If You Aren’t Blogging Lets Get You Started Part 2

Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 4:00 am

Yesterday we spoke of Blogger and WordPress as blogging options if one wanted to go the free route and today I want to finish up with some of the intricacies of things when it comes to blogging, and talk a bit more on its benefits to you, whether you use it as a full blown business model or if you simply use it as a information management system for your current website.

Blogger is actually owned by Google, so some say it will be detected by Google’s radar faster, frankly I am not real sure if that is true or not. I do know that it really doesn’t make a bit of difference, considering when I put my first blog up, it was only a day before Google came by and indexed my first post, so no biggie there as far as benefiting from blogger.

However, WordPress blogs are better in the sense that it has more advanced features such as Trackbacks and Categories, sitemaps and googles analytics. The shear volume of plugins made available to you as a blogger is staggering and 99.9 percent of them are totally free. The other thing you will quickly find attractive to you blogging with WordPress, is the choices you have when it comes to themes. Themes truly make you unique and to your tastes.

I am a big believer when you are learning something new and everything has a learning curve that you simply purchase what is needed to make everything work as quickly and as efficiently as possible and it is no different when it comes to blogging. I will list a resource I used at the bottom of the post.The other thing you will find awesome about blogging is all the internal promotion capabilities built right into the system and those capabilities are growing by the day.

Services such as pinging your post. As soon as write your first blog post it gets automatically pinged and promoted to approximately 18 to 25 different blog specific spots. The other thing that is great from a promotional stand point and blogs is the RSS feed options and the ability for your readership to sign up for your feed. They are much less apt to do that with a static site because unlike blogs and blogging static sites don’t get updated like blogs do.

So just how far has blogging evolved? Well a good example is that that you can now use blogs as almost any kind of business model, over this past year I even noticed a number of Ecommerce online store solutions beginning to hit the market place, which is a huge bonus for someone who is just getting started and thinking about an online store. The internal dashboard for blogs is so easy to use and making corrections or adding items and photos and all that is related to your niche is incredibly easywhen doing it through a blogging platform.

One of the things you will also actually get very stoked about, blogs is similar to article marketing only on steroids. As long as you have a decent grasp of Search Engine Optimization, blogs and blogging makes it all an easier process. Ones ability internally to manipulate tags which is another word for keywords and keyword phrases. Blogs make it quite easy from the control panel to do all of this including and not limited to meta tags and on page optimization.

lets talk a little about blog content. Let’s look at the type of content that’s suitable for your blog in order to make it profitable. In order to make a blog profitable, it will have to maintain a focus around your niches keywords and keyword phrases in order to get ranked well and drive traffic, and blogs are naturally and inherently traffic magnets. But the difference between a profitable blog and a non-profitable one is the way you write. Readers don’t want to read a blog full of techie jargon unless your are dealing with the techie world. They want to feel like they are talking to someone just like them, someone that understands them.

So, it is very important to add a personal touch to your blog posts. You want to add your personality to your blog to make it unique. When you write posts think of it like you got your pal sittin there with your havin a cup of coffee and your just talkin about whatever it is your explaining. This will allow you to connect on a more personal level with your audience.

Having your own personality shine through in your blog will make a world of difference between your blog about gadgets and all the other blogs about gadgets out there. This will go a long way in branding yourself in the blogosphere. There is nothing wrong with adding a bit humor and enjoying what you are doing and letting it show through.

If your getting a bit excited about what and how blogging and blogs can be of great benefit to you, then I highly recommend checking out Expert WordPress. There are a couple things you will really like about it. First Alex makes it an easy 3 step process and the customer service is great. I have been dealing with Alex for a year now and he is there to help.

I have also been thru a dozen or more different hosting companies over the years and I can’t say enough good about Hostgator for the money, and if I am not mistaken they have over a million and half hosted with them and their customer service is great.