Blogging For Beginners

Let's Start Blogging.  Welcome to the Blogosphere!

Blogosphere is the community of online bloggers from around the world. Most of us have already been a member of the blogosphere for a long time and some just joined recently but some of us haven't really started yet. For people who haven’t started blogging yet, I thought it would be a good idea to write something about the basics of blogging.

More than 10 years ago, when blogging was just starting, most people would use it for their personal diary. But later on it evolved to new forms of blogging. Recently blog is used not only for personal diaries, hobby or fun but also used mainly to earn money on the Internet as a legitimate Internet business. Some people start a business blog. Its purpose is to grow a certain business and to connect with people who in turn buy the product that the blog site is offering.


Few types of blog that you can start:

• Personal Blog -

                    This is like a personal diary, mainly about your daily life, experiences, hopes and aspirations, personal hobbies, and anything that interests you.

• Business blog -

                    Usually people who owns an offline business would start a blog about their business promoting the it to a worldwide audience through blogging. Some people would start a blog for the purpose of earning money online through advertisements in their blog, getting paid reviewing products, or earning money through affiliate programs like Amazon, E-bay, ShareAsale, Clickbank, Commission Junction and Linkshare to name a few.

• News and entertainment blog -

                    Some people will write a blog about the latest news and entertainment, latest celebrity news and gossips, sports news, and latest local headlines and international news headlines.                                         

• Art and Craft -

                    People blog about their specialty hobbies, like painting, crochet, ceramics, decoration and so on.             

•   Non-profit -

                    Even the non-profit organizations are now using blogs to promote the organization and share their cause to millions of people. People who want to donate can do so via the blog site of the organization. The non-profit blog is very useful for the organization to expand their projects because they can update information easily and relate to the public faster.

• Niche blog-

                  The niche blog is about a specific topic that a person knows or has passion about. For example if he likes music, he could start a blog about successful singers, their life, success and songs. Or he could just write a blog about all kinds of songs that have been recorded. Another example of niche blog is writing about car repair and maintenance. If he is an expert in this area it would be easy for him to write this kind of blog.

• Expert blog

                    As the word suggest, this is a blog written by people who have an expertise in what they are blogging about, example is car repair expertise, or computer technology expertise, gardening, kitchen remodeling and affiliate marketing to name a few.
                

Usually a blog consists of a post or the entry that you post every time you update your blog. The new post will appear on the front page of your blog. The older post will be archived. The blog also consists of links to other websites increasing the reader’s satisfaction and experience with more information from other sources. Sometimes these links are used for money-making purposes so that when people click the link they are brought to another website selling products that the reader might need and buy. The comment feature of a blog is good for relationship building between the reader and the blogger.

In recent years, the blog has dramatically evolved to a new level of blogging. Aside from written words of a blogger, they can now include photo blogs, audio contents or pod casting and videos or vlogs content. Photos and videos are very good content. It makes reading the blog more interesting. People tend to be visual beings and so when they see pictures and videos of what you are blogging about, then they are more satisfied and likely to come back to your website later on.

Whether writing blogs are for fun, for earning money, for exposure to your business and networking, it is important to read other people’s blog especially related to your topic and learn more about the topic and the blogosphere environment and see what works and does not work. Reading other blogs will give you more ideas and information that will help you when you start your own blog. You will want to follow the example of a successful blogger. You definitely don’t want to follow the blogs that are not successful, but instead learn from it.

Some personal blogs became so successful that the blogger now earns a substantial amount of money from their blogs. An example would be dooce.com, but there are many others more who started small and became successful turning their blog into a full fledged business earning them a very good Internet income.


Pros and Cons of Blogging:

Pros -

• Continued learning makes the person smarter. Reading other people’s blogs, researching books, magazines, and on the Internet are the key to improving knowledge and to find new ideas to write on your blog.                                                                                                                                
• Blogging is a good way of expressing yourself and find enjoyment in doing so.                           
• Whether you are a painter, photographer, an artist or a writer, you can freely express yourself in a blog.
• It is easy to connect with people in a blog, people who have the same ideology and views as yours.
• You have the chance to help people by sharing with them what you know.
• You can promote your products in your blog, or you can do a self-promotion if you have a service to offer like a consultancy business.
• You can earn money from your blog through advertising, affiliate programs, product reviews and selling your own products or products of others and so on.

Cons -

• It will take a lot of patience to blog. It will take time until you get some results. Your blog needs to have a lot of good contents before it can get a good ranking in search engines. And most especially contents that are useful to readers.
• You must invest much time in your blog if you want your blog to be original, by doing a lot of research, reading, writing, publishing and 
• commenting on other people’s blog and moderating the comments of your own blog. You will have to spend time advertising and back linking.
• In order to be successful in blogging, you need to study and learn new technology, new tools and software that are needed to improve your blog.
• Since blog is visible to everyone you should be concerned of your private information and to make sure that they will remain private.
• Some people might leave nasty comments on your blog that may hurt you in some way. 

In order to be successful in blogging one should:

• Write good contents for your blog and write often. Quantity is good but quality is more important so take time to make sure that the contents of your blog are the best that you can write.
• Always read books, magazines, articles, news and other people’s blogs on the Internet so you will have the current information.
• Be passionate about what you write. Each of us has a unique way of expressing ourselves. We have our own unique voice and people will recognize that voice when they read our blog.
• Be active in the community of bloggers; give good comments to other people’s blogs and moderate comments in your own blog. 
• Promote your blog by doing some back linking. You can write an article and submit to ezine article, go article and other article submission sites and link your blog site on the resource box. So when people click the link they will be taken to your blog site.
• Join Hubpages, Xomba, Shetoldme, Squido and other article writing sites and link your website to your article.
• Be active in social networking like facebook, twitter, myspace to name a few and have a chance to expose your blog to millions of people.
• Submit your blogs to blog directories such as technorati, blogarama, blogcatalog, pingomatic, blogtoplist and so on.
• Submit your blog to social book marking like digg.com, technorati, del.icio.us, stumbleupon and reddit to name a few. 
• If you have the technological knowledge in video making you can upload video to you tube and link your blog site to your video for the world to see and click.

These are just few basic blogging information. We will discuss more blogging ideas next time soon.