What Is Blog ?

In these days everyone wants to show himself/herself, organization, company or any sort of organization wants to show others as a superior personality two create a great impact on others, Because the way you show that way you get .

What really I want to say that

So, what is blog now ?

Every starter wants to learn about blog or a website but what I think blog has more majority then a website in my personal experience, a blog is a small news paper of yours activity which you want to show to others in the form of media, images, text, object, ETC…

The activity of updating your acts, feelings, experience which you can show in blog that handling part is called as blogging. And the one who own that blog, who works on that blog called as a blogger. A blog is a type of a website which use to update your all new content from time to time you need. Blog contains many features which really help any individual in the form of entries, matter, a post, a topic, material, in the form of graphics and videos. Many people use the blog for their companies, Organizations or many people also use blog to earn some money. By Google Adsense, Selling product etc.

Now you will learn about ” How To Create Blog “

Blog Basics

Blogs give your readers and consumers a chance, not only to read and connect with you, but a chance to comment and discuss with you, and your team, the information that you’re sharing – allowing them to further relate to your message. And a consumer that relates to you is a customer in waiting ! Our guide covers the very basics of blogging .

• Consider your theme and then build some keywords around it, because for the first little while, you should try to include at least some of them in every post. You’ll get archived in all of the right places that way, which will lead valuable NON COMMENT generated traffic to your blog. You’ll also be commenting on blogs similar to yours and hopefully, generating more traffic based on the links you leave. You can choose your topic, keyword, and theme simply by considering what, in connection to your business you’re an expert in. Once you’ve looked at that, you can decide whether it’s profitable, or viable to pursue it. If not, look at a related area that you can cover – your blog should always relate to your business choices, and give you interested traffic. Having said that, your blog isn’t a free advertising system and nothing more – you’ve got to remember that people will be turned off by blatant advertising.Open up both Google and Yahoo, and start plugging your keywords into it – at the top you’ll see a listing 1 of (a number) – you can then divide your ‘competition’ number by the total of your searches (a number) – that will give you a rating for that keyword – and the keyword with the ‘best’ ratings are the ones you’ll probably want to focus on.

Got your keywords?

What do you want to blog about ?

• Once you’ve got your keywords, you’ll have an idea, at least, of the profitable areas of your niche that you can take advantage of. You’ll be able to choose an interesting niche – for both you to write in, and your prospective readers.You’ll find that you can narrow it down pretty easily based on what you’ve got on your keyword lists – and what YOU feel like you want to write.”While its important to work out what you want to do with your blog, based on your view of profitability, it’s also important to remember that working based on keywords alone is a sure fire way to build an impersonal, and possibly unmotivated blog for your readers.

Choosing your platform

• There are several major platforms to blog on, but for simplicity’s sake, we’re only going to focus on three options: WordPress (self hosted), WordPress (hosted) and Blogger. All three give you strong, steady options to blog from, and all three are easy to configure – and best of all, all three should integrate with any structure you’ve already created or are planning to create within your business.You may find, however, that you can’t integrate the self hosted WordPress with your site, but you should find that you can find a complimentary template on most good self hosted WordPress blogs.

WordPress – self hosted

• By far and away, one of the most popular options for anyone that is serious about their blogging, the self hosted WordPress option. You can install your blog anywhere on your site, and its completely within your control, which means YOU can choose what you’d like to have running – an important feature if you’re looking to add the ability to do things like email the information to people, or polls. Or your own advertising in some cases.By far and away, the easiest way to install WordPress is via Fantastico – most cpanel hosts offer both Fantastico and the ability to install up to date WordPress. Otherwise, you can find instructions online at http://wordpress.org

You can choose your own themes, your own plugins – and modify it in any way you see fit.

 

WordPress (hosted)

• Hosted WordPress is a secondary option for anyone whose hosting won’t support the WordPress self install options. You can grab blogs from lots of places, but places like http://wordpress.org won’t allow you to run a commercial blog .Hosted WordPress blogs will only ever offer the very basics of WordPress blogging – you can’t control the themes on offer, which means you can’t choose a specific theme – unless it’s already installed on the site. The same applies to plugins.

Blogger

• Blogger is a Google owned blogging system, and is highly popular with non tech savvy people. It gives you a basic frame to build on – and is less flexible than either version of  WordPress hosted blogs.
  However, Blogger is a great option if you really don’t want to modify anything to do with your blog, other than the theme and possibly add some surface widgets.Blogger also lets you archive your blog on your own site, giving you all of the benefits of self hosting with none of the update headaches.
  Ultimately, there are more software options for your blog – such as Moveable Type (perl based) and Typepad (hosted, by the same company that offers Moveable Type and Livejournal). Moveable type is not free for commercial purposes – another one that isn’t free, but is a really solid blogging package is Expression Engine – again, you’ll have to make sure that you get a valid licence for it, for the purposes you want to use it for.

 What about CMS’s?

• I’m not recommending any of the CMS based systems, despite the fact that you can use them to build really nice, really strong blogs; you can’t use some of the nicer features of blogging that you really need to take full advantage of, to get the most out of your efforts.Most CMS systems don’t have tagging protocols, track backs and pinging – though they have ways to leave comments per article or post, you’ll find that they are lacking for full featured blogs.
  All of the options will give you a blog that you can build a solid base from, but of course ultimately, where you want to build your blog, be it on your own website or via Blogger (to archive on your site) or hosted with another site, you’ll have to stick with what you choose – purely for the fact that you’re going to be promoting it – and the last thing you want is to move on after a couple of weeks cause you’ve played with the others and discover you prefer one over the other.

 

There is NO HARM in testing them all out first and getting comfortable, if you’ve never blogged – or haven’t explored for a while. WordPress (self hosted) is easy to install ‘vanilla’ (no plugins or themes) via Fantastico – just follow the instructions presented and it’ll install a simple WordPress install in around three clicks.

Once you’ve gotten comfortable you’ll need to decide on your theme – you’ll also want to pick plugins for WordPress, play with certain features in Blogger, and add widgets in other programs. We’ll cover the plugins and other features for Blogger at the end of the book – for the moment, all you need do, now, is to find a theme you’re comfortable with.

Picking a theme

•  Most people that found blogs have great plans – they want to write interesting content (that makes them money for their effort) and they want to be THE site that people come to for their information.Most people don’t consider what they want their site to look like though. Whether this is a deliberate oversight or if they just don’t know what to do with their theme, it’s probably one of the biggest ‘beginner’ mistakes that anyone can make.
  Blogger comes with lots of pre-installed themes – or you can add your own CSS to it, to give it your ‘unique’ look. Its important to at least personalise any theme you choose be it on WordPress(self hosted) or Blogger – its not possible on hosted versions of WordPress, or at least, not as easily. There are customisable options on WordPress.com but they cost money and they are still aren’t as flexible as you can have on your own site, so aren’t as customisable as you really need to present a professional image for yourself and your blog.

There are many themes that you can choose from – and it can kind of be like decorating your first house – lots of fun, but very wearing!

WordPress:

1. http://themes.wordpress.com
2. http://www.wpthemesfree.com/
3. http://www.wpthemespot.com/

All of the above sites allow you to use their themes for free, though its well worth checking the licences – some are completely open – others are restricted simply to personal use.

You can also buy templates from professional designers – or look around and see who other people are using. It’s a fair bet that your colleagues or favourite blogs will have designers to recommend highly. 

Blogger

• Unsurprisingly most Blogger template sites are actually hosted ON Blogger, so you’ve got a vast array of free blog themes.
  http://blogger-themes.blogspot.com/ –  The final site also contains a lot of wonderful tips outwith the scope of this guide, about how to add more features, such as web albums (including Picasa) and forms.

Themes are easiest described as the thing that ‘skins’ your site to look different – more than that though, your theme controls ALL of the appearance of your blog – it’s not just the wall paper on the walls, but the walls themselves in some cases.

Blog content

Putting the cart before the horse?

• Writing for the web isn’t a case of collecting your ideas and then putting them online – and blog posting especially is a hidden and deceptively simple looking ‘art form’ all of its own.You need to sit down and plan down your blog. You need to plan at least 20 posts and choose some sort of posting schedule.Once you’ve planned your content, you can start writing your posts. In the case of  WordPress, you can queue your posts as you are writing them, giving you the additional advantage of being able to post series and have them ready to go, without losing your flow. If you’re using blogger, you should still write your posts as you can then simply copy and paste them into your blog on the day you want them to go live.

What should a blog post BE?

• Blog posts should follow one of a few formulae, but before you look at them – you should probably consider what they can and can’t contain – there are a couple of ‘no no’s’ in blogging.This means that though your blog will do the job of promoting your product, you have to do it without being blatantly, obviously advertorial.
  You CAN write about products – talk about why you’re so passionate about them – their features, the things that make you want to use them – or the services, or problems they solve.
  You also don’t need to just WRITE – you can upload pictures, podcasts (audio), video, multimedia – in fact, the more interactive your blog is, without intruding on the experience of the average visitor, the more traffic and return visitors you’ll get and the more comments your blog will garner.

 Writing for the web

 Writing for the web is an art form.

• You need to use short sentences, with subheadings, usually one per paragraph – those sub headings should be bolded, to stand out, because studies have proven, without a shadow of a doubt that the majority of internet users, especially those with a lower technical savvy than usual, skim read.
  They skim read because we’ve been conditioned to believe two things about the internet: there’s a lot of good information out there – but it can be incredibly hard to find, even on ‘trusted’ sites. Google’s quality, page rank and duplicate content algorithms go a long way to helping to sift the dross from the perfect, but we’re still left with people gaming the system, or worse, not being able to clearly state what we, ourselves are looking for.
  Keyword searching is a really good technique to learn, but for most people typing in short phrases, or whole questions, is the way to go, complete with punctuation .
  Depending on the sophistication of the software in question, they might get exactly what they are looking for, but the same studies that suggest people skim read, also tell us that people really don’t understand how to get the most from the internet.

Blogging is ultimately about YOUR BRAND and YOUR STYLE, so use it well, and you can’t go wrong.

 The most popular blog post formula

• Blogging has fallen into several styles, like articles in newspapers and magazines. You can write and choose to use several different formulae, but ultimately, you have to find a way, and a style of writing that is comfortable for you.
  The most common and most responsive way of blogging is ‘problem – solution’. You take one common problem or current trend, or newsworthy topic and you ‘solve’ it.
  Solving it can be as simple as providing your opinion, showing where you stand on any given issue, or it could be offering an actual solution to a problem many of us encounter.
  Problem – solution or ‘action – reaction’ blogs are very popular with a vast majority of readers, but aren’t without their inherent problems.

This can be a good thing – being of conviction in what you’re saying not only gives you the authenticity that most blogs lack, for fear of stirring up trouble, but will also promote conversation – but not all of the conversation you promote will be positive.

Another type of highly popular blog post is the review.

• It’s fairly straight forward to write a review post, but you’ve got to be careful. If it doesn’t fit with the theme of your blog, you’ll find that it actually damages your overall traffic. Your blog should always be laser focussed on the niche you want to talk about, and related areas to the niche. You can’t go off topic!

Another type of post is ‘a list’ – lists of the ten most popular (x)’s.

(x) reasons why (y) is the only option/ a very bad idea

(x) reasons why you should/should not do (y)

(x) life saving hacks.

As MyFreeClasses highly popular blog, http://myfreeclasses.com is full of these tips and tricks – an article centred on solving a problem. The problem may not be implicitly stated, but instead touched on in general terms, but the solutions are always bang on the money, and that makes this blog a must read.

Its style is easy to emulate too. What problems does your niche have – are there several solutions (that you know of?) and can you express them in simple terms?

The final type of post that is very popular and easy to write is the feature – features can be one article, or several long articles, with links to each other. They should cover something important and be packed full of information. Keyword rich, you want your readers to come away feeling like they’ve really learned something, and search engines to come away with a whole new platter of wonderful content to add to their indexes.

The art of writing itself

•  Ultimately, you have to remember that though some blogs are founded for personal gain, if you’re working on it to make any sort of income at all; you need to consider that your blog is a marketing project. You’re either marketing the content, your company, or in some cases, yourself.
  You can also recommend other marketers that you like, without appearing too fawning, if you’re honest. Talking about experience is a sure fire way to improve on both your customer image, and your professional image.

You can also….

Use your blog to archive articles and other freebies for your company.

More importantly than that though, always ensure that you’ve got somewhere in your blog for people to sign up to your mailing list. Giving them the option to do that will also mean that you’ve got multiple traffic streaming to and from you blog, and though it seems odd to set up like this at first, people ARE more likely to sign up for your newsletter (with and without incentives!) if they like what you’re saying on your blog.

Promoting Your Blog

•  Just putting your blog online is not enough. Once your content is off to that flying start (and its perfectly acceptable to found a blog and then backdate a couple (though, not too many!) posts to give your readers something to read. So over days 1 to four, you should have decided what to blog about, created and installed your blog, made sure you’ve got enough content to last you at least a month and posted it.

Now what?

Well, the long and short of it is, NOW comes the hard work – NOW you have to promote your blog.Promoting your blog will put it in front of people. Fortunately, there’s a myriad of ways to do it, but, unfortunately, they all take time.

The bottom line to this is that the more readers you have, the more traffic you have – the more customers you should generate

Is your blog outperforming your expectations?

Every marketing strategy needs reviewed every once in a while. You’ll need to tweak, to adjust, and most of all, lose the bits that you’re getting nothing from.

Step One: Keep Track of Your Blog Results

• Tracking your blogs stats is as simple as ABC.
  First though, you’ve got to work out what you want to track. Do you want to track your traffic? Do you care more about comments? How about what you’re earning…

Primary goal – traffic

• Keeping track of your traffic is as easy as finding a stats program you like and using it. There’s a great one built into cpanel called Awstats, or you could use http://analytics.google.com
  Either way, you have to understand how to read the statistics.– the most important two numbers in it are the unique visitors and your page views. You might also want to see who is bookmarking you – in the sense of coming back to visit you using a simple ‘bookmark me’ function in their browser.

Bookmarking beyond the simple ‘favourite’ concept.

• Favouriting a site, or bookmarking it, is the act of saving the URL in a list that you can then access from a menu in your browser. But in recent years there’s also been another way to bookmark a site – and that way is interestingly, to drive boatloads of traffic to your site, if used correctly.
  Its most important to remember that this form of ‘bookmarking’ was initially based on the browser based lists we keep on our own pc’s – designed around allowing you to ‘share’ your favourites with others.
  And then sites like Digg, Technorati and Delicious sprung up, giving people a broad range of ways to mark out the best items in another blog – sharing it, with everyone that’s interested in the niche of the bookmarked blogs. If you’re using social bookmarking, you should also try to keep track of roughly how well it’s working out for you – how many ‘diggs’ you’re receiving, how much traffic its referring in. Once you know how well your traffic is performing, you can decide which content is driving the BEST traffic. If you’ve got a goal for your blog, be it making money, referrals, or simply driving traffic to your other site, you can use your traffic (and affiliate stats/earnings) to find out which posts are drawing the most traffic and work on extending on those results.

Advanced techniques

 FeedBurner

• FeedBurner is a great way to add additional options to your site, notlimited to subscription boxes, portable feed results, reposting of your information (for example, syndicating your articles is possible just by giving people your FeedBurner code. Their site updates automatically, and you control where they are clicking through to if they are interested in what you are saying in your articles. Its win – win).FeedBurner was recently bought out by Google, giving you several amazing new options – including opening up their Pro services.Most people use a lot of the FeedBurner functions, so its highly recommended that you grab your own account and explore.

 Aweber

• If you’ve fed your Blogger atom feed through FeedBurner this will also work, but WordPress has feeds that work well with one of the most amazing things that Aweber offers for bloggers, and one of the main reasons I use Aweber.Aweber has a facility that allows you to attach your blog feed to your email list, giving you the opportunity to email your list the instant you update your blog. This is a great way to automate some of your posting process. And all it takes is filling in a form in Aweber, and putting a subscription form on your site. Not so advanced really.You’ll also be able to set up a template for your posts at the same time – you can choose one of dozens of templates that can compliment your site.So, you need to work out how to get Aweber to send out an email once a week – if your average posting schedule is three posts a week, set it up to post your information every four posts – add one to your week’s post UNLESS you only post once a week – in which case, set it to send once per week.

Trackbacks

• There are more ways than one to pay regard to a good blogger – if you’re linking to – or someone is linking to you, MOST blogs will track this.Its called ‘tracking back’ – or backlinking in blogger – or, sometimes even pinging.It is the art of linking back to a blog that you’ve read, and referenced – but more than that, its a way to get an effortless link BACK from a blog that YOU read, as long as they accept trackbacks.Its an advanced technique, because you can’t just ‘trackback’ to from any post – its important to choose only one, two or at a maximum, three blog posts to link back to.When linking back, you have to use a special link, in the case of WordPress, its simply got ‘trackback’ on the end.

No matter what you do with your blog, you’ll always find that you can get more traffic, more interest, and more eyeballs to your site with a blog .And no matter how you work on your blog, if you follow our pattern, you’ll find that in a month you can make a huge impact on your website.