Relayblogger

By Lewis Low

A blog is an online version of diary where people write and display almost anything - their opinions, photos, jokes, thoughts for the day and more. People also share stories about their pets, their passion for soccer, stamps… the limit is only your imagination!

In the last few years, blogging has emerged to become a much more meaningful activity than simply maintaining a personal diary. People use it to advertise their products and services, in fact, quite a number of companies even create their online presence by using a blog instead of a website.

Create Your Own Blog

Starting a blog is free. You can create one at blogger dot com- a free service from Google Inc. You don’t need to register a domain name or buy hosting.

When you sign up at Blogger, everything happens online. Your blog will be hosted by Blogger and you get an URL like http://yourdomain.blogspot.com. You simply log in to your account and start to write.

This is much easier and cheaper than buying your own domain and hosting, then hiring someone to do the web design, writing and coding.

Another free blogging service available online is WordPress which is also very popular and easy to use. WordPress supports more features than Blogger while allowing you to customize your blog with various plug-in. You can check it out at http://wordpress.org

Monetize Your Blog

While blogging for your own interest, you can in fact maximize the potential of your blog for many marketing or commercial purposes.

The quickest and easiest way to turn a blog into a money-making enterprise is to include advertising on your blog. This can be done with contextual ad programs like Adsense - an advertising program by Google. Basically, you get paid when people click on the ads displayed on your website or blog. Google Adsense program is free to sign up. You can visit http://www.google.com/adsense to learn more about the rules and guidelines of the program. Other Adsense type ads that you can use for blog monetizing are SearchFeed, AdBrite, and Yahoo’s Publisher’s Network (YPN).

Affiliate program is another potential way to make money blogging. By focusing on the subject of your blog post, you can promote relevant products from cost per sale affiliate programs like ClickBank and Amazon. You can write a review about the product or service with your affiliate links embedded inside so you get the commission whenever a sale is made.

Boost Your Blog Traffic

Blogs are quickly indexed by search engines, but you need to update it regularly. Search engines love fresh content and regular update will ensure that your website is indexed and ranked high up as well. The higher up it appears, the more traffic will come to your site, which means more sales. You can actively participate in forums discussion or post comments on other blogs to get more link back traffic.

Whether you use your blog for fun or for work, remember that it’s a highly potential tool any which way. So what are you waiting for? Start blogging away right now!

Lewis Low is the founding editor of OnlineBizPromo.com For more Practical Online Business Ideas and Work-From-Home Opportunities, visit his Work-At-Home directory at http://www.OnlineBizPromo.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lewis_Low

Use the opportunity to write several posts when you’ve got inspiration. That way your, hopefully, steady stream of posts will make it through times when you lack inspiration or time to write posts that are good enough to publish on your blog.

Most blogging tools lets you set a publish date in the future so if you are going away for a couple of days you can keep the flow of your blog anyway.

This practice is even more important if you have decided to write a series of posts because it will be easier to make them stick together. If you are writing a series and have some research to do for the later parts, at least mash up as much as you can of the future posts to keep them in spirit of the first one.

Having some canned posts can actually make it easier to write since you are relieved of the stress that can come from feeling forced to write an article just to keep the flow going.

In Wordpress it is possible to save drafts for future editing and publication. Before I started using Google Documents for my future posts I used the drafts in Wordress a lot.

Get a domain name.

I’ve previously written about getting a domain name. The main two recommended patterns for domain names seems to be; get a name that describes your site, or a pronounceable word that means nothing at all.

Here is a Google search for domain name registrars.

Get a web host.

Choosing the right web host is almost like a lottery these days. There are tons of hosts to choose from and it is hard to find out the terms for most of the ones I’ve looked at. If you decide to let your web host manage your domain name registration make sure it is you who actually own the domain.

Here is a Google search for web hosts.

Update DNS servers.

Now that you have a domain name and a web host it is time to tell the world where your site is. DNS servers are a bit like the yellow pages for the web. When a user enters an address in the browser it uses DNS to look up a numeric address that the computer can understand. It can take up to 48 hours for the DNS change to propagate all over the Internet so when you have recently updated your DNS entries you might end up at different sites depending on where you are when you look for a domain. You manage DNS settings from your domain name registrar account.

Write for 48 hours.

The two days it takes for DNS to propagate are perfect to write your initial content. If you are going to blog about a specific subject I would recommend that you write ten posts that you can publish right a way. That way your index page will be fully populated since most blogs show ten posts up front. It is also a good practice to write a couple of extra posts that can be published when you don’t have the time or inspiration write.

Time to get the blog up and running

By using the Google tools for webmasters you can submit your site to the Google indexer so it will find it a little bit faster. You can also tell Google that content on http://yourdomain.com is the same as content on http://www.yourdomain.com, otherwise Google will classify all your content as duplicates and that is a bad thing according to all SEO experts online.

I use Wordpress as my blog tool so further on all my recommendations will be based on that. It is included in Fantastico, a web site configuration tool that exists on most LAMP based web hosts.

Go to your Fantastico control panel and install Wordpress. If you do this before the DNS information has propagated the site will look weird and some things will not work at all.

Get a good looking theme. There are lots of free themes at Wordpress. There is some debate of how important the look and fell of a site is for a steady user base. I think the most important thing is that you should feel comfortable with it. Time spent on content is usually better than time spent on your theme.

Since the spamming business seems to grow faster than anything else; activate the Aksimet plugin. You have to get a free API key from Wordpress.

Feed readers can check your site quite often so to save some bandwidth and get some nice statistics go to Feedburner and create an account. Feedburner has an excellent article on how to get the Feedburner plugin to work.

If you intend to make it on the social networks then theShare-this plugin will enable your readers, or your self, to easily submit your posts to a variety of them. I’m not sure if it is a good idea in the long run, but you will get some readers by self submitting articles to Digg.

If your content makes sense even after a couple of months it can be a good idea to configure your permalink structure. I use ‘/index.php/%category%/%postname%/’ on all my blogs. The default configuration just adds the post id number to the URL and if you use a predefined one with dates in it your posts might look old in a while.

Lets earn some money

, but there are other alternatives that looks and works almost the same. BidVertiser is one of them. The Adsense Delux plug-in makes it simpler to incorporate ads, not only adsense, into your posts.

You should set up a merchant account at PayPal since many offers to make money online offers payment to PayPal. That way you don’t have to pay for checks or wire transfer of money to your domestic bank.

There are several ways other than plain advertising to make money from your blog. Both Bloggerwave and PayPerPost offer payment for reviews. You can also sign up as a publisher for an affiliate network. Affiliate networks gathers advertisers and lets web site owners publish links and/or banner ads to the advertisers. The site owner can get paid depending on the readers actions, such as clicking a link, signing up for a newsletter or buying something from the advertisers store.

Bring on the readers

If you are curious about how many readers you have, what they read and where they are from, you can fulfill your curiosity with Google Analytics It is a free web site statistics package that keep track of more stuff than I could imagine before I saw it. Don’t fall in the trap and check your Google Adsense and Analytics statistics every 30 minutes. Make it a habit to check them once a day and leave it at that. You should put all your effort in producing high quality content.

Good luck!

This post has been submitted to the following blog carnivals:

• Your Potential. Our Passion. Blogging.
• Bootstrapper
• successpart2.com
• Blog Carnival Make Money Blogging 101

RSS is a standard protocol to publish the content of a blog. By consuming RSS you can keep track of several blogs without having to visit their web pages frequently.

For consuming RSS feeds there are both applications to run locally on your computer and services that run in your browser.

The most known web based feed readers are:

• Bloglines
• Google Reader
• NewsGator

You can find a lot of programs on the Internet to download and read RSS feeds on your computer. Those I have tried are:

• RssBandit
• SharpReader
• Outlook

… but I got hooked on Bloglines since it allows me to read my feeds everywhere.

If you are a blogger RSS can help you retain your readers even if you post infrequently since they don’t have to visit your site to get your new content.

If you get many feed subscriber it can be a good idea to use Feedburner. It is a service, recently bought by Google, that publishes your feed from their servers. That way you don’t have to pay for the traffic. Feedburner also offers a way to monetize your feed and some statistics about your readers and their behavior.

If you are using Wordpress; here is an instruction about how to enable the Fedburner redirection.

• Wordpress
  Wordpress is both a service and a program you can download and run on your own server. Here is a list of requirements if you want to install. There are loads of free themes and plug-ins to download. Wordpress is available for most Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP web hosts.
• dasBlog
  dasBlog is a blogging tool developed using the Microsoft .Net Framework and is commonly used by web servers running Windows. If you are not sure about your host check with their support.
• DotNetNuke
  DotNetNuke is also written for Windows servers. It is more of a portal where you can plug in functionality as you grow in your role as a webmaster. It might be overkill if all you want to do is blogging, but you will have lots of room to expand your internet activities.
• Joomla!
  Joomla! is a PHP based portal that fits on most web hosts. Just like DotNetNuke you can add themes and functionality when you need it.
• MovableType
  MovableType is, just like Wordpress, a blog only server program that runs on the LAMP stack. I haven’t tried MovableType but it looks like it is mostly a matter of taste to choose between it and Wordpress.