If you want to build an online business, you must have a blog. Blogging has become the way that people find out who you are and what you do, so it is non-negotiable. After you blog for a month or to, it will become a daily activity that you can actually look forward to for the help www.bloggers-guide-to-profit.com. My blog is my home on the internet, and I am always ready to share the information I have with my readers.
There are really only two choices for your blogging platform. I use both of them, mainly because I maintain so many blogs. Type pad is an easy way to set up your blog within an hour or so, and it is hosted by Type pad. There are about two hundred different themes to choose from, or you can easily upload your own. I always recommend Type pad as a blogging platform to people you need to set up a blog quickly, without any need for specialized features.
For those who want more flexibility with their blogs, Wordpress is the way to go. There are plug-ins that make it possible to turn your blog into a search engine optimization machine, allow you to easily upload audio and video, and do more things than you ever imagined, even with a traditional website. wordpress blogs require more technology knowledge to be set up and maintained, but you may find that you would rather learn some new things in order to have a site that is capable of so much more.
More and more people are now using blogs instead of websites, because the search engines love the fresh new content. You will be able to build your online business with your blog, and people will be able to find you easily when searching for your keywords on Google or any of the other search engines.
How blogs can hurt:
1. One small step. Negative posts can be fatal.
Blogging can open you up for many legal, liability and employment questions, problems or crises. Last year, Jim C. came to me after he had posted a rather nasty post on his Top Ten Worst Retailers in the World blog for the help www.feed-reader-links.com. His company did business with two of those retailers and as nosy or highly sensitive corporate personnel found out about his lambaste it caused a rift at the company. According to Jim, “This year for other reasons I was let go. It was not the economy. I crossed the line.”
2. Pictures tell a thousand stories.
Larry seemed to pipe up at work a lot about things that bothered him. So he decided to publish a seemingly anonymous blog. As a techy he posted hundreds of comments on political ideas, people he thought should be impeached and railed against what he considered bad taste and fashion. He did this anonymously under a lot of different names. But when he decided to take pictures at the year end Christmas party and publish captions that offended nearly everyone, he was, well, suspended without pay forever (fired).

Saurabh
http://www.articlesbase.com/blogging-articles/business-blogging-two-choices-for-your-blogging-platform-726616.html

Technorati Tags: blog, Business People, Crises, Employment Questions, Flexibility, Google, Jim C, Keywords, Legal Liability, Nasty Post, Negative Posts, Online Business, Other Search Engines, Plug Ins, Search Engine Optimization, Technology Knowledge, Themes, Two Choices, Upload, wordpress

So I’ll discuss a little about the wordpress platform, themes, recommended plugins and some tips.

If you have just started blogging, there are a few steps you should take.

1. Activate the akismet plugin. This plugin comes preinstalled with wordpress but you have to activate it and get a wordpress key (which takes 2 minutes). Akismet blocks spam comments on your blog, so if you choose to enable comments on your posts (which you should) then this plugin is a must, and best of all it’s a set and forget.
2. Choose a theme. You could use the default theme, but it’s way overused. The ideal is to choose a theme that is very user friendly, with good link visibility, nice color contrast, and a nice and attractive layout. If you know how to design a theme or can change a free theme to your liking, then you should do so, unique content and layout designs are always a better choice than free themes that are probably used by hundreds or more. A good place to get themes is the wordpress Theme Directory. Another one is searching google for “free wordpress themes”
3. Decide on a permalink structure, permalinks are the actual links to your blog posts, and wordpress gives you a lot of flexibility here. For maximum SEO performance, you should simply choose “yourdomain.com/blog-post-title” but this really comes down to personal preference as I personally don’t think it makes that much of a difference, so you might prefer “yourdomain.com/year/month/blog-post-title” that is also search engine (and user) friendly. Whatever you choose, do activate the permalink feature because otherwise you’ll have those ugly query strings all over your urls.
4. Download and install the Google XML Sitemaps Generator Plugin. This plugin takes care of updating and submitting your sitemap to Google and other search engines. This allows search engine to know more about the structure of your website.
5. Download and install the All In One SEO Pack Plugin. This plugin optimizes your blogs output for search engine optimization. Optimizes keywords, page titles and more.
6. Install the Share This plugin or a similar social bookmarking plugin. This should go right after your posts along with a reminder letting visitors know they can subscribe to your feed. This way visitors have some options when they finish reading your posts. If they like your post, they will be able to quickly submit it to whatever social bookmarking sites they use or e-mail to a friend.
7. Create an About page. You should use this page to introduce yourself to the visitors, your background, your work, what you do and like and what people should expect from your blog. This gives your blog a personal touch that helps visitors to identify you as an actual human behind the blog. Also consider placing one or several pictures of yourself on the about page (or on a photos page if you prefer) as this also greatly increases the human awareness of the visitor.
8. Create a Contact page. You can simply put up a page with e-mail instructions or use a contact me plugin like Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form. This gives confidence to the visitor that he can reach you if he so chooses and, like the about page, gives the human touch.
9. Create an account on FeedBurner for your blog and give your visitors a visible option to subscribe to your blog by RSS and by e-mail (FeedBurner takes good care of all this). This allows users to use an rss reader or just get your posts by e-mail. Most visitors never return so you should make it easy and worthwhile for them to subscribe to your blog and receive future updates.

Well, those are 9 of the things that I think are most common and needed, but I could go on, you should familiarize yourself as much as possible with wordpress (or your other blogging platform of choice), try out new plugins and optimize your theme. It’s a work in progress, but you shouldn’t let that get in the way of your posting.

You could consider setting up a password protected subdomain and creating a clone blog for testing (or install it on your own computer) because once you start getting traffic you shouldn’t go trying new things on your live site where things could break giving your visitors a bad surfing experience. A clone blog is obviously just a blog installation that matches your actual site with the same theme, same plugins and a few dummy posts so you can do your testing.

Once you get your blog ready to go, all that’s left to do is start posting! You should make a nice first post, introducing yourself briefly and letting the reader know that you have an About page with more details. You should give some idea of what visitors can expect from your blog posts.

Now for some quick blogging tips:

1. Make constant posts. You should try your best to do about 3 posts per week minimum. This all depends on your ability to express yourself with words. If you’re good at it, then post as much as you can, daily or even bidaily. If you’re not, well, then try to make at least 3 posts per week.
2. Use post titles wisely. Your post title is very important as it’s the part that will be most visible to the web. Create informative titles, for more details visit to www.your-own-blog.com the words you choose here will eventually make your site rank on google for some or all of those same keywords.
3. Make medium to long posts. Not saying that you can’t do small blog posts, you can and should, but you should try your best to create full length and keyword rich posts. Write your best and biggest posts as if the were articles with a small intro, content and conclusion.
4. Post about other blogs. Read blogs about the same topic than yours and link to them and do your own spin on the post, agree, for more details visit to www.blog-and-ping.com disagree, whatever. Basically try to engage in friendly debates with other bloggers.
5. Leave them wanting for more. End your posts with a small text about what you’ll be posting about next time. Be creative and suspenseful.
6. Proof read and spell check your post before publishing. Occasional typos are ok, but proof reading and using a spell checker should keep them to a minimum.
7. Have fun! You should be having fun blogging. If you’re just starting you can probably feel a little intimidated or sometimes don’t knowing what to post. But you shouldn’t stress to much about it, just take a break and post some other time. Blogging should be relaxing not stressful. Find inspiration around you.

Well and that’s it, there you have just some blogging tips to get you started. These are of course mostly geared to blogging beginners. You can do much more with blogs and use the blogging platform to create other type of niche sites and adsense sites but that is topic for a whole different article.

Narinder Pal Sharma
http://www.articlesbase.com/blogging-articles/just-started-blogging-there-are-a-few-steps-you-should-take-724583.html

Technorati Tags: Akismet, Attractive Layout, Color Contrast, Com Blog, Default Theme, Flexibility, Free Themes, Free Wordpress Themes, Google, Layout Designs, Liking, Other Search Engines, Pack Plugin, Personal Preference, Query Strings, Search Engine, Seo, Theme Directory, Urls, Visibility

The “Wordpress” developer team has successfully launched their latest version of Wordpress, called “Wordpress Ella”. Numerically, the version number is called version 2.1

To the uninitiated, news like this seems like a normal announcement from software developers and are often passed on by. However, from the eyes of a trained mind and savvy businessman, the news of “Wordpress Ella” contain many benefits that online business owners can immediately tap into and profit from.

“Wordpress Ella” comes with the following enhancements which are a great resource for online business owners.

1. First on the list of enhancements from Wordpress Ella is an ‘autosave’ function that ensures you will never lose a post again. This is an invaluable tool especially at times when you have spent a lot of time in front of your computer screen, brainstorming on what to write to promote your business.

Imagine the horror or frustration especially in instances where the battery of your notebook died and you forgot to save. Or perhaps there was a blackout or you accidentally closed the browser window without saving your work.

“Wordpress Ella” autosave function is a real time saver and is an abosolute must for any online businesses.

2. Next in line on “Wordpress Ella” is the “Import” and “Export” functions. Let’s talk about the import function first.

The latest release of “Wordpress Ella” has an import function that allows you to import your blog created from other popular blogging platforms such as ‘Movable Type’, ‘Typepad’, ‘Livejournal’, ‘Blogger’ and so on, into Wordpress itself.

This way, you don’t have to lose any important data such as your blog posts and comments. This flexibility is another reason why Wordpress itself is so successful and continues to gain a huge following and user base.

Why would anyone want to transfer their blog from another platform to Wordpress? Well, one reason is because with most of these other blogging platforms, the user has to pay a monthly fee. Wordpress, as almost everyone knows is free, and you can easily install with a few clicks using Fantastico from within your hosting account’s Cpanel.

Another reason to migrate or transfer the entire blog to Wordpress could be due to the limitation of some blogging platforms. Blogger, for example does not support the use of categories, which are critical when it comes to optimizing the blog to rank high for specific keywords related to the business.

Now, let’s discuss about the “Export” function.

“Export” as the name implies, will export all the Wordpress posts and comments into a file (called XML). This file can then be imported into other wordpress blogs. It’s like a cross transferring of data between similar or related “Wordpress Blogs”.

This is useful when one is starting a new blog and perhaps need to populate the blog with useful content instead of just displaying news feed. For example, if you have a blog on muscle building, and you started a new blog on weight loss, you can import the content (which are the posts and comments) from the muscle blog into the weight loss blog.

This way, when you drive traffic to your new weight loss blog, you can at least provide the reader with some useful content while you build up the content around weight loss. Naturally there is some correlation between these two topics. After all, if you want to build muscle, naturally you need to burn off the excess fats and turn them into muscles!

3. Another enhancement of “Wordpress Ella” is the new search engine privacy. What this means is that you can indicate whether you’d like your blog to be indexed or ping by search engines, especially Google, Yahoo or MSN, which are the three top search engines online.

Most experienced marketers know about the pinging power of blogs. Everytime when a post is published, Wordpress will ping or notify specific blog directories about updates to your blog, causing them to index or visit your blog, brining you that additional and much needed targeted traffic.

As crazy as it sounds, considering that most business owners would like to get their site listed in the search engines, there are also times when you might want to hide or mask your blog from the radar screen of search engines. This is true especially in cases where it’s only meant for paid customers only. For example, you might be providing some sensitive information meant for paid customers and you don’t want anyone doing a search on the search engines to stumble upon your blog and have access to the information.

4. Another powerful upgrade that “Wordpress Ella” brings is the ability to specify a static page as the front page for your site or blog.

Most savvy marketers employ the use of a mini site or a one page only sales letter when marketing their products or services. Normally such one page sites will also contain an opt-in box, where visitors and readers are enticed to provide their email address in exchange for a free gift, software, e-course etc.

When they do so, they will normally be enrolled in an autoresponder course that automatically does the follow-up with the said subscriber which either results in a sale or no sale.

With a blog, however, the main page or the front page will always a display of the latest chronological posts. You can create pages for a blog, however, in the past it was not that easy for the layman to do so.

With “Wordpress Ella”, all you need to do if you want a static front page is to select this option in the Wordpress control panel. It can’t get any easier than this.

These are just some of the enhancements that you can immediately benefit from “Wordpress Ella”.

This article assumes you already have some basic knowledge about the marketing power of blogs in terms
of its syndication power, targeted traffic and search engine optimization capability for keywords.

Brandon Hong
http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-articles/profitng-and-benefiting-from-wordpress-ella-103768.html

Technorati Tags: Blackout, Blogger, Brainstorming, Browser Window, Business Owners, Computer Screen, Developer Team, Enhancements, Flexibility, Frustration, Import And Export, Import Function, Instances, Invaluable Tool, Movable Type, Platforms, Savvy Businessman, Software Developers, Time Saver, wordpress