Pro Blogging Tips

When it comes down to usability of the blogging software, most of them are designed to be simple to use. But this is not the ultimate rule for the people who are inventing software and plugins for blogs. Sometimes you can see what is a good example of "programmer made a stuff for programmers".

No, I would not like to say anything bad about programmers: without them all the things that we enjoy in the Net would not happen to be. But when it comes down to such things as simple and user friendly interface, most of the programmers have big gaps in understanding how this should be done.

As in most of the cases, the only thing that will help you see how the thing is working is to try it, in real life, and take things slowly.

If you are a blog newbie, don’t rush ?? start exploring the most complicated features of a program right away. This can make you feel confused and frustrated. Take all part of the learning curve, as they like to say. If the solution is worth it, you will gain both results and necessary experience.

On the other hand, please keep your eyes open - it is very possible that there is another version of this blogging software or plugin with better interface, more freedom, great price and other perks. If you feel that the solution you are currently testing is too much for you, no problems - take another one. All bloggers have been doing like that, you can do it as well.

As blogging is very popular, surely there is no big surprise that lots of free and paid blogging tools are available on the market.

But loading up your blog with all possible tools is not the best idea. You can overwhelm your blog with everything and this will turn into your disadvantage.

For example, you can decide to have a visitor counter, a flashy background, new kinky font, a pack of animated gifs, and tag pages, and voting module. And then your visitors gets lost on the blog, feels like an idiot (sorry, incompetent surfer) and closes the page - your great content was lost in this package of shining and useful things that altogether made you a very bad favor.

Definitely you should learn about all of the kinds of free and paid blogging tools that are available - this will show you what you can do,

But then you need to become selective and very reasonable. Get into the shoes of your blog visitor and reader, only in this case you will see how to glue them to reading your blog and subscribing to your RSS feed.

Blogging news stories can be updated on a blog almost instantaneously. For this reason the news on blogs are more current, up to date and less censored by the "central" media standards. News on blogs do not need to pass editors and administrators.

Another peculiar trait of news blogging - news often appears in a very personal context. This is already called "New Journalism" when one able to type, to explain the point and having access to the Internet becomes a person with publicity power.

Many bloggers and think that this growing trend of individuals who getting their news from blogs is a good thing, because it makes the flow of information more democratic.

But one should also remember that the use of blogs as news outlets is a tricky issue, because few blogs have fact-checkers, hence the accountability on many blogs is a very vague thing. Surely some use this trend for misinformation and falsehood.

In any case, only the global control over the Internet can stop blogging. Even the false fact burners sooner or later get piled under the true facts which makes blogging a very evolutional and fair process.

Mobile blogging is very popular in the blogosphere.

Why? One of the reasons - bloggers enjoy being able to make frequent updates, on the go, so to say. Mobile blogs (aka "moblogs") help to keep web surfers up to date with everything that happens on almost a real time basis.

So, we can say that with the help of mobile blogging web-based communication can happen from any location, and this is what bloggers (as many of the digital era people) love and adore.

Though the technology of mobile blogging is not that super, but there is no way back. Camera phones and other mobile technology together with the habbit of being away from the desks and keyboards are making the invisible revolution in blogging. At the moment it is tough to say whether moblogs can become the dominant kinds of blogs, but the current trend is very strong.

A mobloggerwith a camera phone who makes a post from the foot of the podium at a presidential speech is a nice proof that this type of blogging has serious future. Welcome on board.

Every type of blogging can give a way to make money from it. Below we decided to publish the list of different types of blogs so that you could see how many niches you can monetize with blogging.

Political blog - all types of political news, elections, political programs, debates and other issue based blogs.

Personal blog - or sometimes called as online diary which can include day-to-day experience, complaints, poems, thoughts, ideas and communications between friends.

Topical blog - this type of blog focuses either on a specific niche.

Health blog - can be devoted to specific health issues or health in general.

Literary blog - this type of blog is also called as litblog and can contain both the literary works of the publisher or reviews of the works of other people.

Travel blog - can have the information about personal journeys or reviews of the offers from this industry.

Research blog - any academic issues that are published in a way of textual, audio and video research notes.

Legal blog - also known as ‘blawgs’ - can be about legal experience, real cases, or juridical problems and views upon them.

Media blog - everything about mass media, including falsehoods or inconsistencies in mass media.

Religious blog - different religions and religious topics.

Educational blog - about education, educational applications, problems in the industry.

Collaborative or collective blog - blog which is written by a group of people, becomes very popular due to special plugins that allow multi user access to blog posting.

Directory blog - collection of numerous blogs and web sites, can be about one niche or multi niche.

Business blog - used by businesses and corporation to properly position the company, its products and services in the eyes of online audience.

No matter what type of blog you are running, you can use these money making opportunities to monetize your blog:

• Advertising programs
• Affiliate Programs
• RSS advertising
• Sponsorship
• Merchandising
• Digital assets
• Donations
• Flipping blogs
• Consulting and speaking

Every blogger should understand the meaning of these features:

Title - feature label your post
Body - the content of every post
Trackback - this feature tells your blog every time another blog "mentions" your blog
Permanent link (or permalink) - unique URL that every post is getting
Comments - feature which allows readers to post comments on your blog

Basically all of these features give you not only a possibility to publish materials, but also help you to get good positions in search engines.

For example, you want to see your blog on good positions in search engines for a specific keyword.

You must make sure that:

You use this keyword in the post title, because this title will be indexed by special robots of search engines and the keyword in post title will "tell" search engine that this post is about this very topic;

Using the keyword in the post title will also automatically create a permalink of your post. You can choose the settings of building permalink to be formed like this:

http://www.yourblogname.com/title-of-the-post

By doing this you will also get a keyword from the title into the URL of this post. This is extra advantage, because search engines pay attention to the keywords in URLs as well, and this will work as extra score for the post to have relevance to the topic that you are fighting for.

By allowing people to post comments on your blog, you open a possibility to grow each page of your blog with extra content. Comment - even if it is just about 2-3 sentences - is still a text and content. Plus it was noticed that usually people, when commenting to some issue, are using the words relevant to this topic. This means your posts can grow with unique and relevant content.

Just make sure that you have special plugins that kill spam comments, because today some people are using spam comments to promote their sites in a "black hat" way.

As you can see almost every feature in the blog gives you a chance to get extra scores in the eyes of search engines. Do that and very soon you will see your blog on good positions for your keywords and this will send targeted traffic to your sites.

More and more people see it from their personal experience that business blog is a great online marketing tool. Blogs are a user-friendly, flexible and very useful medium for proper positioning of products and services online.

Basically blogs help your business by giving the following advantages:

Word of mouth info spread about your blog with huge Internet audience.

Awareness and loyalty built through direct contact with the readers and potential clients.

Useful feedback.

If you think about starting your own business blog, please take these important issues into consideration.

1. Study your blog design. Blog platforms have pre-designed templates. But it is always better to create uniqueness for the blog’s looks. We have a post on this blog that shares simple tips to making your blog design unique for very small money.

2. Choose blog topic. Make a list of topics, this will help you to build the blog content logically - so that the readers from the first seconds on your blog understand what they will find here.

3. Right up to 20 posts and line them up for publishing before going to marketing.

4. Start marketing.

5. Monitor the coming ins and outs of readers on a regular basis.

6. Adjust your blog if needed.

7. Be consistent with your topic all the time.

For more tips please read other posts on the blog.

The layout and design of a blog is one of the key elements for its success. No one says that without fancy design blog will not have big traffic. But at least the simplicity of navigation is a must for a blog to be successful.

Using these simple tips you can make your blog stand out from the millions of other blogs with standard designs.

Customize the header

Header is the top graphics, you see it at the top of a blog. Usually header is the biggest picture and, by the way, the first thing that visitor sees when coming to you blog.

Now you understand that this is a very important element in the design. It must quickly explain what the site is about and tell the readers that they came to the site they’ve been looking for.

A good header (without Flash) can cost up to $25. But you can bargain a better price.

Add a favicon

Favicon is the tiny icon that you see to the left of the URLs in the browser. No big deal, but adds extra feeling of the blog being unique.

Choose the best blog templates, layouts, backgrounds, textures and skins

There any many sites who are giving away all this stuff for free, just for the sake of becoming popular. Yes, it is likely that someone might choose the same blog theme that you’ve chosen, but the chances a smaller, if we compare with the chances to see the same design with ‘by deafult’ blog templates.

Include RSS feeds

Make sure to give the RSS button nice visibility on your blog. This will increase the number of people who will subscribe to your feed and become your loyal readers. Of course, a lot will depend upon the quality of your content. If the button is nice and shiny and content is junk - no one will subscribe. But in any case you need to make it easy to find where to subscribe for those readers who took this decision.

And the final tip - be creative and your blog will stay out of the line.

At the beginning of blogging many web designers and programmers might laugh at the very idea of using the software 3rd parties for a blog. But now the times have changed.

There is so much special tech stuff in the professional blogging software or blogging platform. It has dozens of modules that support special type of actions on the blog. Plus most of these modules need to be updated from time to time, as the Internet is changing rapidly.

Due to this it is really wiser to use 3rd party professional blogging solution than doing all this job yourself, even if you are a professional programmer.

There are 2 types of blogging platforms when we are talking about the hosting structure.

Hosted Services

You can save money on the payment for hosting and domain name and choose a blogging platform with free hosted service included. This can be Blogger, TypePad, Live Journal, WordPress (it’s WordPress.com section) and other services.

These services update all modules and you can focus on the looks and content of the blog.

But this has one disadvantage. The service is the owner of this blog, they kind of "lend" you the hosting and domain name for a while. And they have the right to take it back and even close your blog. Usually they do this only in case you break some rules of the service. Still, many bloggers regret not buying a domain and hosting - because instead of helping to raise the blog for a service, you do that for your own blog.

Self-Hosted Blogs

You buy a domain and pay for the hosting. Then upload the necessary blogging software or platform to the hosting, install it and start blogging. On many hostings today you will see WordPress already pre-installed.

This type of blogging takes more time - you need to install and setup the blog. This is not difficult and there are many videos that explain how to do that. But in my personal opinion it’s worth the efforts, because you are investing them in YOUR OWN BLOG!

The difference between simple audio file downloading and audio streaming is that streaming does not allow download of the music files. In this way those who do the radio blogging do not have problems with the copyrights of the artists and record label owners.

There are several ways to stream audio from your blog.

You can stream a radio program from your blog. All you need to do is find free programs that allow you to stream their radio content. This content is being updated by these programs and you don’t have to spend much time on creating it yourself - you just have the link embedded on your blog and the rest is done automatically.

Another way is to stream mp3 files. Basically you upload mp3 files on blog server and add the files links to the page. But mp3 format can be downloaded, and downloading music files without the authorization of the copyright owner is illegal. You need to get a permission, then you will not have any problems.

One more way is to add audio to the blog through organizing playlists. If playlists (m3u files) are downloaded they will not play music offline. This is a short instruction on how to do it.

Save your mp3 or wma file on the server.
 
Open text editor and type the path to the file into it. Do that for all files you want to play on the blog.

Now save the playlist with a.m3u extension.

Upload m3u file or files to the directory on the server where you store the music files.

Then embed the link to the m3u file.

By the way, you can set if you want to have this playlist work in autoplay mode (when someone visits your site - it starts to play automatically). Plus you can set the necessary volume level.

Ok, the code is embedded on the html file. Any time your blog is visited, the songs from the playlist will be buffered, streamed and played one after another.