What Is a Blog?
A blog is a website-simple as that
Ok as some of you might now there are lots of blogs created each day by people that want to write their passions or just want to earn some extra income.
Now before you go and create your own blog you should relax for a few minutes and just think on what domain you want to represent and what are your passions(What do you like, What are you good at)
For example I was good at selling stuff since I was a boy.
I was around 10 years old and at that time life was hard, we couldn’t afford everything we wanted.
But I had a bike and one of those old Pc’s, I think it was called 486(don’t know if it’s called the same in English) but you could play Dyna, volfied and other stuff.
So I started thinking, what am I good at, and it came to me ‘…Oh yea I have a Pc and a Bike, something that most people don’t have’.
I started renting my bike to people for money and turning my room into a game area and for my surprise It Worked! Ya it really worked, I started making money so I could buy chocolate and other stuff.
What do you have that other people don’t, take that into consideration before creating a blog and start writing articles.
People say it is best to choose a domain that is popular and people are interested in but I would advise you to combine both.
Where Should I Create My Blog?
-WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on hundreds of thousands of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.
Everything you see here, from the documentation to the code itself, was created by and for the community. Word Press is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most commercial platforms.) It also means you are free to use it for anything from your cat’s home page to a Fortune 5 web site without paying anyone a license fee.
About WordPress.org
On this site you can download and install a software script called Word Press. To do this you need a web host who meets the minimum requirements and a little time. Word Press is completely customizable and can be used for almost anything. There is also a service called WordPress.com which lets you get started with a new and free Word Press-based blog in seconds, but varies in several ways and is less flexible than the Word Press you download and install yourself.
A Little History
Word Press was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. It is the official successor of b2/cafelog. Word Press is fresh software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature and stable product. We hope by focusing on user experience and web standards we can create a tool different from anything else out there.
2005 was a very exciting year for Word Press, as it saw the release of our 1.5 version (introduced themes) which was downloaded over 900,000 times, the start of hosted service WordPress.com to expand WP's reach, the founding of Automattic by several core members of the WP team, and finally the release of version 2.0.
After 1.5 we seemed to have something people really liked and we've experienced some fairly rapid growth. Here are some metrics for 2006 and 2007.
In 2006 we had 1,545,703 downloads, in 2007 we had 3,816,965!
As for plugins we had 191,567 downloads of 371 unique plugins in 2006. In 2007 there were 2,845,884 downloads (15x growth) of 1,384 plugins.
2006 saw the introduction of the first WordCamp in San Francisco.
In 2007 we adopted a regular release schedule, putting out major feature releases roughly every 3-4 months, or three times a year.
Because of the number of improvements in version 2.5 we took an extra 3 months on it, but 2008 looks on track to do three major releases again. It will be a very exciting year.
There are now dozens of WordCamps around the world, from Vancouver to Dallas to Milan, Italy.
-Blogger was started by a tiny company in San Francisco called Pyra Labs in August of 1999. This was in the midst of the dot-com boom. But we weren't exactly a VC-funded, party-throwing, foosball-in-the-lobby-playing, free-beer-drinking outfit. (Unless it was other people's free beer.)
We were three friends, funded by doing annoying contract web projects for big companies, trying to make our own grand entrance onto the Internet landscape. What we were originally trying to do doesn't matter so much now. But while doing it, we created Blogger, more or less on a whim, and thought — Hmmm... That’s kind of interesting.
Blogger took off, in a small way, and eventually a bigger way, over a couple years. We raised a little money (but stayed small). And then the bust happened, and we ran out of money, and our fun little journey got less fun. We narrowly survived, not all in one piece, but kept the service going the whole time (most days) and started building it back up.
Things were going well again in 2002. We had hundreds of thousands of users, though still just a few people. And then something no one expected happened: Google wanted to buy us. Yes, that Google.
We liked Google a lot. And they liked blogs. So we were amenable to the idea. And it worked out nicely.
Now we're a small (but slightly bigger than before) team in Google focusing on helping people have their own voice on the web and organizing the world's information from the personal perspective. Which has pretty much always been our whole deal.
So you have two Blog sites that I recommend, it’s up to you to choose which one you want.
How to Earn Money with Your Blog?
1. Advertising
Programs like AdSense and YPN are popular with bloggers and in my opinion is the most common stream of income.
They are very simple to use and require you pasting a code in your blog.
Payment is CPC ‘cost per click’
Another program I think is good too is Chitika’s eMiniMall, because it is not a contextual ad and Google doesn’t allow you to use contextual ads on the same page.
There’s also Text Ads a new popular way to sell ads.
The beauty of both of these systems is that they have a pool of advertisers already so you don’t have to go looking for your own advertisers.
2. Sponsorship ads
This is a form of advertising that few bloggers are using. They find their own advertisers. This is a good thing when you have a popular blog because you will receive lots of offers from private sponsors.
The key is to attract sponsors that have similar products to yours.
3.Affiliate Programs
Affiliate programs are where you take a commission for referring a reader who purchases a product or service to a company. Probably the most common of these for bloggers is Amazon which has tens of thousands of products that you can link to. Another program I recommend is FreeSiteSignUp (ref)
4. Donations
Small number of blogs has a history of making some nice money from donations.
If readers like your articles and want to help you, they donate.
How to get Traffic to your Blog
You can submit your sitemap to Google
Create an account on MyBlogLog
Write an article related to your site and submit it to article sites.
Sign up to StumbleUpon and get your friends to Stumble your site.
Create a custom 404 page so that even if someone encounters an error on your site, they are re-directed somewhere nice.
Set up a 301 redirect to take traffic from your non-www address to your www address. See here for more info.
Add a link to your site in the signature of any forums you post on.
Tell your friends about your site. It's free advertising init.
Spell cheek Ur site. Nothing appears more amateur than a site with typos or spelling mistakes.
Test your site and make sure it appears correctly in all major browsers.
Buy enough hosting. No one likes a slow site.
Don't worry about PageRank - worrying about PageRank is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum.*
Offer something for free. Free is good. People tell their friends about free stuff.
Tell your neighbors, you never know what contacts they might have.
Offer your users as many ways as possible to contact you. MSN, Skype, Yahoo etc all complement email, phone and a real address.
Advertise your site on Craigslist. It's free, relevant and localized.
Do NOT use frames.
Submit your site to DMOZ.org. It may take time, but it's worth it.
Create an XML sitemap of your site and submit it to Google.
Get a custom t-shirt made with your website url on it, and wear it often.
Ask a large breasted lady to wear one too.
Sign up with an affiliate programme to sell your product, or if you're a publish, make some cash!
On your Contact Page ask people if they mind receiving your newsletter.
Send out a newsletter!
Go to a free seminar for Website owners. You might learn something.
Find quality and relevant blogs and leave a comment (with a link back to your site of course).
Don't pay people to submit your site to search engines. It's a waste of money.
YouTube and Google Video are excellent portals on which to launch a viral campaign.
Giving away an eBook is an excellent way to generate word-of-mouth about your site.
Sponsor a Word press theme or a phpListDirectory template.
If you sell products that are advertised on television by the manufacturer, add "As Seen on TV" to your site!
Avoid proprietry technologies like Java and Active X.
Put downloadable content on your site, but make sure it's not manufacturer specific - so mp3 rather than wma.
Learn about CSS. It's the new HTML.
Contribute to related subject areas on Wikipedia.
Ask bloggers and other Web site owners to review your site and/or products.
Have user friendly page names - most tools comes with some way to avoid http://www.yourdomain.com/pgInfoPage...CFE3AEDAF8DD9D
If you must have a Flash homepage, make sure you have a "Skip Intro" link.
Tell your local rag about your site. These newspapers are desperate for stories and you may well even get a pic of your ugly picture published.
Become a leading authority on your chosen subject.
Donate money to a charity and most will place a link on their site back to you.
So you know what a blog is, you know what domain to choose, you know ways to earn money, you know how to get traffic to your blog.
The rest depends on you. Thank You And Have Fun.
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