My Blogging Business

What are the Blogging Elements & Tools Needed

The first step to creating a successful blog is to choose the best blogging platform for your needs. A blogging platform is simply the blogging application you choose to use. There are a number of popular blogging platforms available on the internet, both free and paid.

Popular blogging platforms include Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad and Yahoo360. The two most popular of these are Wordpress.com and Blogger.com which both offer free blog hosting.

Blogger is generally considered easier to set up and use for new bloggers, however for serious bloggers Wordpress.org is the preferred choice. This is because Wordpress offers upgrades that allow you to host your blog on your own domain and to access a significant range of plug-ins and tools that are not available on their free service or at Blogger. However, even the free service at Wordpress.com provides more service, templates and plug-ins than Blogger does.

An additional benefit offered by Wordpress.org is that you own the blog and can transfer it wherever and whenever you want. This is because Wordpress.org is a complete program which you can upload onto your own server and domain name. By contrast even if you host a blogger blog on your own domain, only the data is actually stored on the server. Everything else is still controlled by Blogger which means less flexibility than offered by Wordpress.org where you really own everything.

There are many advantages of using Wordpress over Blogger. Here are five of them:

1. An extensive choice of thematic blog templates.

2. Wordpress allows for automatic tag and category creation.

3. It provides the ability to use PHP coding

4. It offers social networking plugins and most important have build in feature that is extremely useful for SEO, search engine love wordpress blog

5. It offers spamming protection and contact form plugins

If you are serious about building a professional blog, it is important that you host your blog on your own domain and own it. This way as you optimize and monetize your blog and generate blog traffic, you will own your own work and the page rank you will earn will be yours. Basically, you will have a business to sell should you wish to do so. The inability for you to do this is a serious downside of Blogger.

Planning and Stay Focus

Once you have chosen your blog platform, you need to spend some time planning the blog itself. The most effective and successful blogs tend to have a single main theme which allows them to target a particular niche audience. Focusing on one main topic area also means your blog will be easier to locate social bookmarking and blog directories. This theme should also influence the design and layout of your site. What is the impression you want to give visitors to your blog? For example, a corporate blog will look different to an artist’s blog. The color, style and layout of your blog needs to support the theme of your site.

 

Organize and Optimize

After you have decided on the theme and design of the site, it is important to organize your blog page for easy navigation. Unless you make it as easy as possible for readers to find information they are seeking, they will move on quickly. An effective way to keep a visitor engaged on your blog is to provide links to related posts at the end of every blog post. An equally successful strategy is to provide links to your most popular posts on the sidebar. According to experts, these articles are by far the most read on many websites. Another helpful decision would be to put a Google search bar on your blog page so that visitors can search for information on your site. You can also provide additional value to your visitors by linking to other blogs and websites in a blogroll (permanent sidebar).

Search Engine Optimization

The titles or headlines of your individual posts (as well as your overall blog) need to be carefully considered. It is not only important that they appeal to readers, it is also necessary that they are written to appeal to search engines since you will be largely dependent on search engine traffic for the success of your blog. Furthermore, different blogging platforms use your blog title as a part of the filename in which they store the post. Search engines take file names into consideration when they calculate page ranks making blog titles even more important than otherwise.

Blogging System and Coaching Community

As well as the choice of blog platform, theme and layout, a very important element of any blog’s success is the knowledge and skills required to maximize its potential. A coaching club or mentor can be extremely beneficial for people desiring to learn how to create a successful business blog. Of course, all due care should be taken to select a reliable support system at an affordable price. However, as anyone who has spent countless hours trawling through the internet looking for information on how to successfully market and monetize a blog will tell you, the right advice at the right time is priceless.

Having the Right Information and Mentor

Many people are profiting from cleverly using blogs to market products and services. Far more are failing. The difference between success and failure lies in making the right choices and decisions which in turn are the result of having the right information. You now have information that can set you on the path to blog success. Choose a good mentor and your pathway will be all the smoother.

For more information about a proven blogging business system for all level. Click Here! 

 

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Blogging Marketing ABC Bible

No matter how attractive and interesting your blog is, if you don’t market it and attract readers to it, you won’t make any money.

Basically, blog marketing is any activity that publicizes or advertises products, services, a website or business through the use of blogs. However, before you can market on a blog, you have to successfully market the blog itself. If you can’t generate a healthy number of visitors to your blog, you won’t be able to directly or indirectly market to them.

The key to marketing your blog successfully is consistency and effectiveness. This means that you have to consistently post new, interesting articles to your blog that are relevant to your targeted audience as well as consistently engaging in activities designed to drive traffic to your blog. However, there is a caveat on this last suggestion.

Your traffic generation activities have to be effective. To ensure the effectiveness of your blog marketing strategies you need to become well informed about the types of strategies that typically get the best results, consistently apply them and consistently monitor them. You must be willing to drop strategies that do not work and replace them with hopefully more effective ones. It is important that you are not attached to your strategies but to your outcomes. If it doesn’t work, change it. Flexibility is an essential element to blogging success.

Once you have created your blog and have submitted some interesting and unique posts that are designed to pique interest and engage your reader in conversation through the comments facility, you need to get your blog pages indexed in the major search engines such as Google and Yahoo. This process is not automatic and if you don’t take the necessary steps you will have little chance of benefiting from search engine traffic.

Generally speaking search engines require you to submit a sitemap, however if your blog is hosted by a service like Blogger you won’t be able to access the root directory to obtain the information. Instead you will need to submit code in a meta-tag. Your blog provider will direct you on how to do this.

Once you have submitted your blog for indexing with the search engines, the next most important step you can take to generate traffic to your blog is to submit it to as many relevant blog directories as possible. This can be a time consuming process so if you can afford it you may find it beneficial to pay a service to manually submit the blog for you. Automatic submission services should be avoided as they do not make allowances for the visual confirmation that is usually needed when submitting a blog to a directory.

Blog directories can really pay of in terms of attracting visitors to your blog as long as you list your blog in the correct category and you take care to write a description that accurately describes your blog and appeals to your targeted niche.
These steps may generate one time visitors but it is up to you to keep them. If your blog is not updated regularly with new material it will stagnate.

Regular posting is not only important in terms of attracting a loyal readership, it is essential if you want to improve your search engine page rank. The best search engine results tend to go to blogs that are tightly focused on a single niche and give their readers unique information and excellent value.
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What about Politics Blogs Discussion ?

This year the politics blogs discussion will go into overdrive. In the previous USA presidential elections political blogs did very well, both in terms of traffic and revenue. We are expecting this time round for it to be even more of a phenomenon.

 

If you are not a political blogger though, should you mention political opinions? What about if you have both political and non-political blogs, could this cause problems? Can your religious beliefs get you into trouble?

 

Politics Cause Friction?

 

Politics is an obvious cause for friction, if you didn’t know better you would think friction was the whole point. People make all sorts of assumptions about a person once they discover they lean left or right politically.

 

Religion is politicized more than ever now. If you believe the media you would think that religion is politics.

 

But, you might think, aren’t we supposed to let our readers in on a bit of our personality? Didn’t you say we should paint a picture of ourselves being three dimensional human beings? There is the problem, many people see their politics, and certainly their beliefs, as being core to who they are. Should you hide this part of yourself?

 

How Much to Share?

 

I think it comes down to how you work, what your goals are, how open you want to be, and how forceful you are in your opinions. If you are a freelancer or a consultant, I would caution against risking losing work through expressing your opinions off topic from your business blog.

 

Have A Second Blog

 

By all means have a separate blog where those opinions are discussed, but know the risks if your leads follow you around and find something they vehemently disagree with.Openness is a two-edged sword. Sometimes you can share too much and put off the very readers you were wanting to get closer to. Again, this might be a good thing or a bad thing. If someone is so intolerant that they boycott you because of a privately held belief then you might not want them as readers, but on the other hand if you are beating people over the head with it I can fully understand why someone might be put off.

 

In most cases merely mentioning something will not do too much harm but getting into a heated argument almost always causes lasting issues. Polarizing an audience can be a route to success, but it forever labels you, and the internet has a long memory. You might find in a job or media interview it comes back to haunt you.

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