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.