This article is intentioned to help people to start a successful blog
Are you new to blogging? Are you about to start your very first blog? There is so much information about blogging, so I wanted to collect some of the most important facts and put this into one comprehensive summary to help people with getting started.
As this artice is very long, I took up Koen´s idea from comments to add a small index to this:
About blogs
What is a blog?
What makes a blog different from a website?
Don´t worry, WordPress is there for you
How to start blogging
Choose your topic
Pick a domain name
Choose your hosting wisely
Set the whole thing up
Download WordPress
Installing WordPress
Select your theme
Add some categories
Start blogging
Add Content to your categories
Find your personal posting frequency
How to get traffic to your blog?
Write quality content
Carnival Season
Comments, Trackbacks and Pings
Comments
Trackbacks
Pings
The rising of your blog
Do you know technorati?
Do you feed the world?
Keep an eye on your SEO
How long will it take to generate traffic?
About blogs
What is a blog?
A blog basically is a journal, which is updated on a regular basis and being published on the Internet. Blogs are covering almost every topic you can think of and they express as many opinions about them. Blogs also enable the possibility to get into a conversation, as posts on blogs can usually be commented by their readers.
The fact, you are reading this, means that you have stumbled upon a blog at least once as this site represents my blog.
Blogs are giving millions of people the chance to publish their ideas to the world. Only a few years ago, the Internet has been a place, where people were passive consumers of information. Now, with more and more people using blogs - whether as a blogger with an own blog or as a reader - the Internet changes to a more interactive place giving a voice to everyone by enabling people to participate in conversation.
What makes a blog different from a website?
Of course, a blog is basically a website too. What makes the difference is the fact, that content on a blog is being displayed in a chronological order like a journal, as I mentioned above. Readers of a blog can usually leave a comment to a blog post or link to the post from their own blog, if they have one using the post´s trackback-URL. The content of a blog can be displayed separated from the blog´s layout using RSS-Feeds readers can subscribe to and get noticed on every future update on that blog. I know, this sounds very complicated to you, when you are new to blogging, but…
Don´t worry, WordPress is there for you
I know, all this might sound a little bit hard to do for people who are new to all this. Don´t worry, best of a blog is, that you won´t have to do any of this work. There is a FREE software that will do all this for you.
So, don´t be scared, I´ll come back to this later in this article. Just sit back and look forward to your new online venture.
How to start blogging
Choose your topic
Sure you have something, you are passionate about. What are your hobbies? Blogs can work on almost every topic, you can think about. But it is vital for your new blog, that you pick a topic that you really love, a topic you know well. Maybe you want to blog about something personal or your life?
Many,many bloggers choose the wrong topic. You see them posting for a few weeks an then - nothing. They chose a topic, they were not interested in enough to keep the work on their blogs up for a longer period of time.
What are you reading about frequently? Are you a subscriber of other blogs already? If so, it seems, you are interested in their topics, so why not blog about it as well?
Pick a domain name
Your new blog will of course need a domain name. Picking the right domain name, can be a little bit tricky and sometimes frustrating as millions of domain names are already taken by others.
Depending on the topic you chose for your blog, try to select one or two words that will describe, what your blog is about. If you plan to make your blog more related to you as a person, you could easily decide to take your name as a domain.
Remember to choose a domain name, which can be easily remembered and what people know how to spell, when it is spoken out loud. Don´t make the mistake to choose a domain name, you would have to spell, everytime you tell it to other people. One little example: if your domain would be johndoemaine.com because you are John Doe living in Maine, and you tell this to another person, can you imagine, what he or her would type into their browser? Right, they would type johndomain.com instead. You get the point, right?
Try to take a .com-domain if you can, most people tend to remember .com by mistake. So, this guy tells me to choose a .com-domain for my blog and does this on his blog with a .net-domain? Yes, I do. I would rather have taken marcorichter.com for my blog, but it has been taken by someone else. And I wanted my name for my domain, so I decided to buy the .net-domain instead.
If the .com-domain is available, you should always prefer it, that´s what I wanted to point out.
Try this domain name creator on homepageuniverse.com. It will create a list of available domain names based upon any word you enter into the box. Just click create and you´ll find a nice list of available domain names including your chosen keyword. I am using this tool very regular for finding domain names for my other projects and I have always found a very nice domain for them within minutes. Very easy.
Choose your hosting wisely
Choosing a hosting solution for your blog needs your full attention. There are hundreds of offers available, and not all of them do provide everything, you will need. At least, your hosting plan has to include PHP support and a MySQL database, which both is required to run WordPress. These features are kind of a standard, so most hosting plans do include both.
Reliability of your hosting is even more important. You would have to rely on third party information on this, as you would not want to test all of them which would also be a very expensive experiment.
Don´t be tricked by features like “5000 GB of traffic included” or “1000 MB disk space”, you won´t need this. At least, not for a new blog just getting started. So, do not pay for anything, you do not need. By the time, you will come into the need of such figures, you´ll probably wan´t to switch to your own, dedicated webserver, but at this time, a shared hosting account will do just fine for your new blog.
This blog is being hosted by BlueHost.com and I am really satisfied with them. They have a 24h Live-Chat support you could contact anytime, if you have a problem and they will solve it for you within minutes. Best of all, it´s only $6.95 per month including a free domain.
If you want a recommendation, just click the link to BlueHost.com and give them a try.
Set the whole thing up
Now, we have a domain name and we also have some webspace. We´re ready for takeoff. We will first download the FREE WordPress software and install it, then choose and install a nice theme for your blog and do some basic configuration before we start blogging.
Download WordPress
WordPress is a very powerful Content-Management-System (CMS) especially made for blogs. It´s very easy to use and there are thousands of so called plugins to make it even more powerful by adding more features to the system. Of course there are other systems for creating a blog, but WordPress is by far the most common. Many successful blogs are powered by WordPress, so we don´t want to make it more complicated than needed, and therefore we will choose WordPress for your blog too.
We will choose the most recent version of WordPress to assure, we use latest technology. Just click here for the latest Version.
Download WordPress
After that, unzip the zip-file and extract the files to your computers harddisk, we will need to make some changes before uploading them to your webserver.
Installing WordPress
Many hosting plans provide you with kind of a 1-click-installation of WordPress. As this works different with many hosting companies depending on the admin system they deliver with their hosting plans, we will take care of a manual installation of WordPress here. This is very easy as WordPress can be installed with only a few clicks which does not take more than five minutes to do.
Take the following steps to get started:
- Rename the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php.
- Open wp-config.php with a text editor, e.g. notepad.
- Edit the variables in it:
- Name of you MySQL database
(create a new one using your web hosting control panel in case
you had never created it before)
- Your database username
- Your password
- Your MySQL database server
(shoud be localhost usually)
Now save the wp-config.php file and upload the complete folder to your webserver using an FTP client software of your choice.
Type http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/install.php into your browser and follow the instructions on the screen. It´s very easy, just 3 steps to do.
You will get your new generated admin password during the installation process, remember to take a note of it, you will need it later.
After you completed the installation process, your new blog is ready to use. That´s it, you´re done!
Select your theme
WordPress powered blogs can easily be customized and there are thousands of FREE themes for WordPress blogs available for download on the Internet. Use google and search for WordPress themes to find many websites with free WordPress themes. Take your time to browse them until you find a theme, you like.
You can of course stick to the default theme which came with WordPress, but I think you´d like to have a blog looking different from thousands of others, don´t you?
When you have found a theme you like, use the download option and save the files to your computer. In most cases, you will have to unzip the file first.
Installing them to your blog is very easy. Just upload the folder to the wp-content/themes/-folder on your webserver.
Now login to your blog´s admin panel and go to the presentation-tab. All of your installed themes are listed with a screenshot. Just click on the screenshot of your favorite theme. That´s it, your new theme is now activated. Click on View site on top of your admin panel to see it in actions.
You are now ready to start blogging. We will first…
Add some categories
This is easy. Just login to your blog´s admin panel and go to manage and then categories. After a click on add new you´ll only have to enter the name of your new category. Just choose it to be descriptive for the posts you´re going to publish in this category. You should limit the length of the category name to a maximum of two words. The other fields will be filled automatically, so don´t mind them. Now, just one more click on add category and - voilá - here´s your new category.
Every time you write a new post, you will be able to choose the category you want the post to be published in. On the top of the right side of WordPress´s new-post-page, you can select one more categories for the post just by check the box next to your favorite category.
Start blogging
You are now ready to start your blog. Everything is prepared and here we go.
Add Content to your categories
As you can see on my blog here in my right sidebar, I have created four categories so far, Blogging, Linkbuilding, Ramblings and SEO. Each time, I post a new article I decide, which category this post will go to, and my WordPress will put it right there for convenient navigation through my blog.
Now that you have chosen your categories, it´s time to fill them up with some suitable content.
It helps to read, what other bloggers in your niche have to say. I am a subscriber to 73 other blogs as of today which I am reading daily. This keeps to be an enormous resource of inspiration. Go out and look what your new fellow bloggers have to say and you will definitely find something to write about on your blog.
Please do not just copy their postings and use them as your own. That is the worst idea, a blogger can have. People want to read about your thoughts on a topic, they want to know, what you think about it. Give them, what they need.
Congratulations, you have now filled each of your categories with some fresh contents. Good job.
Find your personal posting frequency
So, how often should you post a new article on your blog? Some professional bloggers would say, 3-4 times a day would be best.
Others say, one post per day is good enough. It is important for you to find your personal posting frequency.
This depends very much on you. If you have a day job, you probably won´t be able to spend as much time on blogging as a full-time blogger will. Do you want to write longer article going more into depth of their topics or do you post kind of news of your niche with shorter articles? Is writing very easy for you or can you type a 1000-word article within an hour? Do your posts need much research or is it more trivia?
One thing you should keep in mind: Most important is to setup and keep up a posting frequency which fits your day and your audience rhythm. Please do not try to post 10 articles a day, just to fall back to 1 post a week short time later. Better decide to post 4-5 times a week than to fire up all your ammo in short time and then encounter, you have nothing to write about.
But refrain from posting articles, only to have your blog updated. Only post if you have something to say that will interest your readers. Better leave one day out than to post a boring article nobody wants to read.
You will not only want to attract one time visitors to your blog, but create a community around it. You want your audience to participate, comment and response to what you have written. So, posting much too often will keep your audience away from that. They won´t read 10 articles every day, comment them and maybe write about them on their own blogs. That would be doing too much.
A blog is enabling you to generate traffic from every single article you post. The more posts there are on your blog, the more visitors will come in. People will come back every day, when they expect a new, interesting article to be there when thy check back. They won´t come back if the find the same old content every time they visit your blog. No on will keep checking a blog that never gets updated. This is a main feature of blogs which other websites do not have like this. You can do it with your blog.
Besides, search engines like updates of your content. If your blog is not being updated, it will become unattractive for both, search engines and visitors. If Google finds your blog only being update once a month, it will probably not rank very well in Google´s search results.
So, try and find your very own posting frequency. Maybe start with 2-3 posts a week and see, if this works for you and fits your daily routine well. You can easily increase then to 4-5 post a week. Aim at posting at least once a day in the long run. If you manage to keep this up for a few months, it may be more easy for you to keep your blog updated on a regular basis.
How to get traffic to your blog?
Traffic is the blood of your new blog. It´s the most important factor for a website, whether it is a blog or some other kind of site. Without traffic, your site or blog simply does not exist.
Getting traffic to your blog therefore is vital when it comes to bringing it to success. Where does traffic come from? Traffic comes from mainly two different sources: other sites and from people entering the URL of your blog into their browser´s address field.
People who do the second, will have to know your URL to do so. Therefore, you will have to make your blog somewhat popular outside the Internet, so we will concentrate on traffic coming from other sites first.
Write quality content
Content is still king on the Internet. Now, you are publishing content to the whole world regularly and of course, you want people to read this, and come back to your site often. The way to go is to write quality content. Quality content is content, other people want to link to and share it with other. So, when you are writing a new post for your blog, ask yourself the question, is the content I am writing actually interesting enough to make people want to link to this post?
Would I put a link to this or would I even write an extra blogpost reporting, what I have found and how valuable that has been for me? If yes, continue to write - if not, try to rethink about it, maybe you can add some more information on the topic.
Create some value with your post. This will not only create a huge amount of natural links coming to your site, but it will make people come back to your blog more often.
They will probably even spend more time on your blog, they will tell friends about it and recommend your blog to them. This is a real win-win situation for both, you and your readers. Make them find, what they were looking for.
Carnival Season
Another great way to bring your new blog to some attention is participating in carnivals. A blog carnival basically is the idea of someone taking the time to find good blog post on a given topic an then puts them together in a blog post called carnival.
A carnival is kind of a magazine, with a title, a topic, an editor, contributors and of course an audience. Typically, carnivals are being organized on a regular basis. Editions may come out every Friday or every 1st of the month for example.
In every edition, the editor will list up links to posts, the contributors have submitted. In most cases, he or she will add his or her opinion or some remark for every post.
Participating in blog carnivals is a nice way to see, what other bloggers have to say about a topic and to share your work with some like-minded bloggers you maybe did not know before.
Best of all it is FREE for you.
Go to blogcarnival.com to find a huge variety of carnivals on nearly every topic you can think about. Find one covering your topic and submit a suitable article to it.
Submitting your article to a carnival is easy. Just click on browse all carnivals, perform a search to find a suitable one and click on it. You will get some information about the carnival like the dates of the last issue and the schedule for the next one.
If you choose, this one is right for you, click on submit an article a bit downwards in the center. Fill in the URL of your post, your name and email and then click the submit-button. That´s it. You will get a receipt for your submission via email.
On the given next scheduled-date there is a big chance that your post will be presented on the blog of the carnivals host with your name and a link to it.
Depending on the specific carnival you have chosen, this can bring in lots of visitors to your blog. I participated on some carnivals myself like these:
Comments, Trackbacks and Pings
Comments
Comments are one of the most exiting features of blogs. As this is a highly interactive feature, it will help you build up a community around your blog. People can leave a comment on every article you post to your blog. This option can be disabled in WordPress, but I strongly recommend not to disable comments.
You get an impression of what other people - your audience - is thinking about what you write. This means very valuable information for you as you would not want to write what nobody wants to read, do you? Get into a conversation with your readers and reply to their comments. Secondly, you should leave comments on other blogs too. But do it wisely. Only leave a comment when you really have something to say about the article, don´t fall into spamming other people´s blogs.
Trackbacks
Trackbacks basically are another variation of a blog comment. Imagine, you have stumbled upon an interesting article on another blog and want to leave a comment on that. You would also like to let your readers know, what you have to say about that interesting article because it might be interesting for them as well.
You would then write a post on your blog, in which you refer to the interesting article, you have found, write what you have to say about it and put a link to that article into your post.
After you hit the publish-Button, your WordPress will contact the other blog with a trackback which will display it as a comment to the article together with a little teaser of and a link to your post.
Trackbacks can introduce more people into a conversation while the readers of both blogs - yours and the other one - can follow links to the other post.
As trackbacks are handled just like a normal comment, they can be edited or even deleted by the blogger if needed. Sometimes they are faked by spammers as there is no actual verification for a trackback´s authenticity.
Of course, you will only send trackback to site, you actually link to from your post. Do not try becoming a spammer.
Pings
Pings or pingbacks do basically work exactly like trackbacks but they will be sent automatically, while a trackback has to be triggered manually as described above. If you want to ping an article on another blog, check if pingbacks are enabled on that site. You can generally assume that all WordPress based blog do have pingbacks enabled. But as it can be disabled by the blogger, please check first.
This is easy. Open the URL you want to ping in your browser and open the source-code view. Look for a line in the code which looks something like this:
<link rel=”pingback” href=”…” mce_href=”…” />
If this line exist in the code, pingbacks are enabled. You do not have to put the trackback-URL into the trackback field in your blog´s editor to contact that blog. Just link to it somewhere in your post, WordPress will automatically send pings to all links in your post. Be sure to check, if your blog has this option enabled. Go to the Options->Discussion section of your WordPress admin panel and put a check mark next to Attempt to notify any Weblogs linked to from the article (slows down posting.).
IMPORTANT: If the blog, you are linking to has pingback enabled, be sure not to trackback. This might end up with you posting two links which may annoy the other blogger or even be considered as spam.
The rising of your blog
Now you have successfully setup your blog and learned how all this blogging stuff works and how you basically bring out your articles to the world, it is time to get into it a little bit deeper.
Do you know technorati?
What is technorati? Technorati basically is a website tracking, what is happening within the blogosphere. They are tracking more than 100.000.000 blogs (unbelievable, but yes, it´s true). You can go to technorati and register for an account for free and I recommend doing so. You can then claim your blog and trace, which other blogs may mention yours and put a link to your blog. These will be displayed in your account.
First, you would have to create a free account with technorati.com. After your account has been created, you can claim your blog. Technorati will ask you to put a little code into a post on your blog to check, if this blog is really yours. Copy and paste the given code to a new blog post an publish it. Click the button release the spiders on the technorati claim page and have them crawl your blog.
After technorati has successfully found the code on your blog and therefore validated your ownership, you can just delete that post again.
Now enter some information about you. Technorati will display some biographical information on your account page, so use this to let people know, who you are and what you are writing about. You can add a little photo too and I recommend this to apply a little personal touch to your account. Nobody want´s to read from some quiet anonymous who hasn´t even a face, would you?
Last step is to enter some general keywords - or better tags to your account. The whole system of technorati is based on tags, so enter some tags describing, what is your blog about in general.
To be found on technorati, you will have to tag every post you publish with relevant tags. You can use a plugin for doing this, or just drop this piece of code at the end of your blog post:
<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/YOURTAG" rel="tag">YOURTAG</a>
(Replace YOURTAG with anything fitting to your post.)
Ranking on technorati is measured in different ways. There is an authority-ranking and the other on is just called rank. So, what do these figures represent?
The authority reflects the number of links to your blog from different other blogs. Technorati counts the links towards your blog on all other blogs registered with them, but they will only count link, which have been created within the last 6 months.
So, if 100 blogs have put a link to you within the last 6 months, your authority should be - right - 100. Note, that this number can differ from your backlink count, as a blogger can of course link to you multiple times, maybe in different post, or on their blogroll, but technorati will count just one of them towards your authority.
Your rank simply shows, how many other blogs there are on technorati having a higher authority than you. When your rank is 1000, there will be 999 other blogs being more authoritive than yours. If your blog is new and you have just claimed it on technorati, your rank will start at something like 4.567.890 or so. This figure will go down quite fast in the beginning, with your first backlink it may go down to under 3.000.000. As I´m writing this, I have an authority of 61, showing that 61 different blogs have put a link to mine, and that results to a rank of just over 100.000.
If you plan to participate in an advertising campaign or something like this, keep an eye on your ranking. Some service make their decision on letting you participate in their systems or even have your blog listed in a directory upon your technorati ranking. So this can be a deciding factor for your future plans.
Do you feed the world?
Your new WordPress blog will automatically provide an RSS-Feed with it. What is RSS? RSS is a technology for syndicating pieces of regularly updated content basically. This could be news article, a series of photographs or, in our case, blog posts.
You probably have a number of websites, which you visit on a somewhat regular basis to check for updates. Many of them are supposed to be on your browser´s bookmarks. If you have, say 20-30 sites, you browse daily, this can be really time consuming. Would you like to have the chance to get a notice, when these sites update their content? This would really save you time and you could monitor more sites you like. If they have an RSS-Feed - no problem. Your blog´s future readers will probably face the same time consuming problem, they are browsing several sites daily and check them for updated, many of them will have solved this by following their favorite sites on an RSS-Feed. Don´t make them browse around, give them a Feed to follow, it´s easy.
Look at top of my right sidebar and you will notice a small RSS-Icon (
). With a click on it, you will find the RSS-Feed of this blog. Just add it to your browser´s bookmarks or your favorite aggregator, maybe google or bloglines. You´ll receive a notice on any update on my blog in almost real-time without having to browse here daily.
Ok, now you have subscribed to my RSS-Feed, you might have noticed, that I am using a service called Feedburner to deliver my Feed to you. I do this, as FeedBurner provides me with several features for the feed, like some basic statistics. It is the easiest way to find out, how many people are reading this feed. I simply would not know their number without FeedBurner.
Remember to put a link - better with a logo - on a prominent place of your blog, don´t make your readers have to scan the whole site to find the link to your feed. Your chosen WordPress theme will surely have this in place already, if not - choose another theme, the designer does not seek to know much about blogs.
Keep an eye on your SEO
As we want to attract traffic form search engines too, we need to keep an eye on some factors of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on your blog.
I could really write a whole 1000 pages book on this topic. Please read more about blog SEO here on my blog to get deeper inside. It´s no rocket science, but there are some points to remember.
Do not expect to get on a #1 ranking on google within days or even weeks for your preferred keywords, this will make you frustrated very quickly. You will need several months, or at least week to receive relevant traffic from search engines to your blog. For a quick start, I have collected some blog SEO tips for you with some DO´s and DON´Ts which will get you started. Remember to subscribe to my RSS-Feed to stay updated on this. I will post articles on blog SEO on a regular basis, as a subscriber, you won´t miss any of them.
How long will it take to generate traffic?
This depends on a large number of factors, so I can´t really give you a fixed date for this. Sure, you could generate massive traffic to your blog almost immediately. Just sign up to Google Adwords and spend some money for every click on your advertising.
As this might cost you a fortune depending on the topic you´re writing on, I would only recommend this as an addition to other efforts of traffic generation.
What we want to achieve is receiving relevant traffic from search engines, as this won´t cost you a dime. You should be ready to face some 6 months or more in waiting before you will get an interesting number of visitors from search engines.
If you manage to keep up your writing all that time and remember to build up some links to your blog posts, you will definitely succeed in what you´re doing.
Any questions left? Feel free to ask. I´m here to help
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