Blogging Tips For Newbies
Posted By admin on September 5, 2009
If you have never posted to a blog or weblog before the first thing you need to do is decide what the topic of your blog will be.
If you plan on starting a business type blog, it needs to be a little more informational, but still informal, so that the people who read it, actually want to read it and will want to keep coming back to check for more helpful information.
If it is a personal blog then it needs to be a little more fun and entertaining. You can fill with just about anything that interested you. Although it is a good idea not to include to much personal information, because you never know who will be reading.
As you begin to blog you will find that blogging is not as formal as a standard web page. In fact it can make it seem more accessible and friendly, if the blog is written in a more conversational style.
You can express your views in a more informal way on any given topic rather than just telling the reader what it is that you want to convey to them. This allows your reader to become more interested and involved in what you have to say.
Picking your niche carefully is very important if you are planning to generate an income from your blog. You don’t wantto choose too wide of a niche or you will find that it is hard to compete with the big sites and blogs.
For instance, rather than choosing health and fitness you might try, a smaller more focused topic like exercise for the office, or the home workers guide to staying fit. This gives you more chance of ranking well in your niche.
If you use great keywords in you blog you can expect to see a lot of traffic from the search engines. This is the best type of traffic because it is targeted and it’s free.
There are many ways and tools you can use to find good keywords for your blog. Like the Overture (Yahoo!) Keyword Suggestion Tool
When you type in a keyword related to your blog it will give you a list of keywords to use in your blog that people are searching for. It will also tell you how many times the word is searched for, plus other useful information that you can use to find the best keywords for your blog, so search engines will send you traffic.
If you vary the keywords that you use you will give yourself a better chance of getting free traffic from the search engines. Many search engine specialists think that the search engines look for a keyword density of around 2-3%.
This means that for every 100 words that you write you will need to mention the keyword 2-3 times. Try not to let this affect your style of writing. It is very important to incorporate the keywords into your text so that the information still sounds interesting to your readers.
This will take some practice, but it will be worth your efforts.
Although there isn’t an exact science when it comes to how often you should post it is a good idea to post regularly but not too much.
When you start to build up a readership, you need to post regularly to keep them coming back. But don’t start posting dozens of times a day, or your blog may be seen as Spam by the search engines and this could have a serious effect on your ranking.
After you have been posting for a while you will find your own formula for posting simply by keeping track of the results you receive.
It’s a good idea to “ping” your blog whenever you add a new post. “Pinging” is a way of letting the search engines know that you have added content to your blog.
Pinging is very simple just go to a pinging site such as feedburner.com or pingomatic.com and fill in the details of your blog. Then when you add posts to your blog, just go to their site and click the ping button.
This will get your blog post added to their news feed much faster than waiting for the search engines to find it.
If you haven’t done so already, it’s time to submit your blog to some blog directories like Blogcatalog.com, Bloglines.com or all-blogs.net.
These are only a few there are many others that you can submit to also. Just do a quick search for “blog directory” and you will get a complete list.
You can also submit your blog to traditional search engines such as AltaVista, MSN and traditional directories such as DMOZ.
Directories (particularly DMOZ) will help you increase your relevance with Google.
It’s good to submit to as many blog, RSS directories and search engines as possible. This is a simple but repetitive process can be done by hand or with a submission service or software.
Another way that you can get more traffic to your blog is by submitting articles to article directories such as EzineArticles.com or Goarticles.com. It is the same process as submitting articles to promote your website. The only difference is you that you will need to include the address of your blog in the resource box, so that readers who like your articles can click through to read your blog.
You can also submit to many more directories by using an article submission service or software that will submit your article to several directories at the same time.
Being a frequent participant on forums can not only increase the traffic to your blog it can also provide you with links back to your blog, which will help your search engine ranking.
Not to mention the fact that it can increase your chances of being seen as an expert, plus help you sell more of your products and make you new friends too.
Forums very often have a signature box that appears on all of the posts that you make. In your signature file you can add you blog address and a brief advertisement to entice readers to click through to your blog.
To find a list of forums that are related to your topic just do a quick search like this, forum + “your topic”. For instance if you are looking for dog related forums your search term would be (forum + “dog”). This will return a full list of dog forums that you can pick from.
If you want to increase the revenue from you blog you can do this by adding Adsense ads to it. These are ads that are put on your blog by Goggle and you get paid every time someone clicks them.
You just apply to Goggle for an Adsense account and they give you a small piece of code to add to your blog and the ads show up automatically.
If you are using Blogger they already have an adsense option in the dashboard settings under template. So all you have to do pick the type of ad to show.
With Wordpress and some other blog software you can find Adsense ready templates (often free) that you can use to easily incorporate the ads into your blog. Just do a search for; blog template + “adsense” and you will find some great options.
Another good way to get income from your blog is to promote affiliate programs from it.
This means that whenever one of your readers buys one of the products that you are advertising from your blog you will receive a commission from the sale.
Promoting affiliate programs is the next best thing to having your own product to sell. There are many places to find products to promote. Two of the top affiliate market places are Clickbank and Commission Junction. Clickbank has a huge variety of digital products with a higher commission rate while Commission Junction carries more physical goods.
Another great place to look is at Associateprograms.com it is an affiliate program directory.
Even when your blog is up and running and you have good steady traffic to it, do not think that your readers will just keep on coming back to your blog if you do not post regularly.
Blog readers can be very fickle and the best way to keep them is to give them new things to read so that they will keep coming back.
The next thing you can do is find a way to keep in touch with them. You can do this by adding a contact from to your blog, so that you can capture their email address so that you can send them a little note to let them know that you have added a new post.
There are different ways the you can do this, but one of the easiest is to use an autoresponder service like Getresponse.com or Aweber.com that will allow you to assign your blog feed to an autoresponder which will send out a message every time you post to your blog.
Video is everywhere these days so why not use it on your blog. With all of the tools available it has never been easier to add video to your existing blog or create a complete video blog. Vlogs are increasing in popularity very quickly and it is a great new way to share your thoughts with your visitors. Plus increase the value of your blog.
It’s pretty simple to add video to your blog once you have created one. All you have to do is upload it to a video hosting service like Youtube or Metacafe and use the code that they provide to embed the video on your blog. Most video hosting services have easy to follow instructions.
If you don’t have your own videos you can also share videos created by other people on your blog. Just be sure to keep the videos on topic with your content.