10 Blogging tips

Beginner Tip #1 – Blog About Something Your Passionate About

If you are not passionate about your topic, you are not going to stick to it. The best way to decide what to blog about is to ask yourself, “Would I do this for free?” If the answer is yes, then you have found your topic. People who blog only for money seldom succeed.

Beginner Tip #2 – Get Your Own Domain Name

While it certainly is possible to start a blog for nothing by using a free service like Blogger.com orWordPress.com, I recommend every blogger starting out to get their own domain name. The cost is next to nothing and you can still host it for free if you want (Blogger allows that).

If you do not wish to use the Blogger platform, you’ll have to pony up for web hosting but that’s pretty damn cheap as well. BlueFur (they host this blog) has hosting solutions starting at $5 per month and they’ll give you 15% off if you enter JohnChowRocks in the coupon code.

Having your own domain makes you look more professional. While it may not make you a pro-blogger, the ad networks will take you a lot more seriously. Some ad networks will not accept a site unless it has its own domain name. If you do it right, having your own domain and web hosting won’t cost you anything because the income the blog generates will more than offset the cost.

It’s better to get the domain name at the start than down the road. The last thing you want to do is build up a blog with Blogspot, get a ton of backlinks, PageRank, Alexa and Technorati rankings, and then have to move it to its own domain and start over. I’m sure Kumiko can relate. 

Beginner Tip #3 – Update The Blog Often

A non-updated blog is a dead blog. If you cannot commit to a consistent blogging schedule, then it’s best not to blog until you can. This is where blogging about your passion comes in. If you’re passionate about the topic, then chances are you’ll keep blogging about it. Ideally, you should update the blog everyday.

Beginner Tip #4 – Get To Know Your Readers

Blogging is a two-way street. You cannot exist without readers (well you can, but what’s the point?), and readers don’t exist unless they have something to read. Blogging is about forming relationships. There’s the relationship between you and the readers and relationship between you and other blogs in your niche. It is up to you to get to know them and form this relationship. Many readers have stated that when they’re reading my blog, it’s like a one-on-one conversion. That was not done by accident. It’s all part of relationship blogging.

Beginner Tip #5 – Monetize The Blog With Multiple Sources

When the time comes to monetize your blog, don’t stick with just Google AdSense. There are now tons of ways to make money from blogging. Check out my recommended moneymaker list. If I were to use only Google AdSense, there is no way I would have been able to pull down nearly $12,000 last month. Google accounted for less than 10% of April blog income. Do not put all your eggs there.

I use eight different methods to make money online. Only two of them are banner ads. During the Lab interview, Leo pointed that my blog doesn’t looks it has that much advertising at all. When he found out how many different advertising models I used, he was shocked. The key to monetizing a blog is to run as many advertising products as you can get away with while still providing a good user experience.

Beginner Tip #6- Chose the right blog software:

The right blog CMS makes a big difference. If you want to set yourself apart, I recommend creating a custom blog solution - one that can be completely customized to your users. In most cases,WordPress, Blogger, MovableType or Typepad will suffice, but building from scratch allows you to be very creative with functionality and formatting. The best CMS is something that's easy for the writer(s) to use and brings together the features that allow the blog to flourish. Think about how you want comments, archiving, sub-pages, categorization, multiple feeds and user accounts to operate in order to narrow down your choices. OpenSourceCMS is a very good tool to help you select a software if you go that route.

Beginner Tip #7: Write Title Tags with Two Audiences in Mind

First and foremost, you're writing a title tag for the people who will visit your site or have a subscription to your feed. Title tags that are short, snappy, on-topic and catchy are imperative. You also want to think about search engines when you title your posts, since the engines can help to drive traffic to your blog. A great way to do this is to write the post and the title first, then run a few searches at Overture, WordTracker & KeywordDiscovery to see if there is a phrasing or ordering that can better help you to target "searched for" terms.
Beginner Tip # 8: Participate at Related Forums & Blogs
Whatever industry or niche you're in, there are bloggers, forums and an online community that's already active. Depending on the specificity of your focus, you may need to think one or two levels broader than your own content to find a large community, but with the size of the participatory web today, even the highly specialized content areas receive attention. A great way to find out who these people are is to use Technorati to conduct searches, then sort by number of links (authority).Del.icio.us tags are also very useful in this process, as are straight searches at the engines (Ask.com's blog search in particular is of very good quality).

Beginner Tip # 9: Tag Your Content

Technorati is the first place that you should be tagging posts. I actually recommend having the tags right on your page, pointing to the Technorati searches that you're targeting. There are other good places to ping - del.icio.us and Flickr being the two most obvious (the only other one is Blogmarks, which is much smaller). Tagging content can also be valuable to help give you a "bump" towards getting traffic from big sites like Reddit, Digg & StumbleUpon (which requires that you download the toolbar, but trust me - it's worth it). You DO NOT want to submit every post to these sites, but that one out of twenty  is worth your while.

Beginner Tip # 10: Link Intelligently

When you link out in your blog posts, use convention where applicable and creativity when warranted, but be aware of how the links you serve are part of the content you provide. Not every issue you discuss or site you mention needs a link, but there's a fine line between overlinking and underlinking. The best advice I can give is to think of the post from the standpoint of a relatively uninformed reader. If you mention Wikipedia, everyone is familiar and no link is required. If you mention a specific page at Wikipedia, a link is necessary and important. Also, be aware that quoting other bloggers or online sources (or even discussing their ideas) without linking to them is considered bad etiquette and can earn you scorn that could cost you links from those sources in the future. It's almost always better to be over-generous with links than under-generous. And link condoms? Only use them when you're linking to something you find truly distasteful or have serious apprehension about.