Meg’s Blogging 101

So many people have asked me questions about starting their own blog that I thought I would put up one post that covers as much as I can think of and then if anyone has questions above and beyond what I post, you can just email me.

First of all, it’s pretty easy and you never have to make it public if you don’t want to. You can just keep a journal online and never give out the address. I would suggest it to anyone who is at all computer literate. You’ll never lose it and you can write in it for your entire life. It really is very easy, you just choose a blog host from anyone of a number of them. It’s free although some do charge for extra stuff that I am unaware of. I use Blogger.com but you can do a search for free blogs and choose your own.

They make it pretty self explanatory so that’s all it takes to get started. If you do want people to read it, you need to “promote” your blog. The server itself (blog host) should give you some options such as the ability to appear on the “recently updated” lists and the button at the top of this page that says “next blog”. Beyond that, you need to register on blog lists. Here are a few that I am associated with:

www.blogstreet.com

www.blogarama.com

http://portal.eatonweb.com/

http://www.webloglinkdirectory.com/

http://www.bloghub.com/

You can just do a search for blogs lists and find many of them. You might have to add a link to their site to your blog but that’s pretty easy to do, you just copy and paste it into the html code yourself. I am not sure at all how to read that, I just found a logical place to stick it, like the end of the thing that says the footer. I can always preview what I’ve done so I haven’t done much damage yet.

There are some things that you can add on your own, like a counter. I have two of them, one tells me how many people have visited and the other tells me how many are here at any given moment. Here are the links to them:

http://easy-hit-counters.com/
(This one is for counting visits.)

http://easy-web-stats.com/users/index.php
(This one is to tell you how many people are here at any given moment.)

http://blogrolling.com/

(This is the one I have been waiting for! It lets you create a linklist and I am going to do it the first chance I get. A very nice man sent it to me and I thank him for that. I am just exhausted. I have been up all night writing and the birds just started chirping so I had better get my bottom in bed.)

http://weblogs.about.com/od/blogaddons/
(This one has free add ons, they even have a poll question for blogs where you get to write the question.)


Now, both of those make you copy some code into your template so you have to learn to go into the html code at some point to utilize these things. Also, there is a way to place a list of links to the side but I haven’t figured out how yet. I will do it soon, I promise. Then, I can post everyone’s blogs here. There is an odd site that actually has people “investing” in blogs. It is called Blogshares.com and they actually compete to earn money on blogs using incoming and outgoing links as indicators. I found my blog on it and that’s how I learned who had me listed, they gave the incoming links to my blog. I then turned around and listed those blogs on mine. I wish I could list them like they do, and like I said, I will soon. People who blog are very generous to other bloggers so be nice to each other, it will come back to you. And if you aren’t nice, you will stick out like a sore thumb. Here is an article that discusses the 10 biggest things to avoid when blogging:

http://www.blogarama.com/index.php?show=articles&article=3

I recently found this option for bloggers that I found offensive:

BlogPopUnder.com is a free service designed to help blogs trade advertising with each other. The mechanism of advertising is a pop-under (or pop-behind) window that loads a web page behind the page your visitors are reading. This keeps your visitors? attention focused on your blog until they close the current window.

How awful! They want us to annoy the heck out of our readers by throwing pop-up ads at them? I wouldn't do this if I were you and I wouldn't read a blog twice that did it to me. If someone is nice enough to take time out of their day to read your blog, they shouldn't be penalized with a pop-up ad.

I just found another great site for bloggers, it gives you a lot of information like where your hits are coming from (like through BlogStreet or just straight to your blog), it counts and graphs your hits, it gives you the IP of the people who visit and so much more. It truly is a great little bell to add to your blog:

www.BlogPatrol.com

I hope this has helped some of you. I can't stress how easy they make it for you to create a basic blog, that's all this one is. You can choose your own windows and colors. It shouldn't take you more than 5 minutes to start one. Each server has it's own little quirks so just be patient, you will get used to it. This one, for example, doesn't like for me to place long links in it so if I go to post this and there is a huge blank spot, I will know that one of those links is too long. I am pretty sure it is but I say, what the hell. I'll try it the easy way first and if I have to go back and fix it, I will spend twnety minutes fixing the thing I did to save two minutes. Oh well. Now I've wasted more time writing about it and your time reading it, damn. The damage is immeasurable.


Let me know if you have any questions.

One more thing, I received a phone call from the reporter. The article will be out in the Sunday paper on June 5th. It's at www.ajc.com.

See ya!

Meg
Meg