photo credit: h.koppdelaney

Your first decision as a blogger is to decide whether you are going to use a free blogging service or set up and manage your own domain.

The advantages of the free services are: no cost, very quick to start, very little technical knowledge needed and you can try out blogging with very little risk.

The disadvantages are your blog’s name will be linked to the free blogging service, which will put off some potential visitors; there are more restrictions on a free blog; you are at the mercy of changes in ownership, changes in rules of the service.  You could also have your blog blocked or removed  if you somehow or other upset the company.

Your own domain gives you much more control over your blog.   You will have your own domain name, which allows you to brand your content, and even yourself.  There are no real restrictions on plugins and themes that you use.  In addition you can use a developer/programmer to customise the site even further.

You will need to learn some basic technology, but you do not need to go into too much technical detail.  You will need to buy and manage the domain and the hosting.

If you just want to try your hand at blogging I recommend one of the two free blogging services, Blogger, or, WordPress,   If you want to transfer your content later on to your own domain then it is relatively easy and safe to do.

However, anyone wanting to start a serious blog should get their own domain.  The cost should be less than a $100 per year.

Free Blogging Systems

Your domain’s name is important.  It can give your potential visitors an idea of your blog’s content or it can help you brand the blog.

Personal blog titles usually have one of a number of formats:

• The blogger’s name – Jim’s Blog
• What the blog is about – Reluctant Gardener
• Obscure, (for branding) – Orange Banana

This one is easy.  If you are going to have your own domain then you must use the blogging/ content management software WordPress:

• It’s free
• It has thousands of themes, potential layouts, many free
• It has thousands of plugins, program enhancements, most free
• There are thousands of developers and forums prepared to support you.

Link: Why you must choose WordPress

Sorry to be technical but at the early stage of your blogging career you should use a reasonably cheap, shared hosting service.  That is your blog and others will be stored on a large hard drive of the hosting company.

It should be a cpanel hosting, as this hosting works best with WordPress.

As a large number of hosting companies offer cpanel you can easily move your site to another supplier if you are not satisfied.

The hosting must have Fantastico, as this will install WordPress, and a large number of other software packages, for you – saving you the hassle of learning a number of technical techniques. Again this is free.

Using Fantastico the installation of WordPress is automated see: Installing WordPress and then logging onto WordPress

There are thousands of themes available for your use with WordPress.

See Smashing Magazine’s  list of 100 free themes, yes I said free, themes.

Writing a blog post is different than writing similar to writing an article for a magazine.  You need to develop your own style, learn how to add post headers, make text bold, add links and images.

Coming next week.

As part of my blogging framework, ‘The Seven Stages of Blogging’, I identify the first three stages as being:

• ‘The Start Up Blog’, where the owner learns how to set up a blog and write a few posts.
• ‘The Standard Blog’, where the owner develops their Start Up Blog into an established blog that has a reasonable number of posts.
• ‘The Launch Pad Blog’, is where the owner prepares the blog to be promoted.  The design of the blog has improved, the navigation is better,  posts are being scheduled and there are features, such as a contact page and an email list.

The vast majority of personal blogs remain at the level of a standard blog, with possibly some of the elements of the launch pad blog.  It is worthwhile considering these techniques as they will help you build up traffic and help you network with like minded people.

Today, 7th January, and it is notyet even midnight, the Blog Basics site has, according to the plugin, Jetpack’s Stats has hit the figure of over

300

visitors today. I cannot work out where the big jump from a normal 120 or 130 visitors to this high number have come from.

My previous highest has been 262.  This jump is a surprise as although I’m in the process of revamping Blog Basics this work has been mostly behind the scenes.

I’m working on:

• writing a number of linked tutorials, which I plan to upload in the next few days
• I am working with a designer to redesign the site.  There’s a technical problem with the new theme which is holding things back a little
• I am also working with a friend to restructure the way that the posts are linked.

Overview: There are three essential questions you should ask before starting a blog. Four if you want to earn a living from your blog.

• What am I going to blog about?
• Who do I want to read my blog?
• Why will they read my blog?

The fourth question is for those wanting to make money from the blog

•  How to I make money from my visitors or my visitors actions.

In brief you are going to blog:

• to promote a product or yourself
• whatever comes into your head, a personal blog
•  build your blog in a particular subject area, niche

There will be articles about each approach in linked posts that will be written this week.

This is an important consideration as you will have to make the decision between building up a large number of visitors or targeting a clearly defined group of people.

A business using a blog to help sell a specific, expensive, technical product would want their blog to be seen by people in their industry. The blog would be a mixture of brochure, public publicity, basic support centre and news about the product, other products the business makes and news of interest to the industry. Attracting thousands of general interest visitors would not be one of their goals.

On the other hand a blog making money through adverts and affiliate schemes would want to attract as many people interested in their particular niche as possible. Every visitor would be a potential business opportunity, as they may click on an advertiser’s link, or buy a product from an affiliate.

The personal blogger may want to build a large audience, or to seek a few individuals who are interested in similar subjects, or even to find a small group of people to discuss or even argue about their interest.

Note: It is very important that you have a good idea who you are writing for before you start blogging as it affects your style of writing in your content.

OK chocolate will keep them coming back

So you know what you are going to write about and you know who your target audience.

But…

… you need to think why they come to your blog and why they will keep coming back to your blog.

Your blog will be competing with billions of other websites and blogs. Even in your niche or business area you will find hundreds, and in most cases thousands, of potential rivals. Some of the sites will be strong competitors and hopefully others will become part of your network.

But, and I repeat but, you will have to offer something that is interesting, important, newsworthy or entertaining. People are busy and most are easily distracted. It is therefore up to you to make your visitor welcome and wanting to read your material. More importantly you want your visitor to interact by leaving a comment, by buying a product, signing up to a newsletter, clicking on a link or bookmarking your site with the intention of coming back.

Note: Thinking how your visitors will react to your site is important. It will put you in front of many other bloggers. Your visitor’s reactions to your blog will affect your style of writing, your content, your navigation and how you blog in a very productive manner.

As they say — this is the “$64 million question”. It is useful for you to have a reasonable idea where your money is going to be earned. Is it going to come from adverts, affiliate links, products, subscriptions or are you going to offer training, consultancy or other service.

If you are planning to make your income from say advertisements then building up a lot of traffic is important. On the other hand if you’re going to be rich running a paid for training membership site the focus will be on finding potential trainees. The blog’s objective will be to be one of the dominant blogs in that particular training niche, it will try and try and pre-sell the training and will try to counter any objections a particular buyer may have as well, of course, guiding the visitor to the buying page.

So are you clear:

• on what are you going to write about in your blog?
• who do you want as visitors to your blog?
• why are your visitors going to come to your blog?
• If relevant, I want them to make money from your visitors?

Favicon is a shortened form of ‘favourites icon’. It can also be known as a page icon or an urlicon.  Favicons are very small images which are linked to a particular website or webpage.

Favicons are usually placed in the root folder of a website and generally have the file name favicon.ico.  However, developers and theme designers more sophisticated ways of using favicons.

A sample of some of the more famous favicons are shown below.

These images of either 16 x 16 or 32 x 32 pixels in size are used to identify a website in:

The favicon makes it easy for the user to switch between open web pages.

This is particularly useful:

• when the text is not clear at the top of the screen
• when someone is researching a topic and needs to refer back

2 – Bookmark or favourites list

This helps the user identify the a specific site.  A well designed favicon attracts the eye and makes it more likely the user will click the link, rather than the more bland non-favicon link, such as the third item in the list.

Though not essential favicons improve the general appearance of your website in the following ways:

• A favicon improves the brand or look of your website.  It makes you appear to be professional
• It will marginally improve the numbers of visitors to your site
• As part of the complete package it will more make your website a little more valuable if you plan to sell it.

Smashing Magazine:  A list of 50 simple, well designed favicons

This is just a random sample of blogs – there are millions out there in all different shapes and sizes.  A good place to start is Technorati, a directory of blogs. Search and then come back and tell us of the good ones and the bad ones.

Sassy Two Socks: A lovely mixture of posts from this sassy New Yorker.

Make-up Blogger: All about make-up from Christina.

Julian Wilson: Unusual, very visual home page.  Lots of images of surfing.

Clairtrude’s Corner: Life with a guide dog and battling many of life’s problems.

Square Eyed: Too much about TV.

Boarding Area:  A collection of bloggers on travel.  Range from personal stories to specific advice on airlines, hotels and places.

Vivi’s Random Ramblings: A nice collection of random posts mostly demonstrating that Violy is a well-travelled, excellent photographer.

Why go network of blogs: Another group of travel bloggers.  Each blogger has their own patch, which range from Portland, which looks a nice city, to Iceland and France.

Allison Duncan:  really good longish articles on technology.  I read her in-depth, personal article on dealing with the latest body scanners at airport security.  A good read.

Techcrunch:  This is the one to learn all about technology and in particular technology business, technology start-ups and gadgets.  You’ll usually hear the techie gossip here first.

Speckyboy.com: Great blog on the design of websites.  Good on lists, (usually 50) of well researched examples of good or unusual design.  Gives even the least technical good ideas to discuss with their own designers.

Daily Blog Tips: Daniel Scocco’s great range of blogging advice and you’d be very surprised to find out that the site usually publishes a useful tip every day.

Traffic Generation Cafe: Ana Hoffman’s very friendly, very knowledgeable blog on building traffic for your blog.

Problogger: Probably the ultimate ‘how to blog’ and ‘how to make money blogging’ web site. Darren Rowse makes it look easy, but behind the scenes he works hard.

What blogs do you like?  Are you writing a blog?  Then tell us about it.

If you’re new to blogging, WordPress is definitely the way to go. It is easy to use, has great perks, and makes sense when you’re posting and creating your site. There are a few little things you need to know about it before you’ll be a successful WordPress blogger.

The first thing a visitor is going to see is your theme. This is what your Wordpress site looks like. Pick a theme that makes sense with your topic. If you’re writing about power tools, it probably would not be a good idea to go with a floral-print background. If you’re talking about nature and plants, you might want to steer away from an industrial theme. Make sure whatever theme you choose is easy to use and uncluttered. You don’t want the theme to distract for your posts.

Widgets are WordPress’ name for additional things you can add to your theme. Things like text boxes, Twitter feeds, and photo sections. These are great things to add to your site to make its usability better and also improve your connectedness. Bring your blog users over to your Twitter account increases followers in both places. The text boxes work well to include links to your other sites or interests.

One thing to remember about WordPress is that your post title becomes the page name for that post, so be careful what you initially name your post. Titles can make or break a post. Think ahead before starting a new post. You can always edit the title later, but that is much harder to do. Get it right the first time.

These are how your readers find your posts. Search engines use tags to know what your post is about. Use them wisely. Creating too many tags is just as bad as creating too few. Anywhere from five to ten tags is optimum. Categories help your readers to specify what they would like to read. If you have a mixture of reviews, how-tos, and editorials; give your readers the opportunity to find just what they need by properly categorizing them.

Connecting your blog to your Twitter and Facebook pages is really easy to do in WordPress. When you first post, you will be asked if you would like to connect them. Please do so. This will allow your Facebook fans and Twitter followers to get regular updates of your blog without you having to manually insert a link. It’s quick, easy, and well worth doing.

There are many more things to learn about WordPress, but these five tips will help you to get
started off on the right foot. Pay attention to the tool bar, play around with the themes, and find
out what works best for your site. Good luck!

Author Bio:

This is a guest post from Laura Backes, she enjoys writing about all kinds of subjects and also topics related to internet service providers in my area.  You can reach her at: laurabackes8 @ gmail.com.

Ads for free web hosting are everywhere on the internet. It may seem like a great deal at first glance because paying monthly or annual web hosting fees can get expensive. Choosing a free web host is the best decision in some cases, but not always. There are several things to consider before making a commitment.

If you plan to build a personal or family site to share information, free web hosting is an excellent choice. Free web hosting may not be the best choice, however, for a business or direct sell site because visitors are often bombarded with unwanted ads. These ads allow the web host to offer you the free service, but don’t do much in the way of making your site appear reputable.

Another factor to consider is how much information you plan to upload to the site. Most free web hosts offer plenty of space for blogs or hobby pages, but if you plan to expand your site significantly it may be best to go with a paid web host that offers enough space to add information as your website expands.

Bandwidth determines how much information can be provided to visitors in a set amount of time. For websites with few visitors this won’t be a concern, but if you’re hoping for large amounts of traffic this is an important factor to consider. If your site receives more visitors than the server allows, readers will receive an error message and will be denied access.

Free web hosts are great for having fun and learning to build a site, but for those with experience in site building they may prove too restrictive. Paid web hosts offer different programming options that allow you to customize the site to fit your needs.

Customer service doesn’t seem like a big deal until something goes wrong. Free web hosts have no obligation to offer extensive support because you aren’t paying for a service. Good customer service is necessary for monetized and business sites because you can’t afford for the site to be down while you try to repair technical glitches.

Editor’s comment: The two larger free services, Blogger.com and WordPress.com allow users a lot of hosting space and provide a lot of facilities, but are more restrictive than having your control of your own domain.

Free web hosting is a great deal for those who want to have fun building their own site. If your site is intended to sell items, provide a service or bring in revenue through ad clicks, paid hosting offers necessary advantages to keep the money and traffic coming in.

About the Author

This article was written by Phill from WhoIsHostingThis.

You can just start using a standard WordPress installation as it is – but just by making a few changes to the settings, adding and amending the layout, (theme), and adding a number of enhancements, (plugins), you can greatly improve the professional look of your website.

This post shows you the most useful changes you can make to the WordPress settings menu.

One of the first things you should be doing is to make some adjustments on the WordPress settings:

There are so many different aspects to blogging that it can be a little overwhelming at first. What starts as a seemingly simple venture can turn ugly quickly if you aren’t careful. However, being able to define your niche and target audience can significantly streamline everything for you and make the overall blogging process a little easier.

By defining your target audience you effectively set the tone for your blog. It will help you to pinpoint what topics you are interested in posting about, which will in turn help to organize your thoughts. By picking topics you are already somewhat knowledgeable about you have the opportunity to research, write, and eventually become an “expert” in your blogging field.

In addition, it will enable you to reach out to the right people, the people that will have an interest in your blog and an interest to continue reading your blog. While having people stop by is great as far as short term results are concerned, you ultimately want to be able to grow your readership and retain a solid readership base, which will translate into long term results. If the blog isn’t marketed towards the people that are intrigued with your blog’s niche, it will eventually fail.

You also need to form relationships with other people in your niche. This can be done by commenting frequently (with quality comments) on people’s blogs in your same niche that you respect and engaging in activities such as discussion forums or Twitter chats. Discussions and chats are an excellent way to find others that hold your interests and form bonds with them. When you create relationships with people in the same market as you, you’ll effectively be able to work with each other to grow each other’s blogs.

Keyword research is one of the best ways to identify what category your target audience falls under. By doing research into this you’ll be able to see what words people are searching with to obtain their desired results. Once you’ve identified your keywords you’ll be able to incorporate them into your blog titles and your blog posts, ensuring that readers will be able to find you more easily and that your blog will be more likely to be indexed by search engines and thus grow your blog.

These are only a few ways that you can define and cater to your target audience. Once you have these in play you’ll be able to grow your readership, which is the ultimate goal of any blog. It may take some work and time, but a little hard work never hurt anyone!

Kate Croston is a freelance writer, holds a bachelors degree in Journalism and Mass Communication. She writes guest posts for different sites and loves contributing cheap internet service related topics. Questions or comments can be sent to:  katecroston.croston09 @ gmail.com.

Blog Basics:  The Niche Imperative

Blog Basics: Writing a blog: A business like approach

Blog basics: Branding Yourself

Blog basics: Content Writing: Your Audience – the Internet today

What’s your audience?   What are the most important bloggers in this niche?

The current development of the internet was down to a project based in CERN, a Swiss research centre. The project’s main purpose to enable physicists to send research papers and experiment results to each other.

This article briefly describes the three technologies, HTML, HTTP and browser software, which were developed by the project and why they are so important today.

CERN, (Centre Européen de Recherche Nucléaire), or European Organization for Nuclear Research is one of the world’s leading scientific research centre.  Currently it is most famous as the home of the  Large Hadron Collider, which is investigating how the universe was created after the Big Bang.

The centre has always been of great interest to physicists throughout the world.  In the pre-Internet world research papers and experimental results would have to be either printed or using fairly primitive electronic communication.

A number of people were looking at ways of improving the communication between the researchers.  The amount of research data was huge and was too unwieldy to be printed.

Techniques, such as gopher, ( a way of copying information on one computer and transferring it to another), were often difficult, as the the two computer systems could work in different ways, (called protocols), and it often required quite a lot of technical knowledge to perform a simple conversion to enable those at the receiving end to be able to use the data.

In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN, was working on a solution.  He worked on three technologies to allow the documents to be distributed and read:

• HTML, (Hypertext Markup Language).  This relatively simple code, (well for geeks anyway ), enabled  people to have an agreed layout for document pages.
• HTTP, ( Hypertext transfer protocol). This is the technology that  transfers a page from one computer to another.
• Browser technology.  Software that can read HTML pages.

In that period the first small desk top computers emerged.  By today’s standards they were very primitive, with memories measured in thousands of bytes, very slow and their connections to other computers were by dial-up phone modems.  Consequently they were very limited and would not be able to do the complicated mathematics, on numerous rows of results,  most physicists required.

At that time academic researchers would be using large, university based machines, which generally had very limited software, that was only available for their specific computer and in many cases each research team developed their own software packages, to process their own results, which was often difficult for others to use.

With the combination of HTML, HTTP and a browser a researcher in one country could access and download pages from a remote computer, that could be in a different country, using a completely different system.  This is why this project was so successful – it met an important need – that of rapidly speeding up communication

An HTML document is simply a text file with a few special codes, (call tags), in it to control the layout.

The advantage of a text file is that all computers can read a text file and so many HTML document can be sent from one machine to another without too much trouble.

The tags are fairly simple.  As an example

<p>This is a simple paragraph with the word <b>bold</b>in bold.</p>

The <p> tag starts a paragraph.  The </p> tag switches the paragraph off.

The <b> tag switches bold on.  The </b> tag switches bold off.

The paragraph will look like this:  This is a simple paragraph with the word bold in bold.

Most tags are a pair, switch on, and are then switched off, with the same tag, but with a forward slash in front of the command.  eg <i>Italics</i>

Tags control layout, the placing of images, links, header text and tables. However, some tags have been  superceded by an upgrade to web technologies CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, which give the developer much more control over fonts, text size, spacing and much more.

For developing your HTML coding try the W3school website.

This is the system that finds a page on the web and then brings it to your computer.  It warns the computer to expect an HTML page.  (Nowadays the page could also be an XHTML page, (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language), which though very similar to HTML is a more formal document markup structure and is the now recommended standard for web page developers).

Whenever you type in a web address, known as the URL, (Uniform Resource Locator)  – it is the HTTP system that translates the name into a four part number, called an IP, (Internet Protocol) number, which will look something like this -  86.164.206.217, (which is the UK based BT broadband supplier).  Look up your IP address on What is my IP address?

HTTP, (Hypertext transfer protocol).  Example.

In fact there are two parts to a web address.

So My web address     http://blogbasics.com

The first part is the code http:// which tells your computer system that you are looking for a web page in either HTML or XHTML format.

The blogbasics.com is converted into the IP number format 50.22.67.61

The system will then find the server, (the computer where the page is located), and transfer a copy to your computer.  This is then processed by your browser into a formatted web page.

Browsers are the software programs that convert an HTML or XHTML document into the web page that is read by the user.  A copy of a page is downloaded through HTTP into the user’s computer.  The browser then converts the code and text into a readable web page.

The program analyses the HTML file and identifies the HTML tags, which then controls how the browser displays the page.  The layout is formatted including using the right character set, positioning necessary images or video and adding such features as background colour.

Today the advanced browsers and servers allow many other actions to take place, such as access to a database, automatically adding a date, remember the layout the individual user previously wanted or to show advertisements relevant to the user’s location.

Advantages of Browsers 

A browser can be developed for any type of computer be they laptop, desktop or large mainframe and for any operating system.  You will see roughly the same page – be it on an Apple, Windows or Unix system.

A browser can also be written for new devices, such as smart phones, which are then surf the net, even though many of the web pages were written well before these advanced technologies were no more than an idea in science fiction.

In the PC world there has a lot of conflict between Microsoft, with their Internet Explorer, and other browser developers, such as Firefox and Google’s Chrome.

The Microsoft product often has a different way of rendering, (laying out), web pages than the other browser developers.   This has caused a lot of aggravation for web site developers as many have had to add extra coding to make sure that the layout is the same in all the browsers.

The Tim Berners-Lee’s identification and development of three technologies – the standardised making up of an electronic  document, the development of a method to send the document from one computer to another, (with the ability to be able to type in a domain name, rather than remembering set of digits), and the development of browsing software really kicked started the whole internet revolution.

To be truthful the revolution would have taken place within a few years as the problems of electronic communication and access information on remote computers was being looked by many others.

The big legacy is that coming out of a research centre, rather than a business, has meant that individuals, businesses and governments have been able to build on his work without the threat of legal battles or patent protection.  The internet would have developed a lot slower and probably would have cost a lot more to use.

What do you think?