Blogging Basics - Which Blog Platform?

This is the second article in my Blogging Basics series. One of the biggest decision a blogger faces is deciding which platform to use for their blog. In this post I hope to weigh up the pros and cons of the two most popular platforms - Blogger.com and Wordpress.org to help you make your decision.

Firstly the choice you make will more than likely depend on several factors, these are:

• Your Goals - Are you doing this for fun or is it more professional?
• Your Budget - How much are you willing to spend to achieve this goal?
• Your Individual Skill - How technically able are you?

When you have though on these questions the next thing to do is look at the pros and cons of these 3 platforms and see which fits your answer best.

Blogger
Blogger Pros

• Very easy and quick set up, most peoples first taste of blogging.
• Everything is completely free, they will even host your blog and give you a free sub-domain, let you create a custom domain or transfer an existing one.
  
• Simple, easy to adjust your blogs layout and design and has a built in template HTML editor.
• Lots of useful widgets including easy to apply Google Adsense, all through Blogger.
• Blogger handles all your server and hosting problems so you don't have to worry about any of it.
• Google seems to index Blogger blogs faster than other blogs.

Blogger Cons

• Difficult to add external widgets into Blogger unlike WordPress.
• Very few intitial templates to use from and all fairly similar.
• Very simple, hard to design more complexly.
• Fairly slow to load because of high traffic through Blogger.
• Blogger can ban members and delete their blogs if they do not like the content.

WordPress.Org
WordPress Pros

• Software is completely free, and you get your own site and domain as long as you renew your domain and pay for hosting.
• Easy to setup, it's known for its 5 minute installation.
• Very customizable allowing users to be completely individual and design it any way you want.
• Easy to run, just log in and start writing, no slow publishing.
• Great, updated support in their online forum.
• Huge amounts of themes, plug ins and widgets with the option to let users add external plug ins, etc.

Wordpress Cons

• For the less technically able the learning curve needed to use Wordpress effectively can seem very challenging.
• The base text editor used in WordPress is fairly basic.
• You have to pay for your own hosting and domain name.
• Some WordPress plug-ins can make your server slow.
  

Overall Blogger is perfect for newer bloggers that are still learning and may not have the technical ability to use WordPress, it is also completely free and quick to set up so you can be posting in minutes. on the other hand WordPress lets the blogger to be more creative and enables better customization and options.

Other Useful Blog Platforms:
Movable Type
Wordpress.com
TypePad

Blogging Basics - Where to Start?

Welcome to the first post of my Blogging Basics series, in which I will cover everything you need to know to start a successful blog. In this post I will be going over what a blog is and choosing a blog topic.

What is a Blog?
In my opinion this is the first question to be answered when covering a Blogging Basics series, and there are many definitions out there to answer this ranging from the detailed to the incredibly simple. However I shall attempt to sum up exactly what a blog is in my own words then follow on by covering some simple traits found in almost every blog.

"A blog is from the word 'weblog', meaning a form of website most commonly archived in chronological order with the most recent entries at the top of the front page and the oldest at the bottom. Blogs are usually written by one person on a particular topic and updated frequently."

An example of this can be found on this blogs main page, here.

Although every site is individual there are a few traits that the majority of blogs have in common, I will cover these briefly:

Archives - This is something every blog has and is where all the content written by the blogger is stored in chronological order. In many blogs (such as this one) the archive is easily accesible along the right hand sidebar of the frontpage.

Links - It is highly unlikely to find a a blog without links to other blogs or sites. As well as assisting readers, links are a bloggers way of connecting with the rest of the people out there. Links bring people in from other sites and are one of the most effective marketing tools in a bloggers arsenary. More information on using links to build traffic can be found here.

Comments - Not every blog allows these but most do. Comments are what seperates a blog from a website, when comments are enabled it allows readers to give their own feedback on the bloggers post and allows the blogger to reply. This builds up a rapport between readers and bloggers and around successful blogs can create whole communities.


Choosing Your Blog Topic
When choosing a topic for your blog it is a good idea to start by thinking up areas that you already have an interest in and could knowledgably write good, regular content about. Readers have a nack for noticing whether or not you are passionate about your topic and blogs like these tend to fall short very quickly.

However if your goal is to make money from your blog then other factors need to be considered when choosing your topic. Whilst having an interest and knowledge on your topic can be enough for some blogs to succeed, many fail because the topic area is either not popular enough with readers or has far too much established competition to compete with. Therefore it is a good idea to research around on what is out there before making your final decision, one good way to succeed is to choose a topic that people will read and exploit gaps that your competition is neglecting, almost creating a sub-topic.

For an in-depth guide to choosing a blog topic, look here.

Ten Surefire Ways to Increase Blog Traffic

There are many, many blogs created every day with millions of posts posted every week, yet still every blogger starts with the same problem - How do I attract visitors?

Unfortunately without visitors your hard work, your hours of writing and designing simply goes unnoticed. This is increasingly important if your goal is to generate income from your blog, as the majority of advertisers such as Google Adsense rely on visitors clicking on advertisements within your blog. The good news is that there are endless ways of bringing visitors to your site, some more effective than others. The list i have compiled here - in no particular order - is in my opinion the ten most effective ways of generating traffic to your blog.

1) Write regular, quality content - Content is key to any successful blog and in order to gain and keep readers you must post regular, quality posts, at the very least 5-6 good posts each week. This is increasingly important in the early stages of a blog when trying to gain subscribers and return readers.

2) Comment on other blogs - Leaving comments on other blogs in your niche - especially high traffic blogs - is a great way to generate streams of visitors as many of them will read your comments and trackback to your blog. This is especially effective if you leave meaningful, intelligent comments on other blogs with a way for readers to link back to your site.

3) Participate in forums - Participating in forums such as www.bloggeries.com/forum is one of the most effective ways to generate free traffic to your blog. This is because many of the forums (especially blog-related forums) allow you to place direct links to your blog in the signature left at the bottom of each of your posts. This is extremely effective if you write intelligent, well titled threads about your niche that draw people to follow on to your blog. Also in the Bloggeries forum and many others you can enter your blog feed and have your recent blog posts displayed by your forum username.

4) Linking - By linking to other blogs and websites in your posts or blogroll you gain readers from trackbacks on their blogs. This will at least attract the blogger you linked to and he may even link back to you on his blog or in his future posts. The hope is that the readers of this blog will click on the links to your site, enjoy your content and become regular readers. Also by linking to other blogs and showing bloggers you appreciate their work you build up a positive relationship with them that may result in future links to your site or even promotion.

5) Submit your site to popular search engines - By submitting your blogs URL to be crawled by the main search engines such as Google or Yahoo you will end up in their search results. However it is important to know that just by submitting your blog to these engines that it is highly unlikely you will end up on their front page until you have a large following but it does mean that people can find you in their search results.

6) Submit your content to social bookmarking sites - Take the time to submit your best work to social bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit. These sites can generate enormous traffic if you are fortunate enough to end up on their front pages, however it is important for you to participate in these sites to get the most out of them as many of them already have communites.

7) Utilize Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Many bloggers ignore the process of SEO because it seems confusing at first, however even just making small adjustments to the key words in your title for example, can have a significant impact on your traffic from search engines. Make sure to include relevant key words and links in all your content and you will see the effects, just make sure not to overdo it as Google have been known to treat this as spam and you may be punished for it. A great report explaining SEO and how to use it in detail can be found here, on ProBlogger.net

8) Guest Blogging - There are many blogs out there that will accept guest bloggers including ProBlogger. By writing on other blogs, particularly larger blogs, a larger audience will read your content and hopefully follow the links back to your blog to read more. Also accepting guest bloggers onto your blog is likely to bring traffic back as the guest will likely announce his post on his own blog as well and link it to yours.

9) Run Competitions - Running competitions on your blog is a great way to drive large amounts of traffic your way. The competition can have a cash prize, a gift, a free e-book you have created or perhaps a free service you can offer the winner such as help with blog design. However creating a competition will not draw people on its own, it must be promoted using the other techniques but can help encourage more people to read your blog.

10) Use Blog Carnivals - Blog carnivals are basically one or two pages (much like a magazine) that summarize all the best pieces of content submitted to it by many different blogs and link back to their pages. A good place to start is BlogCarnival . When i first started writing content i used blog carnivals to drive traffic to my film review blog, they were incredibly useful and my content was always listed in the magazine each month.