Blogging Basics

If you're considering starting a blog, it's a good idea to take time learning blogging basics. This article is a simple guide on how to start your own successful blog right now.

How Do I Start Blogging?

Anyone can sign up for a free blog account and immediately start blogging. However, those blogs typically end up lost and forgotten, collecting cobwebs in some dark corner of the Internet. Successful blogs are run by bloggers who understand and closely adhere to blogging basics that include proper planning, frequent updates, and relentless promotion.

So you've made the decision to start a blog. Being a blogger is an exciting and rewarding experience. Some people write a blog only as an online journal, and don't really care whether or not people read it. Other people want to have a blog that attracts crowds of readers and generates interesting discussions. If you want to draw a lot of traffic, or you'd like to generate ad revenue from your blog, then it's important to consider the following factors when considering your topic selection.

• Is the topic overpopulated? Carefully research the general topic that you want to write about. Use Google's Keyword Research tool as part of your research and try to avoid overly general topics that have millions of searches. Your odds of competing well within those topics with a new blog is minimal. Use Google's suggestions and find less populated topics related to your niche.
• Do you have plenty of content? When you choose a topic to write about, it should be a subject with a lot of potential sub-topics that you could explore and write about with every post. One of the most common reasons many new bloggers fail is because they run out of things to write about.
• Are you passionate about the subject? One of the blogging basics that almost always holds true is that bloggers who have an intense interest in the subject of the blog are very successful, because they can motivate themselves to write about the topic almost every day.

When you know what you want to write about, and you know that there's an audience out there ready to read what you have to say on the topic, you're ready to move on to the next step of blogging basics - setting up your blog. You'll need to decide whether or not you want to establish a free or a self-hosted blog.

• Free blog: There are a number of free blogs to choose from, including LiveJournal, Blogger, Wordpress and others. The two leading free blog sites are Blogger and Wordpress. Both offer extremely simple setup and configuration. The one major drawback with free blogs is that they are hosted on a web host that you have no control over. This means that even if you spend years developing a great deal of content for your blogs, you always run the risk of having it deleted if the blogging site ever goes defunct or simply decides to remove existing blogs.
• Self-hosted blog: A self-hosted blog is one where you upload and install blog software to your own web hosting account. The advantage to this approach is that you control the entire blog. The drawback of self-hosting a blog is that you need to be a bit more knowledgeable in how to set up and configure a new blog on your own hosting account. This can involve adding tables to an SQL database, uploading and installing templates, and sometimes even editing the code within the blog template. Self-hosted blogs are not for anyone who feels weak in the knees about web programming.

Once you've set up your blog, you'll need to figure out a way to update it with fresh content constantly. Most successful blogs are updated at least two or three times a week. Some are even updated several times a day. While the highest quality blogs are usually those where a blogger writes all of his own content, some blogs do very well by publishing content that other people write. The following are your options when you're looking for blog content.

• Research popular keyword searches and the most popular "buzz," or online news, and write blog entries based on those.
• Use free articles that you are allowed to reprint from directories like Ezinearticles.com or ArticlesBase.com (just remember to credit the author).
• Add a widget that posts Twitter updates (either your own or people you follow) to your blog.
• Add RSS feeds that will update your blog with new content from blogs and websites that you follow.

While most of the effort of blogging is in constantly publishing interesting and fresh content, much of the real success of a blog comes from promotion. Blog promotion takes many forms, and it's limited only by your imagination. Nonconventional methods might include things like giving away free T-shirts or mugs at college campuses with your blog address on it, or having contests and giving away prizes in order to create buzz surrounding your blog. However, the simplest, time tested methods of promoting a blog involve constantly writing free articles in article directories that link to your blog, establishing yourself as an expert in the field by taking part in forum discussions, and constantly commenting on other blogs. This draws the interest of other bloggers and often initiates inter-blog updates and linking.

The most important thing to remember about blogging basics is that your own blog is only one part of a very large, worldwide blogging community. By interacting with other bloggers and taking an active part with other blogs, you'll eventually find that your own blog is generating a great deal of traffic, and great reader comments as well.

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