How To Start A Blog Have Fun And Increase Website Traffic

When it comes to generating traffic, nothing beats starting your own blog. For years, blogging was considered a place to record your thoughts and connect with family. Maybe the blogs of yester-year branched out a bit to include friends and business associates.

Nowadays, if you haven't started a blog, you are missing out on some of the best website traffic freely available, and losing out big time.

It's a fact. Warm-blooded humans love to read blogs. Search engines, like Google and Yahoo! adore blogs. For the search engines, the reason is pretty simple; content is constantly updating and search engines feed off these updates. For humans, much of the best in information, resources, and product reviews (and products themselves) can be gleaned from following good blogs. It's easy to create loyalty and keep your readers coming back for more, when you have your own space to pour your heart and soul into.

The key to successfully starting your own blog is to first know your limitations (we'll cover passions in just a bit). While Google does have their own blogger area, will you have the know how to make yours stand out from all the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of other bloggers using this blogging platform? If you do not know how to draw traffic to your blog, you face the same trials and tribulations as you would putting up a static website. You must know how to increase traffic, draw and keep visitors, and use the tools and tricks of blogging to be successful.

Let's presume, for now, that you are only interested in the first stepping stones to creating a successful blog. Your first step would be to determine (ah, here it is) your passion!

Bloggers passionate about their fields, hobbies, know how, etc., joyfully exchange information with their readers, yes even years down the road. Conversely, individuals who choose to blog about subjects they have no real know-how for tend to abandon their projects. No heart, no blog.

You need to think outside the box. Remember, when it is your own space on the internet, you have the freedom to do what you want, not do what you are told. You also gain the flexibility to introduce a wide variety of subjects to explore and still maintain the overall essence of your blog. Blogs allow for the creation of categories and tags, and make a neat, easy, simple system all their own to "file" your information. By using a blogs filing system effectively, you make it easy for humans to find your information, and have the search engines worshipping you. Humans need humans, search engines need data.

The next step to start a blog is to choose a platform. As mentioned above, Google has their own, with a limited amount of (not very attractive) templates to begin. Sure if you want to learn the ins and outs of code-related blog themes, you can substitute templates found out online. However, the platform most recommended for starting a blog is Wordpress.

Wordpress does allow you to host your blog on their servers, but we would highly recommend not going that route. Purchasing a long-lasting (keyword driven) domain name, and finding (excellent) hosting for that domain should be your aim.

So what do we have so far? We know you must:

o Unearth your passion - talking with knowledgeable individuals often helps you discover what it is your really love in life!

o Research and buy your domain name - again getting help so you don't end up with a loser of a domain name is important.

o Locate great hosting - highly recommended that you make sure your host uses cpanel as its backbone. Free hosting may not allow for the installation of php or just be cumbersome to work with. You want blogging to be fun and easy!

Okay, so what's next?

Well, you'll need a template. The template you choose if you pick Wordpress as your platform can be your "ideal" design or just a good substitute while you continue to look. With Wordpress, it is so easy to change your mind and swap the old out for the new look. So find a good "theme" that is labeled three column, widget ready, and plug in ready, and begin from there.

You will need to install these files. If you do not know much about FTP and installation, be sure to get some help. It's not hard, but why frustrate yourself when help is available.

You also will need plugins and "widgets" and a way to get traffic rolling immediately to your new blog. Again, don't pull you hair out and go crazy over this, help is always available. Seek it out.

IN SUMMARY

Looking back through this article, you might, but need not, feel overwhelmed. The information above is just that - information. The actual use of blogging as your worldwide platform is so easy anyone willing to follow simple directions, and put in some work, can do. Driving traffic to your blog that is fine tuned to pull in, and continue to draw more, traffic is also easy, with proper instruction.

And the very best part about starting your own blog is...

You spend your time and your money and your effort on yourself!

Sure you can still sign up for affiliate programs and - in most cases - this is highly advisable. But now as you "do your thing online" you are investing in yourself not advertising for someone else. By choosing your passion to blog about, even if six months from now you no longer promote "the other guy's program," you never lose! Your efforts are exerted to promote yourself, your blog, your information. You gain flexibility. Your life online is now a joy!

Blogging is the greatest platform for continuous interactivity and fun for yourself and your visitors. If boredom or frustration is your situation, or you need to expand your business online, consider starting a blog today (yes today!). Your online future depends on it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Theresa Cahill and her business partner and friend, Jeff Greer, publish their Online Internet Marketing Strategies blog under the pen name Diane Scott. They also offer their services to help you start a blog and keep it going for years to come!

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Instant Explosive Blog Results

Want to know how to vastly improve the quality of your blog and the results and responses you get from the people who visit and read it? Improve yourself.

Your blog and the efforts you put into the quality of your blog are a reflection of you and your ethics. There is literally an ocean of blogs and other informative internet sites available today. With so many choices your audience is greatly limited by the subject material and way that you present the material.

It's not just a matter of color or layout anymore, but rather a combination of thought and innovation that go into your blog that appeals to the public. The content must have something for them. Today people are in such a hurry and their free time is very limited so they are selective with the minutes they can devote to reading your words.

Improve the quality of your thoughts and you improve the quality of the thought you put into your blogs. Keep your blogs relevant to the lives of those who might read.

There are a lot of words published onto the internet each and every day. Most are hollow information that is passed along between blogs and news agencies for days on end. The most important words do several things.

Provide true knowledge.

Instill feelings in the reader.

Inspire ambition for success.

If every blog published reflected those points the society of mankind would begin to change and evolve noticeably in a matter of days.

People want to read your blog. They want well written informative content that makes them and their lifestyle or life better. Do your blogs offer any potential benefit to your readers? If not, perhaps you should revisit your reasons for having a blog and what you are trying to express with your words on the blog entries.

You need to write your blog. If you didn't you wouldn't be devoting the time and effort to the cause. That implies that you have something within you that needs to come out and be hear and acknowledged. Make those words something worth the time and effort of reading and worthy of being remembered for years to come.

Leave your mark on the internet and human society through the quality of your life as expressed through your blog efforts. Others realize and expect you to make some income if you desire to make your efforts financially rewarding, but they want the substance of your words to be that which enriches their lives too.

Are you solely a vapid person devoid of any purpose and meaning devoted to the cause of making money or are you someone of substance and purpose devoted to making your mark on the world through your efforts to improve the lives of others?

Your blog offers you such an amazing forum to the rest of the world. Will you use that power wisely or will you squander it in empty advertising jargon. There is something inside of you, some special skill or piece of knowledge that will make the world a better place if you can only identify it, harness your energy and thought and direct it into your blog entries.

Remember that your blog is an extension and reflection of who you are as a person.

AJ Gentry, author of The Human Life Map: The Secret Path Of Life, and Human Excellence Technologies, has pioneered human behavioral research for more than three decades. He invites you to visit the The Human Life Map | The Secret Path Of Life Blog http://www.thesecretpathoflife.com/blog or Hu2 Q&A Blogcast http://blog.thesecretpathoflife.com as he shares knowledge from precursors like Living Dynamics and Success Dynamics.

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10 Easy Ways to Make Money Online Blogging

One of the best and must used ways to make money online these days is by blogging. Hundreds of blogs are started everyday. One of the reasons is because it's the easiest way to have your own website and start making money right away. You just monetize your blog put a few posts on it and start marketing it.

Google already loves blogs because they always have new content, but marketing can help you push your blog up on the search engines. Pinging your blog whenever you do a new post, commenting on related blogs with a link back to your blog and social bookmarking your blog post are affective ways to market your blog.

Okay, so what are the 10 easy ways to make money online from your blog?

1. Ad Units: Monetize your blog with ad units from Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher, Bidvertiser, RevenuePilot and other contextual ad sites. Contextual ads are ads that the ads sites show on your blog that are related to you're your blogs topic. When these ads are clicked on you get paid for it.

2. Sell Your Products: If you have a product blog about it and offer it for sell on your blog. You already have an audience that's interested in what you're doing take advantage of it.

3. Sell Other Peoples Products: If you have an affiliate account at Amazon. com, Clickbank, Ebay or some other affiliate program, sell affiliate products on your blog. You can do related posts for any product you want to sell.

4. Sell Ad Space: If you have a blog with a pretty good Page Rank you can sell ad space on it. You can have different prices for different areas on your blog.

5. Write Paid Reviews: You can make money from your blog by writing paid reviews for paid to blog sites like PayPerPost, SponsoredReviews, Blogsvertise, Smorty and others. These sites offer advertisers who pay to have their product or service reviewed. I must add a word of warning here though. Google has started penalizing blogs for doing paid reviews and will drop your Page Rank if you are caught doing so. However you can still make money online doing this even after a PR drop.

6. Sell An E-Book: Lots of people make some good money online writing and selling their own e-books. You can write an e-book relate to your blog's subject and offer it for sell on your blog. Your e-book doesn't have to be real fancy just give some information that people would be interested in and downloadable.

7. Ask For Donations: You would be surprise of what you can just by asking. You can for donations to help your blog going. Just put a PayPal donation in your sidebar or after every post. It doesn't hurt to ask.

8. Point Your blog To Your Paying Article: If you write articles for a site that pays you a performance fee for your articles like Associated Content or Helium you can have your blog lead your audience to those articles and make more money.

9. Sell Your Service: If you offer some kind of service like graphic design, website design, financial consultation, story writing or some other service offer it from your blog. You can even offer your blogging service to people who might need bloggers.

10. Sell Your Caf Press Items: Caf Press a site where you create your own t-shirts, coffee mugs, calendars, posters and other stuff that you can sell. Way not offer this stuff on your blog. Us PayPal "Pay Now" buttons to take the orders. When someone orders an item they pay you, you pay Caf Press a reduced price, they make the item and ship it to your customer and you never have t see the item.

That's it, that's the 10 easy ways you can make money from your blog. I realize that not all these ways are for everybody, but I'm sure there is at least one or two of these ways that everyone can find to make money online from their blog.

Learn more ways to to make money online for free at SureCashNow.com. You'll find videos, articles and other resources to help you make money online. Also follow along with Michael Bridges as he takes you through his quest to make money online through niche marketing and mini-sites at his blog titled, My Make Money Online Adventure.

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Blogging, Can It Make Money For You?

Blogging is a good way to meet people. Blogging isn't dead but it has sure narrowed down to those who update their blogs regularly. Blogging is bringing new voices to the online world. Most bloggers focus on personal experiences, not politics 7/19/2006 | Release. It is more about speaking out and meeting other people that agree with your narrow point of view. Blogging is easy, almost instant, publishing of content to a website, where every entry is preserved in a database and is therefore categorizeable and searchable.

Blogging

Blogging combined the personal web page with tools to make linking to other pages easier - specifically permalinks, blogrolls and trackbacks. Blogging was used to draw attention to obscure news sources. It can sometimes have unforeseen consequences in politically sensitive areas. Blogging by established politicians and political candidates, to express opinions on war and other issues, cemented blogs' role as a news source.

Bloggers

Bloggers began to provide nearly-instant commentary on televised events, creating a secondary meaning of the word "blogging": to simultaneously transcribe and editorialize speeches and events shown on television. Bloggers think that good argument and strong opinion cause people to seek information, an equally logical sequence. They post about their day or their opinions on different matters. Bloggers consume and extend the shelf life of our reporting, and they scrutinize it at a new level of intensity. They can critique, fact-check or applaud journalists on their own platform, as well as offer their own analysis of world events.

Journalism

Journalism is defined in the Penguin English Dictionary as "a profession managing editing or writing for newspapers or perodicals'. Journalism is always up for grabs, because it only exists in a free society, which is free to redefine itself and always does. Journalism, for many who blog, is one thing they are blogging against. Established schools of journalism began researching blogging and noting the differences between journalism and blogging. It's about how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the business of persuasion.

Google

Google should realize that controversy and selling ad space does not go hand in hand and make sure it doesn't happen again, otherwise people will stop seeing Google in terms of 'not being evil' and see it just as another service provider which would massively decimate not only the good will but also the value of the brand name. Google already crossed a line by setting up a blog specifically to cater to the health care industry. Google can't tell the difference, and customers googling may not care that an opinion they find distasteful is "only being done in off hours. But Google is shamelessly using structural information and photos culled from blogs in its own products (like restaurant search in Google maps).

Personal

Personal bloggers take pride in their blog posts, even if their blog is never read by anyone but them. Personal blogs may not be important to readers, but for the people who write them, they are works of art. Personally don't feel what I'm putting would be that interesting to most people. Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. The modern blog evolved from the online diary, where people would keep a running account of their personal lives. Blogging combined the personal web page with tools to make linking to other pages easier - specifically permalinks, blogrolls and TrackBacks.

Money

There's a good chance that if you are reading this you make money online or want to. I think that making money while blogging is like watching grass grow. The reality for most chasing a quick buck from blogging is that few except those at the top of the blogosphere succeed in raking in a lot of money. The vast number of people looking to make a second income from blogging already own and write their own blogs and don't make much money; simply a low paid network blogging job is often more than what they are making from their own blogs. Blogs don't generate that much money so there's no reason to have minimum wages and benefits for bloggers.

Blogging is changing, and for the better. It is a good way to meet people. Blogging isn't dead but it has sure narrowed down to those who update their blogs regularly.

For more information about blogging and other marketing methods, go to Jim Swanks website at: http://www.MultiAffiliateIncomes.com

Jim Swank has been in the internet marketing field for a number of years. His particular area of expertise is showing others how to make a second income on the internet.

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