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 , 12 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.
More on the post content
You should also establish a logical progression throughout your articles so that the readers don’t get lost. An effective method is going with what, why and how. Start the first paragraph with what you’re going to write about (assisted by headline). Then explain why your reader should carry on and finally, do your best in outlining how the reader will accomplish the results you want to inform and teach them.
Also think things through if all of your posts will be about the same thing. For instance, my posts are categorized by personal articles, link descriptions, book reviews and newsflashes. And for clarity’s sake, the headlines are colour coded for easy reference. Another thing you may already think through is your regular categorization. Will there be 5, 20 or 70 different categories? This is all very important when you decide upon the page structure of your blog.
Additionally, you ought to write the occasional pillar article to draw more traffic. This is an example of a pillar article. It covers the very basics of what you do or what your beliefs are. It can either be separated into several steps or entered as one long post that serves as a deeper relationship with what your blog is about. It is often timeless, practical and shares deep insights over the issue. These should be in your repertoire from the very beginning and depending on your article structure, appear at least once every week or every month.
Again as a reminder, your content is the number one determinant if people will enjoy your blog and revisit it later on.
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.
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10 Most Misspelled Words in Blogs January 30, 2007
Posted by The Probabilist in : [Articles], Communication, Productivity, Studies, Words, Work, Writing, Blogging, Reading , 230 comments
Ok, so technically the following words aren’t misspelled. They’re misused. The reason you should review this list is because a spell checker won’t correct these for you. Make sure that you’ve got foolproof control over them (especially if you tend to write around 3:12 AM like I am now). Extensively misusing them throughout your posts may actually cost you a visitor or two every now and then because some folks do get caught up on these, which means they won’t focus 100 % of their attention on your incredibly valuable content!
1. Your - You’re
As mentioned above, your message might lose impact if you’re not paying attention to this number one word maltreatment. If you find it particularly difficult to separate them from each other, stop using ‘you’re’ altogether and notice how you are starting to improve your spelling.
2. Then - Than
The next step is then to tell yourself that it’s better late than never to get that vowel placement in order. Then your readers might find something more useful to comment on than your apparent spelling impediment.
3. Its - it’s
It’s best to write an article and its words properly for optimal reader engagement. Again, if you still fail to tell the difference without effort, just write how great it is not having to worry about misusing or misspelling words.
4. To - Too - Two
To write two posts per day, or not to write two posts per day. That too is the question.
5. Were - Where - We’re
Where in the world were you? We were at Billy’s and we’re staying for another day. Make sure your blog visitors do that too.
6. There - Their - They’re
They’re moving their cursor over there. By focusing more attention on proper word use, your visitors won’t highlight and pinpoint your mistakes.
7. A - An - And
A flawlessly written article serves as an eye-opener and should provide lasting value. Remember also that an abbreviation like SUV starts with a vowel pronunciation and requires an ‘an’ in front of it.
8. Off - Of
Of all the mistakes you could prevent from appearing, start off by checking out this common mix up. You should have paid attention at school when they told you not to write ’should of’. Or off your visitors go.
9. Here - Hear
Hear ye! Hear ye! Here is a blog worth reading. You can almost hear the distant clicks of new visitors finding their way over here this very moment.
10. Lose - Loose
But if you’re too loose on your writing discipline, you will end up losing those readers after a while. You’d have a bolt loose if you don’t apply these 10 writing rules from now on with greater care. You win some and you don’t lose anyone.
Can you find the misused or misspelled word in this article? 
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