Part 1: Setting Up Your Blog
Blogging
is a lucrative source of profit and blogs are easy to set up and maintain. Imagine
a life where you are paid to write on stuff that interests you, whenever you
want, wherever you are. The mere flexibility of blogging makes it easy for you
to just kick back, relax and go on a vacation whenever you feel like it.
In this article, we are going to look into the profitability of a blog
and set up a blog of our own at no cost! Interested? Read on!
First, we need to obtain a blog. There are several options – host a blog
on your own domain or get a free blog. For starters, let’s talk about the free
blogs. You can obtain a free blog at www.blogger.com
or the newer (and better!) www.wordpress.com.
If you are a techie, you must have heard of Wordpress, a free blog engine that
is robust and infinitely expandable.
Blogger.com is actually owned by Google, so it will be detected on
Google’s radar faster and you will be indexed faster. Wordpress.com, however,
is a relatively new option so I have no comparison on the speed of getting
indexed by search engines. However, Wordpress is better in the sense that it
has more advanced features such as Trackbacks and Categories. You can also
manage your sidebar links more efficiently (more about this later).
Get a free blog at either Blogger.com (http://www.blogger.com/signup.g) or
Wordpress (http://wordpress.com/signup/).
Then, familiarize yourself by posting your first post on your blog and
tinkering around with the options and templates.
Here are a few common “blog-related” words to help you out:
1)
Permalink – Permalink stands for
permanent link, which is a URL (uniform resource locator) that leads to an
individual post that you make in your blog.
2)
Trackback – When you post about
someone else’s blog post elsewhere, your post will show up in their “trackback”
section. This feature, however, is not available with a Blogger.com account.
3)
Pinging – Blogging seems to be paired
with pinging almost every time either one is mentioned nowadays. Pinging is
actually the action where a certain aggregator is notified whenever your blog
is updated, so that the aggregator may show the newest post of your blog on
their website. This is a useful way to gaining traffic, which we shall discuss
later.
For now, I shall leave you testing out your new blog and the features that
come included with it. In the next articles, we shall discuss the many ways we
can gain profit from a blog, as well as tips on how to write posts that keep
visitors glued and keep coming back for more!