Blogging Tips

This blog has talked about everything from Blogging tools, comparison of Blogging tools to photo Blogging. This post is about people who want to start their own blog but are note sure how to go about it. I will not be giving you a step by step tutorial on Blogging platforms or posting articles, I will be telling you what all to consider when you decide to blog. So here we go –

Research other Blogs – When you want to start a blog on a topic/product/service/experience, it is highly recommended that you first research similar blogs on the Internet, this will give you an idea, what popular blogs have in them, why people come back on these blogs, how they are written, style etc. Please don’t think that this is plagiarism, this is inspiration; it is not a bad thing to learn from a successful blog.
Clarity – Be very clear what you want to write and how do you want to write posts on your blog. If you are creating a blog to give your views on a topic/product/service/experience then stick to that, in these kind of blog you can also have news and give your own views on that. This helps, but give credit to the source from where the news was taken.
Layout/Design – The layout/design of your blog should mirror your interests or it should match with the total theme of the blog. Initially managing this will be problem, but once you get familiar with templates, it will be a cake walk.
Credits – When you start your blog, you will obviously take articles or insights or nuggets of information from other websites/blogs, give proper credits. This helps your in building credibility in the Blogosphere.

Tracking – If you have a blog don’t you think that somebody should keep a track of visitors/keyword for you? Don’t worry, just register your blog with FeedBurner or Google Analytics, they will do the rest for you. Just follow the instructions they give you and your blog is ready to be tracked.
Blog Indexing – Do not forget to index your blog with Google or Yahoo’s Webmaster service. It is free and once again their simple tutorial will help you in indexing your site. Indexing will primarily help your blog to come in search results of these search engines.
RSS Feeds – Once your blog is up and running, use FeedBurner to create feeds for your blog. This will help other people to subscribe to your blog in a reader or through their mail.
Promoting your Blog – These are some tips, which will help you in promoting a new blog

• When you send mails to friends and co-workers, put your blog’s URL after the closing salutation. The moment that person will read your mail he will notice the URL and click on it and if your blog is really interesting and insightful the person will congratulate you as well as ask others to read your blog

• Putting the Blog’s URL as a customized message, which gets displayed in your Google Talk or Yahoo or company’s internal messenger. Whenever you are online, the blog URL will get displayed and people in your friend’s list will click it out of curiosity and if they find it interesting rest will be history.

• There are Blog search engines where you can search blogs on the topics, which can be of interest to you. Search such blogs, read articles, if you like the articles comment on them and in that comment also put the URL of your blog. Next time the person, on whose blog you have commented, will read your comment he or she will definitely visit your blog.

These tips are not as efficient and accurate as Search Engine Optimization but they work thats for sure. I have experienced that.

Blogging is good and will help you enhance your skills and gain subject matter expertise. If you are done with the above things then you can click here to learn more about what all you can do with Blogging.