blogging 102

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes If you are reading this post then you have taken your first step in moving beyond the amateur blog level.  The first thing you need to accept is you don’t know everything and you should be reading a lot of blogs how to get set up right.  None of us know everything, and I am more than happy to point you to the people who know a lot more than me on any subject.  That said let me tell you what we can all agree on. Figure out why you want to blog.  This is the most important step and the reason most people never bother with.  Deciding you want to blog for money is perfectly acceptable. Once you figure out why you want to blog you need to decide on what your blog is to be about.  This is one specific thing that your blog will be known to the search engines for.  This is going to be your keyword phrase.  See my post on picking your keywords for more information.  The short of it is you want to find something that defines your blog with a lot of... 

Reading time: < 1 minute 5) Don’t Advertise On Your Noobie Blog. People who tell you not to advertise don’t usually have your best interest at heart. The first kind of people to give that advice are readers who want something for nothing. Second kind are bloggers who think if you don’t have ads their advertising will get a better click through ratio. 4) Gadets and Widgets are the bomb and you should use all the latest and greatest. The fact is unless it is unobtrusive and either useful to you or your readers it is pointless and slows down your load times. convey_source = "English"; Read More →

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes Here is your daily round up of everything you should have read today, but didn’t because you were jerking all morning, napped this afternoon, farted around with your new theme project this evening, watched idol, blogged about idol, wondered where all this traffic came from on The Other Blog, fooled around some more with your theme and then wondered what you were going to post today over in Blog Boy. i suppose I could have twitted all that today. Mani at The Daily SEO Blog brought us Tags and Categories – SEO and Usability Darren blogged on branding your blog with your name in The Choice of Associating Your Name with Your Blog Last but not least Sara gives us a very appropriate post on tax day in Free Tax Sites: A Lesson for Bloggers about Advertising Balance convey_source = "English"; Read More →

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes I am surprised these days how many people still don’t know what an RSS/XML/Atom feed is. Almost every website be it a blog or anything else has some variation of that nice little orange symbol that looks like this: Okay now that you all know what those are, the question some of you still have is yeah, but what do they do. First lets explain RSS. In the guise of K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid) RSS is Really Simple Syndication. As my MIL (mother in law- in case you are really knew to acronyms) would say RSS and Atom are the same meat, just different gravy. They are syndicated feeds of blog posts. XML is just the technology that both of those things are built on. So what is syndication? I knew you were going to ask that. Simply put, it is anything you subscribe to, just like television stations get reruns of shows or newspapers buy advice columns, but web syndication is free. You click on the link and add to any number of web... 

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes Today’s blogging tip is don’t over extend yourself.  If you don’t have time to commit to your blog(s) then you have probably over extended yourself with either the blogs or your other activities.  Either way trying to do both will make your life suck and no one gives a damn if you blog about your sucky life!  When you start out blogging you need to make some serious time commitments to your blog and not just writing the posts either.   Unless you have the extra cash to throw around at web developers then you really need to spend time learning site design, SEO, your blogging software, and all the latest information about the plugins that will make your blog great.  How do you do it?  You do it by reading a lot of really great blogs or better yet their feeds since you can do that quite a bit faster.  Where Should you start reading?  Here is my short list Pro Blogging Perfect Blogging Pajama Professional That should hold you for...