Entrepreneurship | The Probabilist . com

How to Blog - 8 Essential Steps to Effective Blogging February 9, 2007

Posted by The Probabilist in : [Articles], Creativity, Entrepreneurship, Goals, Productivity, Technology, Writing, Blogging , 16 comments

So you’ve decided to start blogging? That’s great, but in order to make the most out of your venture, I’ve compiled a massive 8-step program with lots of detailed advice that you may use as reference whether you’ve been blogging for quite some time now already or if you didn’t know what a blog was until yesterday. It is designed to be easy enough for anyone to follow, yet consist of information that may be new even to bloggers with several months of experience under their belt.

These entries will be long and there will be plenty of external links embedded as well for even more in-depth information and utilities. A new article will be presented every Monday and Friday for the next four weeks. In this sense, it fits perfectly as a real time workshop where you follow each of the 8 steps at the given pace and as thoroughly as you choose to. You’ve probably already pictured for yourself a bit what your blog is going to look like so you are in no way required to follow and do everything exactly as I suggest. Strive for uniqueness on at least one aspect when considering what content, niche, design, features, writing style, layout and audience you want. This guide will be tailored to the Wordpress blogging platform and will also include the element of making money off your blog.

Here are the eight essential steps that will get their own article and link from this introduction.

How to Blog - 1/8 Start Offline (XAMPP, WP, Themes, Files)
How to Blog - 2/8 Go Online - (Web host, FTP, WP Config)
How to Blog - 3/8 Plugins - (How to install, 20+ essential plugins)
How to Blog - 4/8 Design & Tweaks - (Permalinks, Favicon, CSS & PHP)
How to Blog - 5/8 Google Utilities
How to Blog - 6/8 Ads
How to Blog - 7/8 Traffic Building (Internal means)
How to Blog - 8/8 Traffic Building (External means)

I’m not going to let you leave totally empty handed, so I’ll cover the most important things you need to focus on before you make the decision to follow these steps - the reason and the content.

What’s your motive?

You need to establish an underlying reason why you want to blog about something. Do you want to help people with a specific issue? Or do you just want to get yourself heard over yours? Whatever it is, it should be a prevalent and persistent behaviour and thought pattern that will ride the ups and downs that you may experience from time to time. This is most important if your goal is to make a living off of blogging because for such a goal, you need to reserve at least one or two years before you can get to the proof if you’re cut out to be a professional blogger.

Find your why first before reading how to blog because failure is most often found when people start to question why they’re doing what they’re doing. Few people fail out of not knowing how to do what they should do. I can’t really help you any further on that question because you have to find your own personal answer to it yourself. All successful bloggers (as well as entrepreneurs and businessmen) have a strong why and it keeps them going. You may find this article to be relevant as well.

What are you going to write about?

This should be a done deal for you by now, but question first how broad your perspective will be. Will you be able to write hundreds of posts in a very narrow niche or should you keep flexible boundaries to ensure that writer’s block doesn’t hit you? It doesn’t matter if you will monetize your blog or not, readers want to see persistence, a predictable posting frequency and above all else they want to read interesting and useful entries.

As long as you love writing what you’ve decided to write about, you’ve got the highest odds of succeeding in attracting plenty of readers as well as personally having the drive to go on for a long while. Every blogger will agree on the notion that the greatest key to success is writing compelling entries that provide lasting value.

What will the name of the blog be?

For starters, do a Google search on “domain registration” and you’ll find plenty of websites that enable you to enter a url in a field for you to check its availability. I suggest getting your own domain name if you want to stand out as a seriously dedicated blogger. This is also the only option if your idea requires plenty of storage space for media rich content like images, podcasts or videos. Wordpress’ own blog hosting program will not allow you to run ads on your blog. Blogger on the other hand lets you do this in its blogspot directory. More on hosting your blog and going online is presented in step 2.

Then make up your mind on what the blog’s name will be. New blogs grow in numbers like mushrooms in rain, so you’d better make a search on the blog name that you want as well before settling on a final decision. Also decide upon the tagline or trademark text that goes hand in hand with your blog title. Finding a great match between the url and your blog title is getting more difficult for every day, but try to be creative and find a solution that catches and matches with the essence, motive and content of your blog-to-be.

Write compelling headlines

In order to grab attention, your post titles need to be carefully selected. Are you going with wit, clarity, controversy or guidance? Do you aim for people’s emotional or rational attention? Do you want to entertain or provide help? John Wesley provided a great case study over the choice of headlines. Copyblogger presents alternative options of how to rephrase your headlines. And while you’re at it, check the wording of Steve Olson’s headlines in the Most popular posts section in the sidebar. Always experiment and try different methods and analyze the results.

Checklist for introduction

Motive - Why are you blogging? What do you want to accomplish?
Blog Content - What is it about? Niche or general? What do readers expect?
Name & Domain - Check url and name availability. Make it all match together.
Headlines - Know which headlines grab attention. Choose your style.
Post Content - How will you write and present? Write pillar articles once awhile.

In the first step of this workshop (Monday, February the 12th) I’m going to show you how to install and use XAMPP, a free software that allows you to run Wordpress offline on your computer. This way even the most cautious newbie can install and try out the blogging platform and tweak all they want without annoying online readers with downtime, errors or continuous changes when you tweak your blog to the max throughout the 8 steps.

Bookmark this page or subscribe to my feed to stay updated.

(No Ratings Yet)

Why You’re Obliged to Make Money from Your Blog February 7, 2007

Posted by The Probabilist in : [Articles], Entrepreneurship, Productivity, Purpose, Studies, Assets, Blogging , 71 comments

I bet this statement doesn’t resonate very well with some bloggers, but this is how I view it. If you’re not making any money from your blog, then you’re not being true to your own value. Before you bash me for being an evil capitalist, hear me out and you’ll come to understand why I want to see ads on your blog.

I’ve been holding a weekly carnival to help people get some exposure to their blogs and in the process I’ve had the privilege of reading plenty of excellent articles and finding promising blogs that I’ve enjoyed browsing through. However, some of them will undeniably be gone or idle by this time next year and the main reason is that they do it part time and generate very little income from their blog - if any.

These are the people that update their blogs at snail pace and publish a new post 2-4 times per week. If they had the common sense to do their best in realizing their blog’s true potential and make some money that they rightfully deserve, they would surely last longer and probably write 1-3 posts per day instead.

And that’s what I want to see above all else. If more bloggers realized how valuable ideas they’ve got, they would have a much greater chance to reach the positive spiral of working as a full time blogger - for everyone’s benefit. But since many decide not to untap their revenue stream, I again lose another good read because they give up. Or then the blogs don’t get updated enough because they’ve got a “real job” to deal with.

So to provide you with some details, I took a look at 50 blogs that are familiar to me and categorized their income potential into four groups.

graph To the right is the percentage breakdown of how well the bloggers are using ads on their websites. Only two showed that they had thoroughly thought about how and where to place their money magnets. They also understand to use more than one ad format (mostly banners and text ads) to add a more diverse mix to their blog. And most of all, the ads fit perfectly and are sure to reach nearly maximum potential.

The blogs that I considered doing a fairly good job were the rest that used more than one ad format, but had either placed them in cold spots, picked slightly off-topic ads or made them stand out too much. They are on the right track, but could use some additional tweaking or blending.

Bad results are definitely seeing those who decided to rely on only one ad format and who also placed very few ads, in poor locations or that fit very badly in the overall layout of the blog. For those 36 out of 50 blogs that use ads, 22 use only one ad format and 14 use more than one (of which the majority relies on two formats).

However, the blogs that I’m most sceptical about were the 14 that didn’t (yet) run any ads or other forms of income generating means. And some of them are downright excellent reads. There are of course a few valid points that counterattack this small study/observation.

Firstly, these are mostly upcoming blogs that only have a few months of experience under their belts, so a couple of the bloggers may still be in the phase of contemplating how to make their monetizing move. Secondly, as they still don’t have a great reader base, the really good advertising programs aren’t available because of the low traffic. But there are plenty of options to choose from even if nobody has heard of your blog yet. There will be a future entry specifically outlining how to choose, use and place ads later on in this blog. So stay updated.

If you’re concerned about losing readers by putting up ads then think again. There are plenty of visitors like me who hold an advertising blog that supports its blogger in much higher regard than a blog that gets updated twice a week because it doesn’t pay a single bill. Another good reason to put some ads on your blog is that you’ll get another indicator for yourself of how valuable you and your entries are to the world. I’m hard pressed to write a review of a blog if it doesn’t indicate that it takes this work seriously, because nobody likes dead links or obsolete posts on their blogs.

All work, even if it doesn’t feel like work, should be paid for. So would you please start making (more) money from your blog so that you free up time to write more entries?