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Monday, May 3, 2010

Part 1: Setting Up Your Blog

By Tony.G (Online Guru)

Blogging is a lucrative source of income and blogs are simple to set up and sustain. Imagine a life where you are paid to write on stuff that interests you, whenever you want, wherever you are. The mere simplicity of blogging makes it easy for you to just kick back, relax and go on a vacation whenever you feel like it.

In this article, we are going to look into the income potential of a blog and set up a blog of our own at no cost! Interested? Read on!

First, we need to obtain a blog. There are several options – host a blog on your own domain or get a free blog. For starters, let’s talk about the free blogs. You can obtain a free blog right here at www.blogger.com or the newer (and better!) www.wordpress.com. If you are a techie, you must have heard of Wordpress, a free blog engine that is robust and infinitely expandable.

Now as I'm sure you already know, Blogger.com is actually owned by Google, so it will be detected on Google’s radar faster and you will be indexed faster. Wordpress.com, however, is competition for Blogger so I have no comparison on the speed of getting indexed by Google and other search engines, but marketing your blog is really the key to indexing. However, Wordpress is better in the sense that it has more advanced features such as Trackbacks and Categories. You can also manage your sidebar links more efficiently (more about this later).

Get a free blog at either Blogger.com (http://www.blogger.com) (of course) or Wordpress (http://wordpress.com/signup/). Then, familiarize yourself by posting your first post on your blog and tinkering around with the options and templates.

Here are a few  recurrent “blog-related” words to help you out:

Permalink – Permalink stands for permanent link, which is a URL (uniform resource locator) that leads to an individual post that you make in your blog.
Trackback – When you post about someone else’s blog post elsewhere, your post will show up in their “trackback” section. This feature, however, is not available with a Blogger.com account.
Pinging – Blogging seems to be paired with pinging almost every time either one is mentioned nowadays. Pinging is actually the action where a certain aggregator is notified whenever your blog is updated, so that the aggregator may show the newest post of your blog on their website. This is a useful way to gaining traffic, which we shall discuss later.

For now, I shall leave you testing out your new blog and the features that come included with it. In the next articles, we shall discuss the many ways we can gain income from a blog, as well as tips on how to write posts that keep visitors glued and keep coming back for more!

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