Introduction to Blogging

Having a blog is a great way to share your thoughts online. Blogging is fun!

It’s easy to get started and use. You can use a blog to promote your business or even generate revenue directly with your blog.

Like many activities, the more you put into it, the more you get out of it.

What is a blog?

“Blog” stands for “web log”.

Wikipedia has a good detailed explanation.

A blog is a website with several characteristics:

1. Easy for the blogger to add content, including articles, images, links and basic formatting.
2. Allows the blogger to post many articles which are tagged by date and archived.
3. Enables many categories and cross-references.
4. As the blogger updates the blog, the blog website produces an RSS feed. This enables search engines to find content easily and makes it easy for other online software to share blog content.
5. Often blogs enable site visitors to post comments below each article.
6. Effective blogs include new articles frequently.

Get Started Blogging

To have a blog, you need an account to use blog software on a web host server. There are many options available. WeblogMatrix.org has an in-depth comparison of various blog options.

Basic blogging:
You can sign up for an account and start blogging almost instantly with these services:

• WordPress
• Blogger
• TypePad

Disadvantages: minimal ability to customize and incorporate advanced features. However, these services offer various pricing options that give you more control to customize your blog.

More advanced blogging:
If you want to have the maximum ability to customize your blog, you need to have blog software installed our your web host site.

WordPress is the most popular free blog software that allows you to install the software on your web host site. You need to have PHP and mySQL software also installed on your web host site in order to operate WordPress. Most web hosts have the necessary infrastructure to enable you to use WordPress.

Disadvantages: to take advantage of this ability to customize your blog, you need to have some knowledge of PHP and HTML coding.

Video Tutorials on WordPress

Click here for a wonderful and extensive video library for WordPress training.

This video is a long detailed step-by-step guide to blogging using the WordPress service.

Promoting your Blog

Set up a account with the following services to promote your blog:

• Digg
• Del.icio.us
• StumbleUpon
• Feedburner

Also, you can use these services inside your blog to help encourage others to promote your blog. These services contain links to other services (e.g., Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.):

• Add To Any (used on this blog)
• Share This

Each time you add a new post to your blog, be sure to promote it via these services.

Advertizing Revenue

Google AdSense is a service that enables you to easily including paid advertizing into your blog. This may not work for free blog services, but it is easy to implemented if you have a web host service with access to your blog’s programming code.

You need to have gmail account to use Google AdSense. You set up a Google Adsense account and you can easily set up online ads to include in your site. Google provide you with code to paste into your blog’s web page. Each time someone clicks on an ad on your blog, you receive revenue to your account.

Yahoo and other companies offer similar services.