The Basics
To become a blogger, you need a platform; a place to post your blog entries. There are more blogging tools than I can think of, but the most popular free blogging tools are Google’s Blogger [1] and Word Press [2].
Find a free/ultra-low-cost blogging tool you’re comfortable with. Blogger and WordPress work fine for starters.
Use said tool and any associated help files, discussion boards, or books related to create your blog page. Make it visually appealing. If this is hard, well, then you need some training. Either self taught or some other learning method, but there is no substitute for learning to use the tool properly.Avoid paying for any service/tool. It’s a commitment, and unless you’ve been doing this for a while already it’s just not wise to make a commitment to do something you’re not sure you’ll like doing for ever and ever.
Write some posts.Below I put some best practices for identifying and targeting a specific audience to writer for. Writing a blog just to write a blog is the first step AWAY from becoming a professional blogger.
Test it out.Before you put your blog “on blast” and start begging people to retweet links to your blogs posts, post some of them, make them live, and then view them in multiple different browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari are the most popular), just to make sure it doesn’t look awful. Let your friends and family read it (and proof for errors). If they are glossing over, that’s ok, they may not get what you’re writing about. But, they should be able to at least understand what the blog is about and who is it’s intended audience.
Go live.This is hardly the last step. But if you did step 4, you’ll likely already have some posts up when you start marketing your blog. So you should not encounter any surprises when new people visit your blog. And if you did step 3 before step 5, you should already have a few blog posts ready to release or already released.
Write some more, but hold off on making them publicly viewable. It’s not the best practice to write a post and then go immediately live with it, unless it’s about current events. With that in mind, catalog all your ideas for blog posts, and write about them when you see fit. Good timing always helps when posting; it might not be wise to post blogs about holiday shopping in January.
Establish a presence by commenting on other people’s like-minded blog postings, but make sure you are known as the writer of your blog and ALWAYS provide the url to your blog in the comments.This part is easy, but it is a must if you want to be even a little bit successful. By creating, and maintaining, relationships with other bloggers and their already-established communities of readers you eliminate having to start building your entire audience from scratch. But make sure your comments are meaningful and either add to the discussion, ask thoughtful questions, or in the case of disagreeing with an author, are at least respectful. This part of the process is vital, if you aren’t doing this, how are people finding out about your blog? Go to where your readers already go and establish yourself as a member of their community.
Get ads and get paid.This is probably the harder part of blogging, but only because most bloggers never make it to this stage. If you have a steady readership, which can be proven using analytics of the web traffic to your website/blog, then you now have a product you can market. Advertisers want eyeballs, and if you have people reading your blog regularly, then you have eyeballs on your blog. The tricky part about this step is finding the right tool provider for your model. If you intend to have loads of traffic, lots of unique posts that are well-written, and great web traffic, it is easier to justify paying WordPress or Blogger the fees required to post ads on your blog. BUT, be forewarned, this requires research and knowledge about what rates advertisers will pay for space on your site. This can lead you to an entire chapter on marketing that I will not get into here; because it’s still a little foreign to me, and you’re probably already sick of this long-winded, over-detailed answer already.
Best Practices for Writing Content.
Find a niche audience. If you over-generalize your content, you risk getting glossed over. It’s better to start with a niche and expand than to start overly general and then narrow down.A good example of a niche audience: poor college students.
Identify typical problems for that audience. How can you add value to their lives or solve a problem they regularly face? College students struggle to pay for over-priced textbooks.
Research and write about solutions to those problems.If you are blogging on a topic you know nothing about, you’re headed for trouble. Do your homework. The more credible the source of your info, the better (that should be obvious).Research/write about renting text books, borrowing text books, sharing with a peer, and finally, the almighty library.
Must Haves
Things no blog should ever be without. Ever.
A Blogroll. A Blogroll is simply a list of blogs you like to read or that are related to your content. But, a good way to get an idea of who your audience is to read other people’s blog. When you find one you like, become a member and leave comments on the blog posts (do NOT pay for access to leave comments).
Reader Feedback.If you can’t tell if your readers like your content, then you’re missing out on some very useful information that is the key to being successful. A blog is different from a typical media outlet because it’s usually a reachable person that’s willing to make changes based on what their readers want/would like to see. If you’re hesitant to make a place to leave comments, use moderated comments, or at the very least provide an email address so that people can tell you what they think, and they will.
Easy-to-remember Name of Your Blog. Most people can’t get away naming their blog after themselves unless they already have notoriety. Get creative. Keep it simple. And it doesn’t hurt to make it clever and/or funny.
Connection to Social Media.The easier it is to share your content on social media websites like Facebook and Twitter, the better. Seriously, there is no limit to how many/which kind of social media webistes you link to. If it exists, and has more than 100 users, and you can figure out how to use it with your site, do it. It may seem hard to do, but the biggest social media websites all have lots of tutorials on how to add these capabilities to your site. Usually it consists of adding some code to your site, or in some cases, like with Blogger and WordPress, they may already have these features built it.
Top 10/8/7 ListsSimply put, lists are easy to read and don’t usually take up too much time to write. Most readers won’t spend a great amount of time reading your posts, so making them short a effective helps ensure they’re reading all of it. Top-10 lists are a great way to vary your content also, which is useful.
Final Considerations
You don’t need a blogging tool to have a blog. A blogging tool just makes it easier to do just blogging. An alternative is to buy a domain and low-cost web hosting and just publish your blog posts straight from there. Basic HTML knowledge is needed, but really, if you aren’t ready to learn a bit of HTML coding, blogging will always be foriegn to you. It’s not difficult, and once you grasp the basic concepts it’s easy to build on that knowledge. Use W3Schools to get started learning HTML [4], it’s the leading authority on HTML standards and has loads of free tutorials. They literally wrote the book on building websites.
It’s a time commitment. No matter how great a writer you are, if you’re not ready to sit down and actually write these blog posts, or do the research to make yourself sound credible, then you will be in for disappointment in your career as a professinal blogger.
Get creative with who you sell your ad space to. Just remember to keep your audience in mind when/if you sell ad space. Irrelevant ads, or ads that offensive, will drive away readers quickly.
That’s all for now. If you read this far, thanks for reading my manual on “How To Become a Professional Blogger.” And feel free to ask me questions by sending me a message. [via : facebook]
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