Learn the Basics of Blogs & Blogging

First what is a blog? It is basically a site where a person writes down their thoughts and opinions on a subject. It's quite similar to a personal journal or diary but online.

How can this help you market online I hear you ask? Well, several ways. The nature of blogs mean that it is content driven, and search engines love content, especially good content. You can setup a blog specifically with the aim of promoting your product/service.

Because blogs are like journals, they should be kept up to date and entries made on a regular basis. Many have set up blogs only to find that they either forget or get bored of updating the content and eventually stop posting. Blogs should be seen as a more long-term strategy as it will take time to build content and get visitors. but it is a worthwhile strategy.

Blogs have evolved over time and some are extremely sophisticated and function pretty much the same as a website. In terms of blogging, that is, 'to blog', you need to set yourself up with one.

There are two main methods with two main products you can use.

They are as follows:

www.wordpress.org
This is a free blogging application that you need to install yourself on your own webspace. It is an excellent choice and very popular but does require a little technical knowledge to install but not too much. You do need a database with your own webspace to install the program to. The program comes with full installation instructions.

www.Blogger.com
Blogger.com is an online blogging solution which is also free. The main difference is that your blog is hosted on blogger.com's server. As such, you have less control over your blog. However, it is a great choice to start with and is the fastest way to start blogging. This is probably the place to begin your blogging adventure!

Writing Your Blog

So, once you have a blog, what do you do with it? Well, you write stuff! You do not need to worry too much about making mistakes or if people are interested. I would personally would just get writing.

Have a theme for your blog. My personal blog (www.waimanyau.com) is on the theme of personal development and the law of attraction. I started just by writing my own thoughts and experiences with these areas. I did also start writing about online businesses as that is another one of my passions but I realised that it was getting a bit muddled so I kept the focus on the law of attraction and personal development.

Remember, entries do not have to be great long essays, and it is perhaps best that it isn't, certainly to start with. Write about yourself, your background, about your product or service and how you came to get involved with it. As you post more, you can start talking more about your product, or what is new with it, new in the industry, any trends, what your thoughts are on it. Basically get writing and keep the tone of the blog to a theme.

The other way to write your blog is to do the good old keyword research (Lesson 1 - Keyword Research). When you have a good list of keywords with demand and supply, find the ones with low competition and good demand. The main thing here would be that you want the competition as low as possible. In fact, anything below 5000 pages for a phrase (it would need to be a phrase as 1 or 2 keyword phrases are likely to have very high competition). The demand doesn't have to be high, if it is above 200 per month, I would go with it. You then take your keyword and write blog entries around the keyword!

Personally, I just tend to write entries as I like. They tend to revolve around certain keywords anyway.

Now, on your blog, you should be able to enter links to other sites from the admin area. So, the idea is to add links to the website(s) you are promoting. If you look at www.waimanyau.com you can see on the right a couple of links to other sites, these are sites that I own and run. You see, search engine spiders like fresh content and your blog should be updated regularly. If it is, then the spiders are more likely to like your site if the content is good and follow any links to other sites, so helping your other sites. Also, hopefully visitors will go to your blog, find it interesting and then follow any links to other places.

Ping Pong!

When you have your blog up and running and there are some entries, you then need to let the search engines know that you are there and that they can spider your blog. This is known as 'pinging'! You simply need to go and enter your blog URL to the following sites:

Google Blog Ping

Yahoo Blog Ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=http://www.waimanyau.com/
(replace "http://www.waimanyau.com/" with your own blog domain, ensure it ends with "/")

MSN Blog Ping
http://www.moreover.com/ping?u=http://www.waimanyau.com/
(replace "http://www.waimanyau.com/" with your own blog domain, ensure it ends with "/")

Or simply go to this site and ping them all! http://pingomatic.com/

It is advisable to do this every now and then, just so that you remind the spiders to come to your page and hopefully from there, they can also find your main website via the links.

TASK

1) Set yourself up with a blog at www.blogger.com or www.wordpress.org

2) Write some entries over a period of a week or two to build some content.

3) Ensure you have a link to your main website that you are promoting from your blog.

4) Ping the search engines.

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