echoes of the ego

Jane Foster

Setting Up Your Blog

Blogging is a lucrative source of profit and blogs are easy to set up
and maintain. Imagine a life where you are paid to write on stuff that
interests you, whenever you want, wherever you are. The mere
flexibility 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 profitability 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 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.

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 a relatively new option so I have no comparison on the
speed of getting indexed by search engines. 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).

Now familiarize yourself by posting your first post on your blog and tinkering around with the options and templates.

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

1) 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.
2) 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.
3) 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 profit from a blog, as well as tips on how to
write posts that keep visitors glued and keep coming back for more!

Blog Content

Now we’re going to discuss the type of content that is suitable for
your blog in order to make it profitable. First off, I want you to
understand that there is no fixed scope that your blog should have,
which means you can write about whatever you’re interested in.

However, the difference between a profitable blog and a non-profitable
blog is the way the blog is written. Just imagine, would you prefer to
read your university professor’s lecture notes or the latest novel by
your favourite author?

You may prefer to read the novel because it appeals more to your
interest, or because it is not as mind-numbing as the lecture notes by
your professor. However, the most important point is people like to
read “light” stuff most of the time. You see, when people log on to
your blog, they are not only looking for information – they are also
looking for information they can obtain easily, and better still in a
relaxed manner.

So, to attract more visitors as well as to keep your current visitors
coming back for more, it is very important to add a human touch to your
blog posts. This can be done by simply imagining you’re talking about a
certain topic with your personal friend. An extra bonus for your
readers would be a great sense of humour, so try to add funny comments
in your articles where they are suitable.

Another important key point is to avoid addressing your reader as a
plural unit. What I really mean is you should not write as if you’re
preparing a speech. Instead, you should write as if you’re having a
conversation to a single person because this will make your visitor
think of you more as a personal friend rather than a person of higher
authority.

Besides that, it is also very useful to establish your own personality
through your words. Human beings are very curious creatures, so
naturally your visitors would want to know as much about you as the
information you’re offering them.

Having a distinctive personality in your blog would make a world’s
difference between your blog about gadgets and all the other blogs
about gadgets out there. This is a lot like creating your own brand
name, where people immediately remember your blog’s name when they need
to find out information about gadgets, just like how people immediately
think of McDonald’s for fastfood or Nike for sportswear.

So, the lesson for today is to simply write as an equal friend to your
visitors, write to them as if you’re talking to a single person and
establish your own personality on your blog.