Congratulations on your decision to start a blog. The blogosphere is a community unlike anything you have ever experienced before. It is imperative that you do not simply jump right into blogging. You need to have a well designed plan in order to make your entry into the blogosphere as enjoyable and exciting as possible. In this article you will learn proven steps that will make your transition into blogging as smooth and enjoyable as possible.
Choosing Your Blog Name and Topic
The very first step that needs to be accomplished is for you to decide exactly what it is that you wish to blog about. The topic of discussion on your blog can affect anything from the name of your new blog to whether you wish to place advertisements on your site.
You don't want the name of your blog to be “Billy Bob's Bed And Breakfast” and have all of your posts be about sports. You need to build trust with your potential readership. Heading to “Billy Bob's Bed And Breakfast” blog only to find out that baseball preseason has started will instantly reduce your credibility in the eye or your potential readership.
The subject of your blog can also impact your decision to place advertisements on your site. If your goal is to earn money from your blog, a narrowly focused niche topic is advised. If your goal is to simply get out there and blog, the need for a narrowly focused nich topic is not needed.
Purchasing and Registering Your Domain Name
When choosing your domain name be sure that the word or phrase that you choose reflects the content of your blog and is also related to the title of your blog. You may also consider purchasing any common misspellings of your chosen name. This will allow you to redirect potential readership from the mistyped address to the correct address of your blog. This is done from within your host server if you decide to self host. It is advisable to stick with the more common domains of .com, .net, or .org. Domainsite - NameCheap.com - Godaddy - Network Solutions - RegFly - are jus t some of the sites that offer domain name pruchasing and registering services.
Pay Hosting or Free Hosting
Hosting your blog on a blog hosting site such as Wordpress or Blogspot is an excellent choice for the new blogger on a tight budget. Along with free hosting you get the ease of use of the free hosts built in content manager. There is no need to be familiar with HTML or PHP coding. Most free hosting site also offer various quantities of pre-made blog templates for you to choose from. The domain name for a free hosted blog is usually formated as http://yourblogname.freehostsname.com Keep that in mind.
Pay hosting offers numerous advantages of its own. You can host your own domain (http://www.yourblogname.com). Paid hosting allows you to control every aspect of your site. You decide the design and if needed the advertising content. Increase in versatility is another intrinsic quality of paid hosting. You are able to run various CGI and scripting application. A knowledge of server function, file managers, file editors, HTML and PHP is advised in order to take full advantage of the options paid hosting offers. Some of the better known paid hosting sites are Host Gator , HostMonster , LunarPages , and , WebHostingPad.
Social Networking
The life blood of any blog is traffic. Every day approximatley 150,000 new blogs are created. Having a solid plan in place in order to promote your blog is an absolute neccessity. There are dozens if not hundreds of social network sites available for you to join. These networks are vital in promoting and directing traffic to your blog.
Populair is the absolutely best site for finding all the social networks that you need. It also contains a list of the hottest blogs. Bookmark those blogs. Read them. Post comments in them. The more you make your name seen and known the more traffic you will generate for your site.
Odds and Ends
Always ping your blog after each new post that you publish. Pinging your blog alerts search engines and crawlers that your blog has been updated with fresh content. By pinging your blog you improving your chances of having your blog indexed. A simple search for "ping blog" on any search engine will retrieve the most popular sites offering pinging services.
Use a traffic monitor for your blog. Google Analytics is web based free traffic monitor. Monitoring your traffic will allow you to pinpoint the dips and spikes in your traffic. By analyzing those dips and spikes you can ascertain whether a recent post, redesign or anything else has affected your traffic flow.
Create a sitemap. A sitemap is a list of the pages on your website or blog. Creating and submitting a sitemap helps make sure that search engines and indexes crawlers know about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by normal crawling process.
Set up an RSS feed for your blog. RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, blogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS feed to whoever wants it. Set up an option for readers to subscribe to your blog via email. Offer your readers various means of obtaining your blog's content.
Finally, enjoy the blogging and blogosphere experience!
