Ultimate Guide to Blogging

Here is a consolidated version of my 3 part series, the Complete Guide to Blogging.

Part I: Creating and Maintaining a Blog

Over the past few years, blogging has become all the rage. As with anything, a large number of bloggers can easily become a large number of abandoned blogs. A few months ago I read that over 4 million blogs on Blogger still have the Google Search, Edit Me, Edit Me as their outgoing links. These blogs are destined to fail because the blogger is not putting in the effort. Here are a few tips to help you find success in the blogosphere:

Find your niche and stick to it - What is your full time job? Are you a teacher? Blog about teaching. Feel your an expert on Fantasy Football? Blog about Fantasy Football. Are you an expert on Blogger Hacks? Blog about Blogger Hacks. You get the point.

Make sure your niche is something your into - If you don’t enjoy your blogging topic, you will quickly become frustrated and abandon your blog.

Make sure you have something unique to offer the potential readers - There are plenty of websites and blogs that report the news, so if you mention something that is already being talked about alot, its ok to blog about it, but make sure to add your own spin or opinion on it. To many people think a bloggers job is to report the news, but if you can’t break it, you aren’t gonna find success without branching out a little bit.

Don’t expect to make money blogging (at least not right away) - While there will always be a few exceptions, most people aren’t going to make money unless they are blogging full time. Even then, it can be extremely difficult. If your dream is to someday blog full time for a living, make sure you follow the first three closely.

Make quality posts - See this Blog Posting Mantra for tips on making the best quality blog posts you can.

OK, so you’ve decided you want to be a blogger? What’s next? There are several great blogging services out there available for use. Some are free, while others have varying monthly fees. If your just entering the blogosphere, you may want to start out at Blogger to get your feet wet. Its a free service and you have full HTML control of the design. You will, however, be lacking a few things (without some HTML coding background). At this time, you are not getting the benefit of categories and you won’t be able to schedule postings for the future dates or times like you can with many other services. The good news is, if you decide you want to move up to another blogging service, you can usually export your blog posts and comments to most of the other blogging programs out there.

Once you’re comfortable with blogging, here are a few services you may want to consider switching to:

• Typepad
• Wordpress
• Movable Type
• LiveJournal

Part II: Making Your Blog Findable

Now that you’ve started blogging, the next step is to make others aware of your blog. Most blogging services now provide a feed with your blog. Many readers will only subscribe to Feedburner feeds, so you will want to head over there and set one up.

The next step is to register with the search engines to make your blog findable. This is important because it will get their website crawlers out to your blog as soon as possible and get your posts logged into there search engine. Here is a list of the websites and links to their “Add URL” pages:

• Google
• Yahoo
• MSN Search
• Icerocket
• Technorati
• Alexa

It only takes a few minutes and only needs to be done once!

Now that your registered with the search engines, you now need to get to know Technorati a little better. For those unfamiliar with Technorati, it is an internet search engine based out of San Francisco, California, which focuses on blogs by searching weblogs for keywords and/or links. As of June 2006, it is currently indexing over 44.1 million weblogs.

Technorati has alot of value to blog readers, because it is the most commonly used search engine by web users for blog related posts. If you want your blog to be found as a blog writer, you will need to add tags to the bottom of each of your posts.

You will first want to register with Technorati and claim your blog. You will be asked to enter information about your blog including keywords that describe your blog. When done, you will then need to start tagging your posts.

In order to create a Technorati Tag for your post, my recommendation is to use KeoTag’s tagger service. For Step 1, you will want to add any keywords that are relevant to your post. If your keyword is two words or more, you will need to use an addition sign between words to link them as one phrase, otherwise it will be considered two seperate links. After typing your keywords, go to Step 2 and click the Technorati icon. This will generate Step 3, which is the code to add to the bottom of your individual post. For your convenience, Keotag gives you both the raw code and the code in HTML format. Copy and paste your code of choice into the bottom of your post and you’re done!!

If you tag correctly, and monitor your website’s traffic, you should notice the power of Technorati almost immediately.

Part III: Turning Your Blog Into a Conversation

So you’ve been blogging for a bit, the search engines know you exist, and your still not getting traffic? Don’t worry, you are not alone. Alot of both personal bloggers and corporate blogs run into this problem. Luckily, there is an easy fix. You simply need to start looking at your blog as a Conversation Station, or a way to engage in conversations with others that share your interests.

This can be done in a large variety of ways. Here are the most important ways:

Leave comments on blogs - This is probably the most important way to stirke up a conversation. Go to Technorati and do a search for similar blogs. Bookmark them or preferrably throw them in your feed reader. Whenever you find something of interest, let them know! Or shoot them an e-mail with a request for a review of a certain product or their thoughts on a certain situation. People running blogs want to talk about what their readers want to hear about. How else are they going to know if you don’t tell them? Two important things to know when commenting on blogs:

1. Don’t leave your website address in your post. People can click on your name to take them to your website if they have an interest.

2. Use services such as CoComment and Co.mments to track responses to your comments. This way you don’t have to manually follow up to see if someone responded to your comments with a question or comment.

Take full advantages of Trackbacks - Many blogging services allow trackbacks. Trackbacks are a way to extend the conversation between blogs posts (instead of using comments). If you read something somewhere, and would like to put your response on your blog, leave a trackback. The most important thing you need to know is to only use trackbacks if you are adding to the conversation (for example, giving your response to what they wrote). If this feature is used for advertising or spam reasons, it will often be taken away.

Message Board Signatures - If you read, and more importantly post, on message boards, you may want to consider throwing a link in your message board signature. Just make sure your blog has relevant content.

Link Love - Whenever you see another blogger has written a quality post, link to it on your website. This can be accomplished in many ways, including using Del.icio.us Daily Links, Digg’s Digg This feature, or featuring or crediting their blog in a post on your weblog.

Monitor Incoming Traffic - Whenever someone links to you, browse their website and try to find a quality post to link to or to feature in a post. Often times this can help you find friends and help both blogs in the growing process. This is especially important with smaller blogs who aren’t getting 1000+ hits a day, as they are more likely to both notice your link and appreciate it.

So, now you should be all set! If you have anything to add, feel free to leave a comment below (or trackback!)