How To Begin Blogging, Even If You Don't Know Where To Start
Recently, someone asked me a simple question: "How do I begin blogging?" That question reminded me that sometimes, we get so wrapped up in the details of online marketing that those of us who teach it forget to get back to basics. However, many times those basic building blocks are exactly what our audience needs. Blogging is a perfect example of this.
There is a ton of information out there on blogging tips, how to publicize your blog, how to make money with your blog, how to link up your blog with social media sites and on and on. But what if you just need the bare essentials so you can just get going? Sometimes those basics end up lost in the sea of information. Here's what you need to know to be on your way. (And yes, you will find others who say there are other ways to do it. But in my own experience and from helping others get started, these few steps will get you set up right.)
1) Pick a blogging platform. This may sound scary if you are an absolute blogging novice, but there are essentially two types of choices: hosted by someone else, or hosted by you (often referred to as self-hosted.) You may have heard of Blogger.com, which is a very easy to use option that is hosted by Google. It may be a good choice in terms of its simplicity, but I recommend going with a self-hosted platform such as Wordpress. This can be downloaded for free at Wordpress.org. Self-hosted options such as this allow you to have a lot more control over your blog and they give you a lot more flexibility, which you'll want in the long run.
2) Pick a name for your blog. When you are getting started, the only real costs associated with a blog are the domain name and the hosting (which we will address next.) You can get a domain name from a site like GoDaddy for less than $10.00 a year. But first, you need to think about what you will name your blog. A .com extension is always preferred over others such as .net or .info, and your name should be a reflection of what the main focus of your blog is. Also, try to stay away from extra-long domain names, or those with hard-to-spell words if possible.
3) Pick a web host. With a self-hosted blog, you will need a web hosting company to provide server space to access your website from. Usually this service is relatively inexpensive for a smaller site; the average cost is around $60-$100 per year. If you already have a website and just want to add a blog on to it, then you can remain with the host you have been using for that site. In many cases, people who add a blog to their site simply have their web administrator make the blog another page of the website, accessed from your domain—for example, www.mywebsite.com/blog. If your blog stands alone and is not connected to another site, you would install the blog software on your domain via any free FTP service you can find online, such as Filezilla.
4) Start writing. Hopefully, at this point you will have taken some time to get pretty clear on what you want to talk about on your blog. Commit to writing your first post, which can be as short as 200 words if you want it to be. The idea is just to get going. Don't worry about getting a bunch of readers or comments, about setting up an RSS feed, submitting your site to directories, or customizing your theme. Those things are important, but can be investigated with time. Continue writing posts on topics that you think will be helpful to your market, and before you know it, the whole blogging thing will be old hat.
Questions and Answers
There are quite a few good blogging platforms online, but the best of all is WordPress and that is why you must get a WordPress blog if you expect to succeed online. If you do not know how to set up your blog, just make use of WordPress blog setup services.
What do you sell as a blogger? What's the difference on Wordpress? And how much can you make Wordpress blogging? This guide highlights ways to optimize any blog for search engines, how to sell via passive and linear income, and how to add blogging as a major part of your career (if not your sole career).
Lets talk about how to create a wordpress blog, setting up a brand new WordPress.com blog can take as little as 5 minutes to do. Got 5 minutes? Alright then, lets get started!
Setting up a profitable WordPress blog has to be (arguably) the easiest as well as the most effective way of getting your online web presence set up & live quickly & easily. Not only does the magic WordPress software relieve you of having to code a traditional website with HTML & CSS, but it provides you with so much functionality in terms of optimizing it for search engines, setting up Amazon stores, RSS feeds and so much more.
Any Internet marketing strategy starts with a great looking web site. For a small network marketing business, spending thousands of dollars to to have a professional create your slit may not be an option. A good alternative is a WordPress blog.
Traffic is only as good as the potential of those people to become your customers. So what you really want is "the right" traffic. You want to attract your customers to your site. I get a lot of questions about pay-per-click advertising. Here is my most current answer: Yes, you can pay to get traffic to your site with pay-per-click advertising but the question is, how much will you pay and it is really the right traffic? You can spend your entire advertising budget and not get the traffic
A fresh look at some of my reasons for suspicion - and a continuing battle against the organised group of bloggers.
7 Steps Important to Make Best Strategy Blog to Development for Your Business Online
Getting into social media marketing is a smart idea for any business owner. No matter whether your business is online or offline, this still remains true. With so many businesses reaping the benefits of social marketing, it's a shame to see so many others losing out. Just looking at it from this angle highlights the value of using a blog for your business. A blog can give any business an immediate benefit when it comes to social media.
Getting into social media marketing is a smart idea for any business owner. No matter whether your business is online or offline, this still remains true. The web environment for business is focusing on social marketing so much that it becomes imperative. Just looking at it from this angle highlights the value of using a blog for your business. A blog can give any business an immediate benefit when it comes to social media.
If you want to see real results from your online marketing efforts, a blog for any business is the perfect choice. Seriously, you can build the simplest blog and do well depending on your business. When you have your blog running, you can focus on some serious marketing for it. A blog will support just about any kind of content format, so a video blog will work very well indeed. This article will look at some simple strategies for building up a blog for your business.
You followed the advice you received and set up a Facebook Page for your business—hooray! However, if you're like most business owners, you might be stuck saying "now what?" Engagement is a key piece of any social media marketing strategy, and Facebook Pages are no exception. The easy part is getting it up and running! Once you do that, you need to continually give people a reason to remain interested and keep coming back.
I recently returned from my coach Alicia Forest's Online Business Breakthrough Workshop. It was very refreshing, actually, as the event was kept purposely small to give it a true workshop feel. I had a lot of fun not only learning, but networking with the others and finding out all about their particular businesses. Now that I've had time to absorb and reflect upon the event, a couple of key things stand out to me, and I thought it would be helpful to share them with others as well.
As social media and blogging have grown more and more popular, there's been some talk about the demise of the "lowly" email newsletter, or e-zine. Once a staple of business owners using the Internet to market and promote their businesses, it seems that lately the thinking is that they're not so important anymore. Or, even worse, not as effective.
When you have your own business, one of the things you'll hear over and over is to get clear on who it is you serve---also known as that all-important "target market." But knowing who these people are is only part of the equation.
I always recommend the WordPress platform to people looking to get their own website or blog up and running fast. You also may know that I use and highly recommend the Thesis theme. What's a theme? A theme with regard to WordPress is just a way to alter and customize the design, look and presentation of your WordPress site.
Discuss this Article
