web 2.0) is very much a “give and you shall receive” environment. If you seek to give and be a benefit before seeking your own rewards, you will be much better off.

Linking to other blogs

I don’t know what it is, but everyone wants to know when someone is talking about them. So it is with blogs. When people link to my site, I get a notification and often go check out who linked to me and what the context was. I have had some good relationships form just from this.

Create Squidoo pages

 Squidoo.com, InfoBarrel.com, Hubpages.com  and a handful of others are sites that allow you to build a simple page about a topic. You can do it very quick and the pages often rank well in the search engines. If you build a page that gets a little bit of traffic and have links coming back to your site, you will catch some of those visitors. If that weren’t good enough, many of them allow you to earn money from your articles as well.

Article submissions

Submit articles to article submission sites. These sites collect articles and most allow a bio-section that can include a link back to your blog. Here are a few that are worth looking into…





  
11 tools that have helped make it all possible…

Not all of these tools directly contribute to the bottom line, but each one of them have been very helpful over the last couple years. 
1.Google Analytics – which is a wonderful (and free) statistics tool that will help you keep track of your visitors and analyze a lot of data about them. As I mentioned before it now integrates with Adsense to give even more valuable data.
2.Semiologic WP Theme – This is the theme I used to use for most of my WordPress sites. It costs about $300 for the full version, but I started with the free version, which I think is far more customizable than the vast majority of WP themes out there already. So if you are just starting out your probably don’t need the full version yet, but eventually it is probably worth considering. For what it has allowed me to do I know that it has paid for itself many times over.  
3.Google webmaster tools – This will help you see how Google views your blog. They will also let you know if there are any problems with it that you may not be aware of. For me I had some issues that were really hurting my search rankings, but I found out about them and fixed them and voila! All better.

4.Aweber Email Marketing Service– I haven’t been using this too long, but if you read anything about internet marketing, you will certainly hear about the incredible value in having an email list. I have been happy with Aweber thus far.

5.Google’s Keyword Tool – This is a great tool to get ideas about popular keywords as well.

6.SEObook Keyword Tool – I use this to get a ballpark estimate of how many people are searching for particular key phrases.

7.SocialPoster – This tool allows you to submit articles to multiple social sites. I used to use it to submit to about the top 5-10 social sites.

8.Hittail.com– This one provides ideas for articles based on what you have previously written about and could probably rank for. I just noticed that the free version is gone. If you have a blog that is established it might be worth paying $10 a month for it – I suggest doing the free-trial and see how much it helps you.

9.Stock.xchng – The best free stock photography site I have found.

10.iStockPhoto– The best cheap stock photography site I have found. They have lots of images that you can get for just a few bucks.

11.Feedburner– If you have a blog, you will want to burn a feed. Feedburner makes this fun, organized, and easy…


Learn everything you can

One of the advantages I have is that I love to learn and don’t stop when I make a mistake. I work really hard to learn from my mistakes and figure out what the better course of action would be for the next time. You are going to do things wrong, but you just have to keep going and keep learning. Learning how to use Google search is very important. If you do, you will be able to find an answer to just about every problem you encounter on the web.

Avoid time-wasters



Checking your stats every hour, reading 500 blogs in your RSS, playing on Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon, or Youtube all day will kill your productivity. Focus on what yields results and stay disciplined to stick with that. Social media is an important part of building traffic, but you have to keep it in check.

Have fun



While I wrote this article as a guide to help those who want to make money with a blog, I understand that many people don’t really care about that. Either way, life is too short not to be enjoying it. So whether you want to be a full-time blogger or just communicate with friends – have fun!!
Did you like this article?


Many people have told me that I am “giving away too much for free” with this article. That was my intention. I have had some success making money blogging and want to help others do the same. I just figured that by creating a great and free resource a lot of links would follow – and they have. Some people ask me how they can repay me – which is not necessary -but for those wanting to show their appreciation, I just say linking to the article from their blog is the best compensation I could receive. Thanks for reading!