Make A Blog
How To Make A Website > Make A Blog
A Blog is short for Web Log, basically it's an online
journal that you use to update on a regular basis regarding the
topic of your website or blog. A blog is great for keeping visitors
informed about the latest news or products. I use my blog to add new
information on
how to make a website.
What I'll do below is explain some of the options for
creating a blog along with the pros and cons of a blog.
One thing to consider is that search engines love unique
content and maintaining a blog is a great way to add
unique content to your website on a regular basis.
Make A Free Blog
There are quite a few options with
making a blog that are free. The most popular would be
Blogger. All
you need to do is setup a free account with blogger, choose a
website name, choose a template and then start blogging.A couple
of drawbacks of blogger is that it's so popular that majority of the
good names are already take, for instance, I searched about 10
variations of makeawebsite.blogspot.com before I found
http://make-a-web-site.blogspot.com/.
Another drawback is the flexibility you have with the selection
of templates plus the capabilities to add advertising to your blog.
They offer a decent selection of templates but with so many great
free blog templates you'll find that you're limited.
Wordpress Blog Software
The alternative that I chose
was Wordpress, it's still free to download and install but you have
greater flexibility with it. You can select from 1000's of free
Wordpress templates along with the fact that you can monetize the
page by selling advertising or inserting Google Adsense.Another
great thing with Wordpress is you can install it on any domain name
that you own. You'll need a web hosting account but with so many
providers offering hosting for multiple domains you shouldn't need
to purchase a hosting account just for your blog.
The other alternative, which I've done, is add it to a current
website. If you visit
www.makeawebsitespot.com/makeawebsite you'll see that I
installed Wordpress on a page of my main site and use it as a page
that I update with my latest blog on how to make a website.
You can download the software for free at
WordPress.org.
Build A Following
Once you've established your blog
as a reputable source with unique information people will want to
subscribe to your blog via a RSS Feed. A RSS feed stands for Really
Simply Syndication) and allows users to receive updates via a
variety of sources such a Google Reader. Read more on
What Is An RSS Feed.The
great thing about RSS is that any time you update your blog with new
information or a new product, the people that have subscribed to
your feed will receive notification. This increases your traffic
because people will return to your website for your latest posts.
A great example of this is
ProBlogger.net.
In my opinion it's the best source on the internet in regards to
building a blog including ideas for monetizing it. I subscribe to
the
ProBlogger.net RSS feed and any time a new blog post is posted I
receive it through my Google reader so that I can stay on top of the
latest things that ProBlogger has to say.
Make Money With Your Blog
Once you start getting
visitors to your website it's easy to start making money with your
blog. The best alternative is to add Google Adsense to your blog.
You can see that I've done this on the right hand side of this very
page.How it works is that Google serves ads that are relevant to
that page and when someone clicks on one of those links you earn a
percentage of what Google earns.
You'll find that most blogs that you visit have integrated
Adsense into their blog to assist with earning money on their blog.
Other ways to earn money are to directly sell advertising to a
merchant. If you're website is about Ford Mustangs and you get a
fair amount of traffic to your website a merchant that sells Ford
Mustang accessories may be interested in placing a banner on your
website. This is generally negotiated on a monthly rate and the fee
is based on the amount of traffic that your blog receives.
Tips On Running A Successful Blog
Below I've covered
a few important parts of running a blog with a brief description.
- Blog Regularly - Search engines along with readers want
to see regular blog posts. This keeps your content fresh to keep
readers coming back for more. Along with this search engines love
pages updated regularly so it'll assist with search engine rankings.
- Keep Content Unique - Again, search engines and your
visitors want unique content. A reader is less likely to come back
to your website if they find that they content they read is
something that they've read somewhere else. Search engines are the
same, they want unique content and will reward you if you can
accomplish this on a regular basis.
- Find A Target Audience - Once you've determined what
you're going to write about, stick with it. Your visitors and search
engines won't stick around if you don't. Consider this, my blog is
on how to create a website and if I start writing about the latest
gadgets or politics people would stop coming around because they
want to learn how to make a website.
- Keep It Clean - You'll find that there are 1000's of free
Wordpress templates but many of them are difficult to read. Choose a
template that you like but also one that your visitors will like as
well and find easy to read.
