This is what I hear a lot of; how Do I Blog? When you start creating a blog, it’s hard to imagine that it can become an Empire. Most of us have these dreams of running an Empire blog, but with so many obstacles to go through, over and under and around. One would believe that there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Dreams keep us alive and keep us going and striving for what we want. A strong desire to achieve and a hatred for failure keeps us piercing forward to grab trophy reward.
Running a blog can be a satisfying experience, especially if it’s a blog that teaches. But before we can go about teaching, we need to figure out just how to build it and what platform were going to be on. Let’s look at a few things that we need to discuss to build our Empire blog.
Domain Registration
Most people would like to have a blog with a dot com name rather than the name of the actual provider, i.e., WordPress, Blog, etc. This is where domain name registration comes in. You register a domain for about $12 bucks a year and reroute (DNS) that domain name to your hosting company. For those who don’t know what (DNS) is, the Domain Name System is how the distributed naming system for computers and services. It translates IP Addresses with domain names.
Website Hosting
You can actually run a blog from an entirely free service and never have to worry about hosting your blog. However, it’s a sense of professionalism and trust in blogs hosted with their own dot com name and running from an independently hosted servicer. I would recommend getting a hosting company to host your blog, which is friendly for your blogging platform. If this is not your area of expertise, video tutorials will help you through the process step-by-step.
Free Platforms Like WordPress
Again I can see you asking; how do I blog? There are a few free blogging platforms on the Internet like blogger, Tumblr, blog, Jux, WordPress, Posterous Spaces, and Weebly. Some are better than others and to pick one is usually a matter of your personal preference. However, I’ve used a couple of them and would most definitely recommend WordPress because of its versatility and functionality. A few sites offer video tutorials that tell you everything you need to know about WordPress from setup, themes, plug-ins, affiliate marketing, and much, so I wouldn’t worry too much about knowing what to do here.
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Use Headlines Effectively
Imagine writing the best article you ever wrote in your life, only to have absolutely no one read it. Most of us never really think that the title is that important. We usually relate the title to something that has to do with the article, and by far, that is the way to go. However, it would help if you made it compelling enough for your reader so that they will actually click on it to engage in your article. Before you formulate your headline, do a keyword search to find out how many competing websites target those keywords; you can use phrases like “How Do I Blog?” Try to look for fewer websites that are actually targeted your phrase. If you have 900 million websites targeting a particular keyword or phrase, it’s tough, if not impossible, being new at blogging that you’re actually going to move up to the top of any search engine.
Have a Great Blog Design
When you first design your website, try to make an appealing website because you want people to read your content and indulge in the appearance of your website. I’ve been to some websites that look horrible, and it doesn’t take me long to move on to another website. Most websites that are disgusting in appearance only hole a person’s interest for three seconds or so. Not a lot of time to read any content, so you get the drift at this point, don’t you?
Leverage Social Media
These days, social media is a huge deal; look at the young kids walking around with their cell phones crossing the street, looking down, and never lookup. Most of them are texting or chatting on Facebook or some other social network media. When you start targeting Facebook and other social network media such as Pin, Tweeter, LinkedIn, and others, try not to overwhelm them with all sorts of marketing. Remember, most of these people are your friends and family, and they will ignore your post. A post here and there of interest will get them moving along the way, and it will also get them to like your website and start promoting it on their wall.
Identify Your Niche
Discover what your interest is and what you would enjoy writing about. This is nothing worse than having to write about something you can’t stand. If you choose a topic that you don’t enjoy, you’re not going to write very much, and as a matter of fact, you’re going to fizzle out in about three months. A blog is nothing more than a diary and needs continuous updates. We were little kids for some of us, and we had a little diary that every day we would write something in it. Well, your blog is nothing more than just that. Except for, you can choose to write things in it every day or every week but whatever schedule you put yourself on, make sure it’s consistent.
Keyword Research
Now that you found your passion, it’s time for you to do some Keyword Research. There’s really no point in writing without targeting keywords that people are not searching on. Use a search engine like Google and target a particular word. Google has a keyword tool that you can use to target particular words or phrases. These will tell you just how many people are searching on those keywords. From there, you need to determine how many websites actually have those keywords. It’s not very hard to do from this point. All you need to do is put your keyword or phrase in quotes, and that will tell you just how many websites actually have those keywords. Find keywords that average around 50,000 searches per month, which is a little over 1600 searches a day on that particular keyword. If you only get 10% traffic to your website, that’s 166 potential customers per day; that’s a great start.
Link Building
No links, no visibility. It’s great to write good content, and I hope that everyone will find it. But the truth is, you must have authority websites link to your site for your reading to find you. The way to go about doing this is to find yourself some good article directories and start writing to become an expert in your niche. You can also use other blog sites that do not restrict the links and link back to your own website or article. To find yourself high ranking article websites, type in Google “high ranking article directories,” and it should come back with a list of the top 50 article directories. This will give you a good starter as you sort your order by page ranking to know which ones rank at the top. Pick yourself a good starting point like, let’s say, five rankings. Anyone under five will ignore and use any authority website with a ranking of five or above.
Blog Comment
This may not seem like a big deal, but blog comments go a long way to link back to your website. If you align yourself with a good high ranking blog that permits you to enter your signature as a blog link back to your site, then you’re in business. As you become more of an expert on that blog, people will start to follow those links right back to your site. Not only that, but the search engines will also follow those links, and you will get a higher ranking on the search engines. So every chance you get, try to increase your blog comments.
List Building
A Weber seems to be the big honcho an email responding services. I believe they cost around $19 a month or something along those lines. However, an email list is extremely crucial to your blog. There’s nothing better than having an email list of subscribers interested in exactly what you have to offer. Once you become an authority in your area, your subscribers are interested in what you have to say and the offers you make to them. Now, don’t always put out something that costs them money. You have to give them good free stuff as well. The problem here is setting up an autoresponder that has substance. Again, you can’t just spew all-out junk; you generally have to offer something of value, like, let’s say, a free e-book or some educational information that has to do with your blog.
Ping
Pinging Servers actually promote your blog; they create a list of various blogs that have new material. Blog search engines can provide fresh results very quickly by polling only the newly-updated blogs. WordPress actually comes with a ping service as a default. However, there are tons more that you can actually load to your WordPress blog and have it ping every time your blog has been updated.
Social Bookmark Links
Social bookmarks are great services that offer bookmark sharing. The service merely saves the bookmark and share that as a resource. Some services allow for the treating of bookmarks, which helps to get the word out.
AdSense and ClickBank Ads
Although when you first start your blog, it’s usually not a good idea to plaster a ton of advertisements all around it. Most readers get sick and tired of the tone of advertisements anyway. However, you may want to at least look into Google AdSense as a way of getting paid for allowing advertisements on your website when your traffic starts to grow to maybe 5000 users a day. Now, click bank is something that you could use in your current articles. So when you first start up and write an article about something, let’s say, electronics. You may want to pick a particular electronic and then link to your affiliate link, which goes to ClickBank so that when your reader clicks on that to get more information, and they purchase a product, you received some commission.
Learn About Marketing
Anyone can put up a blog, but not everyone knows how to market it. This is key, and this is the truth; you need to learn how to market your blog. There are many things to learn and a lot of phrases you hear on the Internet about search engine optimization, keyword marketing, article marketing, lead generation, and much more. All of these terms are pertinent to your blog’s growth, and you need to know something about them. Granted, many of these things can be extremely overwhelming, but you should have a fairly decent grasp on each of them, especially if you’re going to be running the blog by yourself.
Fix Broken Pages
Go through every one of your pages to check for broken links. Broken links can definitely send a bad signal to the search engines, and that would be catastrophic. What you can do is look at your web hosting reports. These reports have pages that people have visited, search engine keywords used, linked pages, and also your error reporting; broken links. This would be a great place to start because sometimes, you can miss links easily. If you find a page or something that is not working correctly, you can always put in a refresh page to send them to a root directory or somewhere else that’s not broken.
Spam
Don’t forget about protecting your blog. However, we’d love to think that everybody on the Internet is about business and finding good content and enjoying your website. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, and there are some serious head cases out there. When we generally create our blog, we concentrate so much on its look and its content along with the marketing, which we sometimes forget that spammers are out there looking to post hideous links. Make sure you have a reputable spam filter that will catch most of the reply Posts that are inappropriate for your blog.
In my first week that my blog was up and running, someone already tried to spam my website with a link that went to an inappropriate site. The comment was something like this; this is a very nice website linked to their inappropriate site. The best way to defeat this is not to permit replies to be automatically posted so that you can check out the post for appropriateness before approving.
Blacklist
A blacklist is another useful tool to help control bad words in your replies. This is another area we need to perk up on and learn about the word you do not want on your blog. Several services already use an array of blacklist terms and variations of foul words. You can get them from places like Google and Facebook and several other large organizations that regularly deal with this type of stuff. It would be a good idea to learn from their experience.
