Make A Blog
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David
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February 20th, 2012
A Blog is short for Web Log, basically it's an online journal that you use to update on a regular basis regarding the topic of your website or blog. A blog is great for keeping visitors informed about the latest news or products. I use my blog to add new information on how to make a website.
What I'll do below is explain some of the options for creating a blog along with the pros and cons of a blog. One thing to consider is that search engines love unique content and maintaining a blog is a great way to add unique content to your website on a regular basis.
Make A Free Blog
There are quite a few options with making a blog that are free. The most popular would be Blogger. All you need to do is setup a free account with blogger, choose a website name, choose a template and then start blogging.
A couple of drawbacks of blogger is that it's so popular that majority of the good names are already take, for instance, I searched about 10 variations of makeawebsite.blogspot.com before I found http://make-a-web-site.blogspot.com/.
Another drawback is the flexibility you have with the selection of templates plus the capabilities to add advertising to your blog. They offer a decent selection of templates but with so many great free blog templates you'll find that you're limited.
WordPress Blog Software
The alternative that I chose was WordPress, it's still free to download and install but you have greater flexibility with it. You can select from 1000's of free WordPress templates along with the fact that you can monetize the page by selling advertising or inserting Google Adsense.
Another great thing with WordPress is you can install it on any domain name that you own. You'll need a web hosting account but with so many providers offering hosting for multiple domains you shouldn't need to purchase a hosting account just for your blog.
The other alternative, which I've done, is add it to a current website. If you visit blog.websitespot.com you'll see that I installed WordPress on a page of my main site and use it as a page that I update with my latest blog on how to make a website.
You can download the software for free at WordPress.org.
Build A Following
Once you've established your blog as a reputable source with unique information people will want to subscribe to your blog via a RSS Feed. A RSS feed stands for Really Simply Syndication) and allows users to receive updates via a variety of sources such a Google Reader. Read more on What Is An RSS Feed.
The great thing about RSS is that any time you update your blog with new information or a new product, the people that have subscribed to your feed will receive notification. This increases your traffic because people will return to your website for your latest posts.
A great example of this is ProBlogger.com. In my opinion it's the best source on the internet in regards to building a blog including ideas for monetizing it. I subscribe to the ProBlogger.com RSS feed and any time a new blog post is posted I receive it through my Google reader so that I can stay on top of the latest things that ProBlogger has to say.
Make Money With Your Blog
Once you start getting visitors to your website it's easy to start making money with your blog. The best alternative is to add Google Adsense to your blog. You can see that I've done this on the right hand side of this very page.
How it works is that Google serves ads that are relevant to that page and when someone clicks on one of those links you earn a percentage of what Google earns.
You'll find that most blogs that you visit have integrated Adsense into their blog to assist with earning money on their blog.
Other ways to earn money are to directly sell advertising to a merchant. If you're website is about Ford Mustangs and you get a fair amount of traffic to your website a merchant that sells Ford Mustang accessories may be interested in placing a banner on your website. This is generally negotiated on a monthly rate and the fee is based on the amount of traffic that your blog receives.
Tips On Running A Successful Blog
Below I've covered a few important parts of running a blog with a brief description.
- Blog Regularly - Search engines along with readers want to see regular blog posts. This keeps your content fresh to keep readers coming back for more. Along with this search engines love pages updated regularly so it'll assist with search engine rankings.
- Keep Content Unique - Again, search engines and your visitors want unique content. A reader is less likely to come back to your website if they find that they content they read is something that they've read somewhere else. Search engines are the same, they want unique content and will reward you if you can accomplish this on a regular basis.
- Find A Target Audience - Once you've determined what you're going to write about, stick with it. Your visitors and search engines won't stick around if you don't. Consider this, my blog is on how to create a website and if I start writing about the latest gadgets or politics people would stop coming around because they want to learn how to make a website.
- Keep It Clean - You'll find that there are 1000's of free WordPress templates but many of them are difficult to read. Choose a template that you like but also one that your visitors will like as well and find easy to read.
Webmaster Forum
I invite you to visit my webmaster forum, it's a great place to discuss websites and ask questions to fellow webmasters regarding topics that you may still have questions on.