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...

Network Marketing, or Multi-level Marketing, is among one of the highest trends in the work-at-home industry. Network Marketing allows entrepreneurs to earn an impressive income by building an organization of people. Through network marketing entrepreneurs not only earn income through building an organization of like-minded individuals, but they have the opportunity to promote and sell products for various companies in an effort to be compensated for royalties on the services of those products.

Unfortunately, many individuals who are being recruited into companies are being told to sell, sell, sell & recruit, recruit, recruit. Without any prior experience in sales or recruiting, it has become frustrating for newcomers in this industry because of a lack of training. Granted, many companies do provide their organization with a game plan of how to recruit and sale by getting everyone on the weekly conference calls and telling them to make a list of their closest friends and family, give them the sales pitch and "close the sell."

Many of the top notch gurus in the network marketing industry live by the sell, sell, sell & recruit, recruit, recruit rule. Their is such a thing as personal branding or building personal relationships with prospects. The first thing that prospects look for when joining a network marketing company is who is doing the presentation. The prospects will query upon this seemingly insignificant but very substancial question. Which leads back to the first statement in this article:

People don’t companies. People Join People

No matter how impressive the compensation plan, it is all about who is giving the presentation. The compensation plan falls a few points down the list of things that prospects are looking for when joining you. And while the numbers can be very intriguing, the compensation plan is not the ultimate concern. When you first pick up the phone and get acquainted with the prospects, they are subliminally pondering questions such as: Is this someone I like? Can I count on this person? Can I trust this person? Can this person help me to be successful?

Many times network marketing companies will tell all of the newcomers to 3 way their prospects in with the upline due to the lack of experience on the newcomer’s behalf. This is not such a good idea. It has been said that much of the deciding factor for the prospect joining you is your ability to answer their questions personally.

Avenues of Personal Branding

I make mention of MySpace quite a bit in my blogs because I see Myspace as a great way to market yourself. I personally use MySpace and I get a great response from people inquiring about what I do. Often enough, the people I have encountered on MySpace are already in a business and are trying to sell me on something or they are hungry for something and they are looking for tips and ideas on how to become an entrepreneur, which was my inspiration for starting this blog.

Many times I will just ask them personal questions, inquire about their background, or ask what it is they are looking to do in an attempt to determine what to recommend. Ultimately, MySpace is a great networking avenue to communicate with other like minded individuals and build long lasting relationships.

Online blogging is a great resource for putting out information for readers to view what you have to say, but it is also a great avenue for building relationships with your audience. By placing quality content on your site and staying consistent and publishing blogs at least 2-3 per week, you will gain an audience to your blog which will in turn gain you exposure to more prospects looking for something that you have to offer.

Personally I don’t offer my business opportunity on this blog site. I choose to focus solely on publishing quality, helpful content to entrepreneurs who are looking to take their business to another level. In fact, I can’t count the number of responses I get from people who visit my blog site expecting to get a sales pitch or be sold on something. The very response I get is "Why don’t you make mention of your MLM company at all on your blog?" People are literally surprised that I don’t mention a company, a product or a compensation plan of any sort.

I must admit, I do use some form of monetization on my blog but it is very minimum, and my blog content is not centered around those products. I do want to stress that the purpose of my blog site is not to sell individuals on a company but to provide useful information and tools for entrepreneurs.

Remember focusing on building long lasting relationships in your organization is a must. For more tips on how to succeed in your network marketing venue visit JarrodClark.SuccessIn10Steps.com and download the free e-book Success In 10 Steps by Michael Dlouhy.

To Your Success,

Jarrod Clark

While it is very easy to start up a blog for free, there are some things to take into consideration if you are seriously looking to explore blogging as an avenue to market your business. Although entrepreneurship and online business is the main focus for my blog, there are obviously many other genres of blog subjects that people are blogging about online. However, my goal is to provide topics geared towards entrepreneurs.

I want to share a couple of incidences in which I almost lost all of the content to my blog. It is not a good feeling when you have put so much hard work into your blog and it is all lost in an instant. After about a month of creating this blog I was attempting to upgrade my blog to WordPress 2.5 for the first time and I wound up somehow triggering something within the control panel of my hosting site for this blog.

Although I was only within a month of having started my blog, it felt like I put about 2 months worth of work into it. After all of the hard work that I put into my blog with in that first month I wound up loosing it all. I will never forget the feeling I had when I went to view my blog after so-called "updating it" to WordPress 2.5. Many WordPress users may still remember the very first custom blog entitled "Hello World", that comes with WordPress when a new blog is set up. That is all I saw when I typed in my blog address at www.JarrodClark.com. My blogs didn’t show up, my theme wasn’t there everything was lost.

I had another instance today (the day I published this blog). I was installing a plugin to the plugins folder for my blog, and although I was aware of the fact that after installing a plugin to your blog, you should always go back to your blog site and refresh the page to make sure that the plugin doesn’t interfere with the operation of your site.

Not thinking I installed the plugin and about 10 minutes later when I totally forgot that I installed the plugin I went to refresh my blog and guess what… it was all gone. Those same feelings came flooding back from when I lost all my blogs the first time, I just couldn’t believe it. All I could remember was the hard work that I put into my blog. I tried to think if I saved all of my blogs on file. Then I thought to back track all of the steps that I’ve done. After deactivating one of my plugins and refreshing my blog’s home page, I saw that all of my blogs have been retrieved. Needless to say, I will not be using that plugin, ever again.

I was so thankful that all of my blogs weren’t lost. This was a learning experience for me because I am now making an oath to myself to save every blog post and organize it into a folder on my computer as well as the pages. This situation gave me a big scare, as it would scare anyone who have worked hard on their blog, because I just could believe that I lost it all again.

I took out the time to save the html version of every blog post and page in a folder and title them accordingly. I thought that by saving the html version instead of just the plain text version, I would also be saving the pictures, the links, related articles and the subscribe form that are at the end of every post. If you save the plain text version, you won’t save the pictures or the links you will only be saving the plain text.

I am not condemning saving the plain text version because after all,  saving something is better than nothing. However, I realized that if anything ever happened to where I lost all of my blogs again I would not only want to upload the text as it were before I would want to upload the pictures and links in the same way just as they were before.

I must say that it is not the fault of WordPress or Hostgator, (the hosting site I use). WordPress is the most amazing blogging resource and it is the safest most reliable blogging tool available, if you host your own blog. It was a mistake on my part number 1, for not knowing exactly what I was doing in the upgrading process of my blog and number 2 not having backed up my blogs in the first place.

If I could encourage you to do anything I would encourage you to back up all of your blog information, it could be a life saver. If you have many posts I would advise taking out some time to save just a few a day but nonetheless, save them all.

To your success,

Jarrod  Clark

You may want to choose a general theme, topic wise, for your blog so that you have room to level a more numerous audience and gain more connections to your blog but not such a general topic that you wind up forfeiting the very market that you shooting for.

For instance if you are writing about health, and you happen to be a fitness instructor who is writing an article about the importance of an aerobic benefit, you will want to choose something a little more specific. Comparatively, you may want to try health and fitness or fitness tips as a keyword. You can settle up on any keyword you want, the main focus here is to narrow it down to a specific keyword.

Just a side note

Staying Focused

After coming up with a keyword niche that you feel comfortable using as a theme for your blog, hone in on that keyword and center the topic of your whole blog around your keyword. This is why it’s important not to choose something to narrow as you will have more blogging room. You will want to optimize your article pages with those keywords including proper keyword density. Read my previous blog Search Engine Optimization for tips on optimizing your page in a way that search engines will easily pic up on your page.

Keep in mind that you must focus on writing good article content and not focusing too much on the traffic. Remember there are thousands and thousands of people keying your keywords as search terms into search engines looking for your information. All you have to do is focus on presenting them with the information they’re looking for and before long you will notice your audience growing.

Once readers come to your site and see good quality content, they will be enticed to come back for more articles. It is up to you to stay focused on the topic of your blog.

I chose to insert an excerpt of Robert Frost’s poem "The Road Not Taken" below as a prime example because I thought it is the perfect analogy to the journey we take in the beginning of designing a blog. Don’t be afraid to experiment with new and interesting ideas. You never know what works for you until you take a risk and branch out or should I say take "The road less traveled by."

Much of starting a blog is all about experimentation. Before you settle on a topic you will find yourself varying from topic to topic until you find a topic that is comparable for you to settle on. Once you settle on a topic, cling to that topic and you will began to see a major growth in your audience.

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

 However, there are some individuals who haven’t been as successful targeting their warm market. They get rebuttal after rebuttal and they have yet to be able to achieve much success in the area of your warm market. If this sounds like you and you are running out of your warm market, do not be discouraged.

There are many plentiful sources and ways to market your network marketing business online. One of the best ways to market your business is by focusing on your target audience. Your opportunity may have a typical product or a distinguished product, it doesn’t matter, what matters is how you market it.

By taping into search engine optimization, and focusing on people who are your target audience, you will acquire prospects who are calling you and not the other way around. Below you will find an intuitive outline of helpful tools of marketing online:

• Posting blogs online. - Blogging is a derivative of the word "web log" which essentially means logging your thoughts on the web. Blogging is effective because it’s a great way for search engines to pick up your message. Search engines will then give your blog a ranking. Based on your keywords, the search engines will place your blog in order of it’s ranking throughout the search engine’s listings. This will, in turn, draw targeted traffic to your blog based on your blog tags or keywords. Do a google search on blog resources and you will find a number of blogging resources. One resource that has been helpful for me is www.blogger.com

  
  

• WordPress Blog is also another great resource.

• Posting your articles online. - You can find a number of sites where you can post your articles for free. Posting articles are a great resource. Posting articles is also a great way to expand your readers and get your message out to an even greater audience. If you have a website and you want to draw traffic to it, posting articles is a great way to draw traffic to your site. Also it’s a good idea to post articles for search engine rankings. Search Engines see this as a one way link to your website and you will be rewarded for it.
  

• Free Article Submitter Software

• Free Directory Submitter Software

• Marketing on Myspace.com - Contrary to what some people think about the safety of myspace, it is a great way for you to market yourself and your business. It is a great tool for you to network with others that share the same interest as you do. Myspace has fundamentals like online groups and forums targeted toward specific categories. There you can join those groups and meet other individuals who are looking for what you have to offer as well as share ideas with other people who are successful in the area of network marketing. Myspace is also a great place for you to blog as mentioned earlier.

• Marketing using video blog web technology. - Video blogging is the same concept as blogging except you are video taping yourself verbally speaking your message. It’s very helpful, if not the most helpful tool, because it gives your audience the face to face advantage that they would get if they were in the same room talking to you. It is also my understanding that people join people not companies. There are sites where you can market yourself and your business that are key in helping you to be successful. One site that is well known is www.youtube.com is a great place for you to video blog.

There are many other ways for you to market your business opportunity and gather prospects that are looking for what you have to offer. I would like to add that I am not bashing the outside marketing ideas. It is a great way in addition to online marketing to achieve the level of marketing that you would like to achieve. I’m simply elaborating on the fact that there are some people who have a struggle with putting out flyers and walking up to people in the mall and pitching your presentation.

If this sounds like you then I would like to encourage you and enlighten you. There are more ways of marketing your opportunity than just approaching your warm market and approaching people on the streets. Explore and study ways of marketing online through google and other search engines. There you will find results and ideas that suit you in discovering your niche in online marketing.

To Your Success,

Jarrod Clark