Blogging News

How to Start Blogging – Steps for becoming a Blogger

1) Find your Niche – Now when I saw this Tip, I didn’t even knew what’s a niche. What it means to me is your interests. For Eg. -My Blog Realtrix is about Internet & Web and Computing Stuff. Similarly you should find your Interest about what you are going to Blog about. Some Ideas I think you can be blogging about are Blogging, Computing, Tech, Motivation, Entrepreneurship, Music, Bollywood, Parental, Personal & Education.

2) Find which Blogging SW you are going to Use – The are many. The most Popular is WordPress & Blogger. Lets be straight Wordpress is much better than Blogger. BUT is better as it not 100% free. Hence, Blogger is the Best Option. I am using Blogger as Its highly Customizable. Also Blogger is a part of Google Services.

3) How to Start & what to write – Before making your own blog see what other Bloggers are doing and writing about on the same topic you are going to write about. Then make a list of Stuff they are not Writing about but you think should be written about. Now you know what to write about in your Blog.

Tip : If you are a regular reader you might have seen that I use Images for every Post I write. So you can start collecting Photos for your Blog Post in advance.

4) Starting Your Blog – Check Out the Video here to know how to Get a Free Blog at Blogger.Com. Set Up the Blog there following the Video Tips. Read : How to Create a BlogSpot Blog for Free ? – Video Guide For Beginners

5) Search Engine Optimization – This is very Important when Starting a Blog… See Below “Tips for New Bloggers”

6) What Template to Choose and Where to find Them – Your blog Template, I think is one of the Factors which will keep bringing back Visitors. I means think it this way if you see a very Nice Looking Blog … Don’t you try to remember it and Go back to See what’s new going On there ??

Best Tips for New Bloggers

Do you want to increase traffic to your blog? Well, here are some ready tips to make a move in the world of success blogging. Get started with the following tips that make your task easy. Some of the Easiest Ways to Improve your Blog, SEO and its Traffic/Visitors.

Make a habit of posting regularly in the blog.

Choose a proper template for your Blog. You don’t expect people to like it if you have a cooking theme in a Technology blog.

Write a topic and post it in different sections and thereby create a series. This increases the curiosity of the web visitors who turn to the blog for the interesting follow-ups.

Optimize your blog to make it load Faster so that new visitor don’t get annoyed to sit idle while your blog page loads.

Try to blog out breaking news first. It increases the popularity and creates an authentic image in the web community.

Use right keywords in the body content. The placement of the keywords in accurate density proves to be search engine friendly.

It is very important to encourage comments of web visitors in your blog. Highlight the most relevant comments on the blog. Try to build a cordial relation with the web visitors so that they visit your blog over and over again.

Submit your blog in blog directories and the RSS feed in RSS directories respectively.

It will be fruitful if you use the Ping-O-Matic service. Enter your blog name and its URL and select the directories according to choice. Any updates in your blog are automatically updated in the directories. The web visitors in these directories will able to access your contents.

While designing your blog it necessary to make an email subscription button and form. This proves to be very user friendly.

Try to comment on other blogs. This will introduce your blog in the blogger community.

List your favorite blogs in the blog rolls. You must also try to list your blog in other blogs.

It is highly important to add your blog’s URL to your email signature and any profiles other social networking sites. This will also introduce your blog in the web community.

It is essential to use Digg, Stumble and other social bookmarking sites for your blog. Once you send a post in the aggregators, it will reach millions in no time.

Write on related topics. Post related Articles in a row. This helps in stirring up the interest of the web visitors.

Show the topmost posts in the your blog which received great popularity. This will bear evidence of your blog’s authenticity and significance.

It is mandatory to add “previous” and “next” post buttons. This helps the user to quickly and easily navigate through the Blog.

Try to build up inbound links in your blog. This will help the web visitors to access other important pages in your blog and thus enhance traffic flow.

Rework on the previous Old posts. Try to check out every detail in your post and make it exciting.

Track your Visitors. See where they Come From, Searching for What. When they leave. etc.

Use photos in your post.

Make a Translation Widget In your Blog to help foreign visitors read what you have written.

Utilize your Online time when Not Blogging.Find Important Things to Do when Not Blogging.

Also Read : How to Boost Blog Traffic – Must Read

** Google Desktop Live **

Google’s free desktop search utility made it out of the “beta” stage and users can now download a finished 1.0 version from http://desktop.google.com for free.

With improvements over the “beta” version released in 2004, the finished version not only allows you to search your own computer for Microsoft Office documents, emails, and instant messaging history, but now supports music, video, images, PDF files, and the Firefox and Netscape Web browsers.

In their never-ending quest to make their name synonymous with “search,” Google’s Desktop Search utility makes a bold step towards dominating the desktop search market.

Available for Windows XP and Windows 2000, Google’s desktop search remains miles ahead of MSN and Yahoo!, who released their own beta version desktop search utilities several months after Google.

Google also chose to create an environment friendly to third-party software developers by encouraging them to develop “plug ins” that expand the capabilities of their Desktop Search application.

By allowing others to add their “two-cents” to the program, Google will further cement their position as the leader in this emerging field of “desktop” search.

** MP3 Player Wars Boiling Over **

In response to Apple’s iPod Shuffle, a low priced flash memory MP3 audio player, Sony announced plans to offer a comparably low priced MP3 player in the $100 to $150 range.

This in response to complaints from consumers that Sony’s past MP3 player offerings rated too expensive next to the feature-rich iPod.

Consumers can expect several developments in response to Sony’s entry into the “Under $150″ MP3 player market.

First, increased use of the portable players will cause related businesses selling the actual MP3’s and accessories to experience continued growth, both online and offline.

Second, a new trend known as “pod casting” is getting set to explode.

“Pod casting” involves content providers (radio dj’s, entrepreneurs, columnists, musicians) creating MP3 audio content and then making it super simple for listeners to automatically download these “broadcasts” online and listen to them at their convenience.

The fact that consumers can now get their hands on the equipment to download and listen to these broadcasts so cheaply means a whole world of amateur dj’s and talk show hosts is about to hit the cyber-airwaves.

Though you’ve heard rumblings about it, and people are grasping around in the dark trying to get a grip on how to implement it, now you can actually plan to see and hear about the widespread use of “pod casting” in the very near future since a potential audience of listeners with the right equipment is now set to grow.

** Associated Press Offers RSS Feeds **

The Associated Press now offers RSS feeds of their top news stories. RSS (Real Simple Syndication) makes it possible for content providers to offer instant updates to their readers without sending email.

Anyone with an RSS reader such as FeedDemon (www.feeddemon.com) can receive and read RSS feeds.

Traditionally, the Associated Press marketed their services exclusively to newspapers and online sources such as Yahoo! News.

Now, by offering their RSS feeds directly to consumers at www.ap.org, the Associated Press is obviously seeking to bypass online news sources and go directly to the consumer.

The fact that the world’s oldest and largest news source has chosen to start offering content this way demonstrates quite clearly that RSS is fast coming of age as an acceptable mass-communication medium and that widespread consumer adoption is imminent.

Soon, there’ll be an RSS reader on every computer desktop and the use of RSS will become as widespread as email.

What you need to know about RSS feeds.

So, what are RSS feeds and why they are so popular among internet users and web designers?

Shortly speaking, RSS is a technology that lets you know about new information on different sites and blogs. Any user can sign on RSS feed and get the latest news and links to the information on the website. Depending on the version and specification of RSS the abbreviation means:

- Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)

- RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9, 1.0 and 1.1)

- Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)

There were only three ways to look after favorite website updates before RSS feeds become available:

1. To visit your favorite website daily/weekly to check if something new appeared. It is a waste of time if you have more than five favorites, especially if you find no interesting updates.

2. To receive via e-mail notifications about website updates. In this case spammers can find out your e-mail and you`ll receive additional advertisements.

3. To use a program to track page updates. This will determine interesting sites and their changes. Apart from downloading and installing you`ll never know what precisely has changed there.

And here comes RSS! The newest and best type of notifications about news or events on sites – RSS feeds. It is executed by means of a special page on your site which is called RSS-document, usually it is rss.Xml. This RSS-document does not contain any waste information such as site design or navigation menu. It basically consists of information on the latest website updates, the additional description of the news and the link to the source page. It should be known that one website can contain not only one RSS feed. It is often that apart from the main RSS feed one major site holds a lot of extra RSS channels with news for different site sections which gives the user more flexible choice if he does not wish to watch for all site news.

How to make RSS feed on a site? There are a lot of ways to generate RSS channels with their advantages and disadvantages. For instance, blogs can be used as such servers give links on RSS document of your blog, which you place on your site and get a “news channel”. The other way is to make and manually edit the rss.Xml, for example, by means of Notepad ++. In this case you shall need a good knowledge of HTML and XML, and if the news will appear often, this method will turn to be very irksome. Thus the most convenient way is to use special RSS-generators, for example, RSS Channel Writer. It includes user-friendly tools like creator wizard, RSS editor, FTP manager, automatic RSS ping tool to RSS servers e t c. Being protected from making mistakes during RSS feeds creation, you don’t need to possess with XML syntax knowledge to create RSS feed with this program.

In its turn, receiving and reading RSS feeds is maintained by means of RSS aggregators, either standalone (for example, free of charge FeedDemon), or integrated in a browser (IE7, IE8, Opera, Firefox). Such aggregators usually have fewer functions to work with RSS feeds in comparison with standalone programs` possibilities, but in case of using web browsers it is not needed to install any additional programs. Consequently the users are now ready to use RSS feeds, and web designers need only to use this possibility to involve in website community and to hold there more and more regular visitors.