Writing and Publishing Your First Blog Entry

Writing and Publishing Your First Blog Entry

The content of your blog is an important factor in gaining traffic and acquiring a target audience. Publishing your first article or item is a great milestone in your blogging career. Fortunately, there are several basic guidelines, which can make your content more effective to your audience, adored by the search engines and respected by the world of blogging.

Publishing an Effective Content

Before you begin to write anything on your blog, you should know who your target audience is and what they want. If you see these factors as irrelevant for your blog because your blog is not business oriented in any way, you must remember that if you want readers then these factors are really relevant.

Always remember that where there are readers there is something interesting to read. The only reason why people read is because they want something. If you really want to achieve some kind of massive readership, you must strive to make your content interesting and actually what readers want.

First of all, keep in mind that communication is the key. More so, your communication must be authentic. The time when you publish your content is also the time when you let your true self surface. Blogs are personal in nature and communication is the key to being personal. The fact that each blog is unique because each writer is unique is enough for you to not to worry about future similarities with other blog entries. Keep in mind that whatever topic you are blogging about you must incorporate your personality with your writing.

In order to create a loyal target audience, it is important for the visitors to trust you and relate to you. It does not necessarily entail that they know about your personal details but you must connect with your audience in an authentic manner.

After establishing your communication with your audience, the content must also be credible. The blog must have authenticity even though credibility takes a lot of time to build.

The moment you begin publishing your content, which is of high value and useful to the readers, you also start establishing your authority. There will come a time when your readers ask you for advice or seek for your opinion; this is the time when you have achieved some kind of credibility and you must use this to build your reputation as a blogger.

The Blogger’s Block

Blogging is writing but uses a different medium. There are several methods to fight blogger’s block. Always remember that your blog software exists to serve you and not to frighten you. You do not have to try blogging carrying the idea that you have prolific writing skills, or a journalism degree. The fact is that you have something to say and you want others to hear it. However, if you are feeling stuck on an idea, there are several suggestions that you can apply when creating the content for your blog.

Firstly, you can try visiting other blogs. Visit those blogs that interest you and pick ideas and topics from those blogs that might be worth blogging about but keep in mind the relevance of the topic and your readership. You can also syndicate your news updates. You can do this by subscribing to news services online because they allow you to save time on searching using keywords. This is most useful for bloggers.

Why You Should Blog

Why You Should Blog

Many people are getting into blogging for several reasons. You might have heard it somewhere recently but it actually started more than a decade ago from its mother, the online diary. Back then, these kinds of diaries are used by people to record and share accounts of their personal lives. Although blogging still uses that same concept, it has now evolved into several categories and usage.

Nowadays, blogging is synonymous to online marketing. Bloggers not only publish contents reflecting their moods for the day or sharing what they have done for the past few weeks but also advertise and create a sturdy communication with their audience. More so, through the use of blogging, people are now able to find an alternative in making money. Blogging is an excellent opportunity for generating income.

The Blog

Before you even start to create you own blog. It is necessary to know what blog really is. The term blog is actually derived from the word Weblog or Web log. Back in the days, around the late 1990’s, these Web logs are utilized by users to track updates and references to other resources online. They served as journals, which made them useful as a publishing tool for the user’s stream of consciousness. Of course, the readers can still comment and share their thoughts on just abut anything under the sun.

Technically, blogs are also known as CMS or Content Management Systems. Being a CMS, blogs allow the writers to easily publish to a specific Web site and manage the content without the need of having to deal with the program code. Publishing software also provides users with a GUI or Graphical User Interface for easy pointing and clicking of their articles. Through the use of easy-to-do procedures, you can perform configuration and set up, which can ease your job as a blogger since the tool can automatically organize your published articles the next time you publish.

The Advantage of Blogging

The main question is; why should you start blogging? The first thing you need to know is that blogging can enhance and support your online communications. However, you must first understand the outcome of your blog that you desire in order to attain success. The main reason why you should start blogging, is that it can be both an excellent outlet for your frustrations or excitement and profitable at the same time.

It does not mean that if you are not into blogging, you should not blog. Being in a business, especially those with dealings on the Internet, requires you to establish a clientele that are actually interested with your services. Blogs can do this easily due to its accessibility and being an excellent medium for marketing that it is, blogs are essential for businesses.

More so, if you are handling a business, there is good chance that your competition is blogging about their products and services. This is an easy method for you to examine the competition and what their clients’ preferences are. Additionally, blogs can create strong customer relationships since your target market can easily and directly communicate with the authority within your business.

This kind of opportunity is hard to resist since a strong customer relationship can eventually lead to lasting trust to your product and services; hence, eventual increase in your revenue.

The Basics of Blogging

The Basics of Blogging

With the advent of internet marketing, Web publishing is continually gaining ground and popularity. Nowadays, technologically savvy corporate businessmen, or even business employees, use blogs to build and manage relationships with their consumers. They share their company’s expertise, culture and other information, which can help develop the customer’s interest in their products and services.

On the other hand, not only do businessmen venture in the world of blogging but regular computer users too. Not only can they voice out their opinions and thoughts to others but also earn money in more ways than one; from selling ad space to offering expert services, which in turn builds their reputation as a professional.

If you are thinking of entering the blogsphere, you must be ready of the problems you might encounter in several areas of blogging, such as: choosing, installing and configuring your blog software tools. Although the collection and assortment of configurations vary widely, a neophyte blogger can still get confused. The tools are not the only obstacles you must overcome but also the terminologies used for blogging.

Tools for Blogging

Basically, the software tools for your blog greatly depend on your provider. For instance, the RSS functionality can be absent from one provider but present in another. Additionally, some blog software tool providers can cost as low as $4 each month depending on the extent of service you choose, while others can be used for free but with limited services.

Choosing the right software tool depends on you. If you have enough cash to spare for a blog or if you want to really get serious with a blog and hope to earn cash in the future, which is always a possibility, you have the option of choosing priced blog software tools. However, if you are a newbie blogger, it might be advisable to start with free blog software tool providers.

Fortunately, some providers that charge for their services also offer free trial periods, which range from 10 to 30 days. This is an excellent opportunity to try and test out the services they offer without paying any fee. Luckily, if you find a provider that you are comfortable with and offer the services you need, you can always use their free trial periods to the full extent before subscribing.

Blogging Terminologies

Blogging is like a secret society and like most secret societies; it has its own language that you must learn. Although, technologically savvy individuals an easily familiarize themselves with these terms, it might be hard for those who have limited or no background with Web publishing whatsoever.

Firstly, the most important term in blogging is Post. A post happens every time you place or publish an update to your blog; you also create a post this way. Secondly, since blogs are a means of communication, comments are also possible. If your audience leaves a message regarding your published content, this message is referred to as a comment. Normally, the comments are labeled and time-stamped to allow you and other readers to see who posted the comment and when it was posted.

Comment spams, is also a term that happen when a single reader continuously repeats the same comment over and over again. This can be a headache for the blogger as the blog can be used by the reader to promote other blogs or Web site.

These are just some of the few terms that you can encounter in blogging. Only exploration and experience can help you understand the other terminologies involved in blogging.

How to Plan Your Blog

How to Plan Your Blog

The basics of blogging cover all the basic essentials, including your writing style, blog category and the content of your blog. Planning your blog can be difficult if you do not know what you want to talk about. It could be extra hard if you do not have the necessary background in blogging. However, knowing what you want to blog about can easily come to you once you start browsing and poking around other blogs. You can pick ideas from those blogs, expound and make them the basis of your blog.

The Blogging Categories

Generally, there are several types of blogs. Nevertheless, there are three popular categories of blogs, such as: the organizational, business and personal blogs.

The first category, the organization, uses the power of blogs to communicate either externally with the public or internally within their organizations. This kind of blog has the purpose of facilitation internal communications amongst employees, colleagues and other organizational personnel. In addition, organizational blogs normally publish information that is of interest by the public. In a certain instance, there are organizational blogs that publish seminar schedules, meetings, and announcements for their clients, customers or members.

The business blogs, on the other hand, are for promoting services or products offered by businesses in order to help increase profits, revenue and interest of potential consumers. These kinds of blogs can look for ways to increase their reputation and authority with vendors, customers and partners. They do this by publishing contents that express expertise and knowledge within a specific market portion, niche or industry.

The personal blogs are those that contain contents that are more of a reflection of bloggers’ opinions and thoughts. Normally, they are used to publish articles that voice their points of view on several kinds and varieties of events and topics. Bloggers who publish personal contents usually find pleasure in documenting their everyday lives, stream of consciousness and even their hate to specific events through articles that reflects their moods.

The Target Audience

Your target audience and blogging style comes hand in hand. The moment you think of creating your own blog, you must first realize what your target audience is; you must know what they want, need and desire to read about. The blog you create and the contents you publish must provide quality and value to the readers in order to be effective in establishing communication and expanding readership.

More so, the kind of blog you want to create essentially creates its own target audience. For instance, an organizational blog is meant for those who are members or clients of a certain organization. Although the target audience may be limited, there is a good chance for consistency with regards to the dialogue you create with your readers and eventually more people would be interested in your blog.

The mentioned personal blogs are not normally designed for social dialogue with a certain target readership of any category and is rather meant to serve as a collection of your musings. These kinds of blogs are best reserved to your close friends and they are your target audience.

If you identify your target audience successfully, your messages that you want everyone to know about will be effectively targeted. Some of the greatest joys of blogging come from the use of your enthusiasm in publishing signification information for a community where there is a free exchange of opinions between the readers and you.