Starting Your Blog

Starting Your Blog

Keep your blog organized and attractive.
Who is your audience? Who are your readers? How often will you be posting to your blog? How often will your average reader be visiting your site? Think about the type of content you will be writing and what the best way to organize it will be. Ask yourself if your blog should be more date oriented or category oriented. And make sure you ask these questions from your reader’s point of view.
Keep your blog postings relevant. Your blog should have some kind of theme or topic. Every time you post something on your blog, ask yourself if it’s relevant.
Don’t just fill your blog up with content. Consider who you are trying to attract then stay with your topic and don’t lose focus. Write for the reader, not the writer.
Customize your template and keep your bog organized. Everything you need to know to customize your blog can be found online. To organize by date or to organize by content. If your blog is just a diary, you write about anything and everything, it’s an update, news, or latest goings on of your business or personal life then a date organized blog is usually best. If you are developing your blog into a site of resources or providing content that will be valuable weeks from now, then organize by category. Again, think about how your visitors will use your site and what will be easiest for them. If you think they may find value in your previous posts, make it easy for them to find those posts.
Blogs have easy to plug in categories and calendars, so use them! Set up a handful of categories on your blog and remember you can easily change them as you begin to develop your blog. Also, organize your calendar.
Use a search form. A search form enables your visitors to easily find exactly what they are looking for. You do not want your visitors coming to your site in search of a post they saw and then force them to wade through post after post to find it. Using a search form is easy to use and is default on most blog templates.
Don’t make your visitors blindly click links on your blog to find what they are looking for. Make the categories and titles of your posts as descriptive as you possibly can. Following this single tip will make a huge difference, especially once your site has numerous postings.
Make a clear navigational path for all parts of your blog. Just like a website, you need to make a directory of your blog. You want to make it easy for your visitors to find all the categories, as well as additional pages of your blog.
Left or right side navigation? Placement on either side will work. You can even do both.
Keep your blog simple and to the point. Keep your blog layout focused on what your readers and visitors want it will reflect a layout and organization that fits them.

Blogging

Blogging

Bloggers are becoming an important factor to Internet marketing. Bloggers are taking advantage of this communication technique, and some will be rivals and others will be allies. For this reason, it is important to identify the blogs that are capable of spreading a positive image about your business.
Explore blogs to find those that have some appeal and apply to your topic. There are search engines specifically tailored to searching blogs, like technorati.com. The Technorati site enables you to locate bloggers proven to have more authority in your industry by how many other blogs are linked to them.
Keep a list of contacts you find beneficial. You can keep track of your contacts online, with management tools, such as the free jibberjobber.com tool.
Become knowledgeable about the blogger’s content by knowing the current topics on the blog. Know whether the blogger is a big media blogger or a small time blogger and utilize both. Keeping up with bloggers will develop trust and acceptance of your role in the site.

You can get noticed by the blogger by leaving positive comments on the blog or sending an e-mail. Frequent visitors to the site might begin to recognize you as a source of information if you place comments often.
Bloggers usually do not want someone to push a product or service on their site.
Bloggers can be important to your industry; therefore creating a positive relationship could lead to a better outlook on your company or organization. By treating the blogger with respect, it is likely to form a mutually beneficial relationship.

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking

If you do any blogging then you should be utilizing the power of social bookmarking. Social bookmarks are icon links or links to sites where users are able to save articles for themselves and share them with other users.
Social bookmarking sites store lists of Internet resources users have found useful by category, tags, or randomly. These bookmarked sites and pages can be shared with other people who have similar interests.
These links can also be organized by user defined keywords or tags (called folksonomy). Resources can be rated by users, include email links, have comments added, be sorted by popularity and algorithms that draw inferences from other keyword references, and participate in automated notification systems.
Social bookmarking links can be included in your press section and press releases.
Social bookmarking is a way for people to bookmark and share a web page with others. There are many social bookmarking services which allow users to add web pages to their bookmark list.

As a blog owner you benefit from having someone add a page from your site to their social bookmark list. Your web page then becomes search-able in the entire bookmark directory, which is available to all members of the service. People will also be inclined to share it with others! This is a great way to build your blog’s audience and increase exposure.
By providing a special link, visitors can add a page from your website to their social bookmark list. There are now over fifty different services available to manage social bookmarks.
If you’ve been in the blogosphere you have no doubt seen these images at the end of articles and posts.

There are icon image links to social bookmarking services. Add these icon images to the bottom of your blog posts with links.