How to Start a Blog

Perhaps you have a passion to start blogging and have no clue as to how to start a blog. There are many ways of starting a blog. You can set up a blog for free at no cost to you.  Personally I prefer WordPress blogs because their blog system is more secure with much more features than blogger or typepad. You also get the added benefit of backing up your blog with WordPress. To start a WordPress blog just go to WordPress.org and you can sign up for free. Blogger.com is another source that you can visit to sign up a blog for free. 

There are many reason why one would start a blog. Many people are into starting a business blog, starting a family blog, starting a political blog or starting a food blog to name a few. A personal diary blog is probably the most common use for blogs where people will just write about the process of there day or a particular event.

If you are seriously considering using WordPress as your blog source and you are looking to host your blog. Click here for a video tutorial that gives you step by step visual instructions on how to set up a professional wordpress blog from beginning to end as well as numerous other add-ons that you can use to custom your blog and make it your own personal blog...

Blog Tips

Perhaps you have a passion to start blogging and have no clue as to how to start a blog. There are many ways of starting a blog. You can set up a blog for free at no cost to you.  Personally I prefer WordPress blogs because their blog system is more secure with much more features than blogger or typepad. You also get the added benefit of backing up your blog with WordPress. To start a WordPress blog just go to WordPress.org and you can sign up for free. Blogger.com is another source that you can visit to sign up a blog for free. 

There are many reason why one would start a blog. Many people are into starting a business blog, starting a family blog, starting a political blog or starting a food blog to name a few. A personal diary blog is probably the most common use for blogs where people will just write about the process of there day or a particular event.

If you are seriously considering using WordPress as your blog source and you are looking to host your blog. Click here for a video tutorial that gives you step by step visual instructions on how to set up a professional wordpress blog from beginning to end as well as numerous other add-ons that you can use to custom your blog and make it your own personal blog...

Accessing the maximum potential of what the WassUp offers us, and using it to our benefit, can be a helpful tool in optimizing our blog site.

Today’s blogging entrepreneurs go through all the steps in optimizing their blog sites and with a little help from all the impressive plugins, it is a guarantee that our blogging experience will be more pleasurable. It’s no wonder WordPress has gained the credibility that they’ve rightfully earned. With the creative genius of quite a few WordPress plugin inventors, we have access to the perfect WordPress plugin tool WassUp.

Got WassUp?

Compatible with WordPress versions, 1.4.9 - 2.5, WassUp has taken many WordPress users by storm. By installing itself as an additional tab in the WordPress administration area, WassUp provides blog site traffic information to WordPress users indicating when and how often a visitor visits your site. It also provides detailed information such as what sites refer your visitors, which search engines referred those visitors to your blog, the visitor’s IP address, search engine spider, S.E.R.P and Keyword..

I must say it took me a while to really understand and appreciate the usefulness of WassUp.  While it was very helpful to be able to see how often I have a visitor and how they were referred to my site, I did not maximize the full potential of the plugin until I recently analyzed every specific detail of the information that it provided me.

It is nice to be able to keep a track on your site traffic progress, which ultimately was the reason I downloaded this plugin, however I want to share with countless entrepreneurs out there an idea that sparked my attention as I was analyzing one of the great features that this plugin has to offer.

I do understand, as a blogger myself, the importance of optimizing your site and keeping tab on how well your blog is ranking with the selected keywords. However, in addition to my chosen keywords, I found it interesting that my site is ranking fairly well for keywords and keyword phrases that I didn’t know it is ranking for.

The aha moment

As we all know, when someone is looking for information on a particular topic, they go to a search engine and type a keyword phrase based on that topic. That being said, wouldn’t it be nice to know how well your site is ranking with keywords that you didn’t even know you rank for.

If someone goes to google and keys in a keyword related to your site and they see your site in the Search Engine Results Pages (or S.E.R.P) and they click on your site, WassUp will let you know what keyword the visitor used to find your site. Which I think is a helpful tool when keeping tabs on what keywords your site is ranking well for. I was able to find quite a few keywords and keyword phrases that are related to my site. These keywords are very similar to my main keyword, only they differ in a slight variation.

WassUp will also tell you what S.E.R.P page those keywords will appear on. It turned out that many of the keywords that I discovered through WassUp were keywords in which my page landed on the first page of those Search Engine Result Pages.

WassUp is free and available for download at http://www.wpwp.org/

To Your Success,

Jarrod Clark

This blog is a spin off from a previous blog post of mine, "The Benefit of Backing Up Your Blog." In the risk of sounding redundant, I will skip the whole reprimand about how you should save a back-up copy of all your blog posts. Although it’s a good idea, I will not elaborate on that idea. I will allow you to take a look at that blog post to get an understanding on why you should back-up your blog and the benefit of doing so.

It was from this mistake that I learned to seek guidance next time I make an attempt to upgrade my blog. I realize that the learning process of developing a blog is in experimenting and trying things out. All of the changes that are done to my blog are done by me, I don’t have a webmaster.

That said, WordPress is a very safe and convenient resource for blogging. And hosting your WordPress blog is the best thing that you can do. If I can use an analogy to describe the importance of hosting your blog site, I would say that the difference between hosting your blog and using a non-hosted blog is the difference between owning an insured restaurant verses owning an un-insured restaurant.

If your restaurant burns down overnight the insurance will pay to have it rebuilt, however if you own an un-insured restaurant, which most restaurant owners are too smart not to have insurance, the cost of the rebuilding will be your out of pocket expense, thats if you decide to rebuild.

There are many people who own free, non-hosted, blog sites and there are some very successful non-hosted blogs with very worthwhile content on them. Blogger.com is free to sign up, however Blogger.com is an example of a non-hosted site. It doesn’t allow outside hosting capabilities. There are many stories of people who have had there content taken down by the Blogger.com due to unknown reasons. This is where the benefit of hosting your blog comes in hand.

WordPress is free to use as well and it allows you to sign up for free. However, the great thing about WordPress is that it allows external hosting capabilities.  By personally hosting your blog through an external hosting site, you have total control over your blog. Where as with blogger for instance, the company has the option of removing your blogs at their discretion. When you host your own WordPress blog, you have total control of your blogs, WordPress can’t remove content from an external hosted blog.

I will say this in Blogger’s defense, there have been many successful blogs that have come about through Blogger. Many blogs have been in existence for many years now through Blogger. Blogger won’t remove your blog for no reason, they have terms and conditions that they have to abide by. If you breach the terms and conditions they will remove your blog site. If you own a blog through Blogger, make sure you read the terms and conditions and make sure you are abiding by them.

I would encourage you that if you are into serious blogging, it is a good idea to host your blog site. It gives you the assurance and total control of the existence of your blogs. I personally use Hostgator to host my blog and I pay about $7.98 per month and it is well worth it. I simply view it as as added insurance for my blog. To find a list of web hosting sites go to webhostingfever.com.

To Your Success,

Jarrod Clark

Yes it is true that even some of the greatest article writers have the case of writer’s block. However, many of the greatest writers have taken out time in the beginning to discipline themselves to write everyday about anything. As an aspiring blogger, I can voucher for the fact that beginning stages can be difficult when it comes to forking up the topics that will feed your audience and make a difference in their lives. It has been said that if you do at least some writing everyday you will improve the right side of your brain, also known as the creative part. It doesn’t have to be a full blown out article and it doesn’t have to be perfect. I’ve learn that if you try to produce a perfect article on the first draft you will only frustrate yourself and it doesn’t help your creativity.

 Just Write

 When you sit down and write, do just that… WRITE! It doesn’t have to be formatted correctly or it doesn’t have to have to perfect structure. You might even have grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, don’t focus on those, yet just write about a main idea and focus on that idea. I am a musician and I remember the days when I first started playing drums, it wasn’t something that I learned over night. Making music, or any other craft for that matter, is a skill that has to be practiced. It takes time to improve on your craft.

 It’s A Craft Too…

That said, blogging is something that requires practice. Writing is a craft such as being a musician, painting masterpieces or anything that takes skill. It takes practice and diligence to become a pro blogger. Mozart was a great genius and composer but nonetheless, for the genius that he was, he didn’t become the skilled musician that he was overnight, it took practice, discipline and diligence to achieve that level of success.

I want to encourage you and to take out sometime to write just a little everyday. Don’t feel like you have to finished the article, you can write a half article if that’s all you can fork up, just write something. Don’t attempt to publish your first draft. Come back the next day and try to improve on that first draft. As the day progresses, write down blogging topics that come to your mind. It doesn’t have to be all business oriented it could be personal topics, topics centered around politics anything. When as you get better at blogging about anything, your creativity will open up with content and topics in ways you never deemed possible.

To your success,

Jarrod Clark