subject: Beginner's Guide To Blogging [print this page] There are countless blogs on the Internet which are dead or rarely updated and serve no purpose but to take up space. On the other hand, a small number of blogs online are thriving and have tens of thousands of loyal readers who visit on a regular basis. The difference between having a blog that flops and a blog that can generate you a full-time income is passion.
The first step towards starting your own blog is to purchase a domain name. A good domain name to purchase would be yourname.com, but you can choose whatever fits your needs. You will also need webhosting for your domain, but that is extremely cheap. The last thing you'll need is a blogging platform. The two biggest ones are WordPress and Blogger, both of which allow free blogs hosted on their servers, but doing so will severely limit your blog's functionality. Hosting a blog on your own domain will make your blog much more professional and will give you a greater ability to customize your blog.
Picking a topic to blog about can be tough, but when you're doing so, make sure you pick a topic that you are passionate about and are confident in your abilities to write about. Blogging isn't some short term project which you can ditch upon completion because there is no completion. To create an established blog which readers will enjoy reading, you will need to regularly update your blog. At first, many new bloggers get discouraged because they have made a handful of posts but have not seen any traffic or sales yet. It does take a while to get established as a blogger because it takes time for a new blog to gain popularity amongst readers and rankings in the search engines. The more content you have on your blog, the more visitors it will attract. As you attract more visitors, there will be plenty of ways for you to generate traffic by leveraging the efforts of your existing readers.
If your readers like your content, they'll come back for more. If your readers absolutely love your blog and you make them feel at home reading it, then your blog's growth will skyrocket without too much effort on your part. What you want to do is to make it easy for your readers to share your blog post with others via popular social media sites such as Twitter or Digg. Find a plugin which allows you to have a button with every post which allows your reader to tweet or Digg your post with the click of a button. Your readers won't mind doing it because it won't be a lot of work on their part, plus, they'll feel good for sharing great content with their followers.
The key to having a successful blog is to regularly update it with quality content and engaging your readers. Provoke discussion and have contests to renew interest in your blog. Once your blog is popular enough, you will literally have people begging you for the privilege of guest posting on your blog, from which point on, a lot of your blog's content will be taken care of by its own readers!
