A blog is like a diary where you can write and display almost anything like your opinions, photos, jokes, thoughts for the day and more. You can also share stories about everyday happenings, Your interests, etc… the limit is only your imagination!
In the last few years, blogging has emerged to become a much more meaningful activity than simply maintaining a personal diary. People use it to advertise their products and services, in fact, quite a number of companies even create their online presence by using a blog instead of a website.
Create Your Own Blog
Starting a blog is free. You can create one at http://www.blogger.com – a free service from Google Inc. You don’t need to register a domain name or buy hosting. When you sign up at Blogger, everything happens online. Your blog will be hosted by Blogger and you get an URL like http://yourdomain.blogspot.com. You simply log in to your account and start to write. This is much easier and cheaper than buying your own domain and hosting, then hiring someone to do the web design, writing and coding.
Another free blogging service available online is WordPress which is also very popular and easy to use. WordPress supports more features than Blogger while allowing you to customize your blog with various plug-in. You can check it out at http://wordpress.org.
Monetize Your Blog
While blogging for your own interest, you can in fact maximize the potential of your blog for many marketing or commercial purposes.
The quickest and easiest way to turn a blog into a money-making enterprise is to include advertising on your blog. This can be done with contextual ad programs like Adsense – an advertising program by Google. Basically, you get paid when people click on the ads displayed on your website or blog. Google Adsense program is free to sign up. You can visit http://www.google.com/adsense to learn more about the rules and guidelines of the program. Other Adsense type ads that you can use for blog monetizing are SearchFeed, AdBrite, and Yahoo’s Publisher’s Network (YPN).
Affiliate program is another potential way to make money blogging. By focusing on the subject of your blog post, you can promote relevant products from cost per sale affiliate programs like ClickBank and Amazon. You can write a review about the product or service with your affiliate links embedded inside so you get the commission whenever a sale is made.
Boost Your Blog Traffic
Blogs are quickly indexed by search engines, but you need to update it regularly. Search engines love fresh content and regular update will ensure that your website is indexed and ranked high up as well. The higher up it appears, the more traffic will come to your site, which means more sales. You can actively participate in forums discussion or post comments on other blogs to get more link back traffic.
I am still trying to build up the traffic. Once you get your visitors to stick onto your blog you will get regular visitors. This is very much useful in building up your traffic but be careful not to loose them. So keep updating your blog.
Whether you use your blog for fun or for work, remember that it’s a highly potential tool any which way. So what are you waiting for? Start blogging away right now!
This is a very good introductory article for new bloggers. Nice work!
Everything is good. I’m using blogger. And till now, i don’t have complaints using this blogger service. I also tried wordpress earlier, but for some reason didn’t find it user friendly.
I customized my blog to a three column tempalate. And as well i’m using external java scripts running successfully in my blog.
What for do i need wordpress or can you let me know in detail the ‘extra’ features in wordpress…. so that i can start a business blog with a .com domain redirection.
I’m in a dilemma not knowing what to choose. I’m much much familiar with blogger and it’s tweaks n services.
Thanx,
jagan