[More Books + Links for creative professionals: Creativity, Creative Careers, Intellectual Property]
A blog is a website where entries (posts) are displayed in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent posts appear at the top of the page.
Blogging software automates much of the code required for web publishing, so that it is easy for even non-technical people to write and update a blog. Because all the blog posts are stored on a database, they can be searched an accessed in different ways, making it easy for readers to find the content that is most interesting and useful. Most blogging software also enables bloggers to interact with their audience by allowing readers to add comments to the blog posts, and to interact with other bloggers by linking to their blogs.
You’re probably familiar with the idea of a blog as an ‘online diary’, but you may not realise that blogs are now being used by large and small companies, as well as artists and freelancers, as a powerful business tool for promoting their work and interacting with customers and clients. The UK has been relatively slow to embrace business blogging, but in the USA, Japan and elsewhere blogging is now regarded as an essential marketing tool. In addition to publicity, a blog is a powerful way for individuals and companies to learn by interacting with customers, clients, collaborators – and even competitors.
Seth’s e-book Who’s There? inspired me to start blogging. It’s free and it could transform your business – what have you got to lose? If you like it, you’ll also enjoy his previous e-book – Knock Knock. Seth’s blog is also essential reading for entrepreneurs and marketers (and if you’re reading this, that probably includes you – even if you don’t like those words).
WordPress is the software I use to run both the Wishful Thinking blog and my poetry blog. There are two good reasons for using WordPress: 1. It’s fantastic; 2. It’s free.
On the fantastic side, it’s easy to write and publish material to your blog, including images, video and audio – if you learned to use a wordprocessor, you can learn to use WordPress. Once you’ve set your blog up, you basically type in your text, hit ‘publish’ and it’s live on the web. Not only that, it’s being published via RSS so that readers can subscribe to receive all your latest material. And there are lots and lots of graphics themes and software add-ons to help you customise it and create a unique blog experience for your visitors.
On the free side, you can download it from the WordPress site, then follow the instructions to install it on your web space. N.B. If you are creating a professional blog, I strongly recommend you run it on your own web space instead of having it hosted on a platform site – firstly, it looks more professional and secondly, you want to ensure that all the benefits listed above (such as earch engine ranking, links from other sites) accrue to your web domain and not someone else’s. You don’t need a pre-existing website – WordPress can act as your website if you want to, but you do need a domain name and a web hosting service. Neither of these will cost you the earth, and hosting the site yourself could be one of the best investments you ever make. When choosing a web hosting service, you will need a SQL database to run WordPress – show them the WordPress install page and ask them if they can provide the functionality and login details it specifies – if not, you need to look somewhere else…
For a good video introduction to WordPress, watch Why WordPress And How It Works on the excellent Tubetorial blog.
To learn how to use WordPress, read through the extensive documentation on their website. If you get stuck, there are lots of helpful people on the WordPress Support Forums – but make sure you search the forums thoroughly before asking a question, as the solution to your problem may well be on there already.
Once you’ve got the blog installed, you can choose from a range of free themes to customise its appearance. Have a look at my poetry blog and you’ll see it looks very different to the Wishful Thinking blog, even though they both use WordPress – the only difference is that I’m using the Tarski theme on the poetry blog, and yellowhite3c (with my own modifications) on this one.
Blogging is about conversations – which means you do a lot of reading as well as writing. If you want to be a successful blogger, you’ll need to read lots of other blog, both to learn from others and to interact with them. Fortunately this is a lot of fun! And with a good blog reader, it can be surprisingly quick and easy to keep up with a large number of blogs. This is because once you’ve subscribed to a blog’s RSS feed, the reader will only show you the latest posts from each blog you’re subsrcribed to.
The best thing you can do to publicise your blog is to write quality content – useful, interesting, entertaining posts that engage your readers and make them want to come back for more (and tell their friends). Even if you managed to, there wouldn’t be much point in attracting thousands of readers if there’s nothing of interest for them on the blog. So the main focus of your blogging efforts should be to write (and/or draw, record or otherwise create) outstanding original content on a regular basis.
Having said that, there’s a world outside your blog and there are things you can do to attract the right kind of attention to yourself. It’s important to remember that blogging is about conversations – leaving comments on other blogs as well as using trackback links (see below) are great ways to start interacting with other bloggers and alert them to your blog’s existence.
One of the most encouraging things about blogging is finding that someone else has not only read and enjoyed one of your posts, but they have taken the time to write a comment about it. It’s always nice to get praise, but answering questions or even responding to (constructive) criticism can be rewarding ways of engaging with others via your blog.
And guess what? It works the other way round too – you can make someone’s day (or at least brighten up their tea coffee break) by leaving a comment on their blog. When you make a comment, you can leave the address of your blog so that other bloggers can follow you back to your blog if your comment is of interest to them. I’ve made contact with some great people by leaving and receiving comments. And it’s a good way to gain extra readers for your blog – if you are commenting on blogs that interest you, there’s a chance the author and readers could be interested in your blog.
Be careful though – when you leave a comment, you are a visitor on someone else’s webspace and a little consideration will go a long way. It’s considered bad manners to ‘promote’ your own blog with any kind of sales pitch – comments like this are likely to be deleted. Only leave a comment if you think it will genuinely add to the discussion on that blog, and will be of interest or useful to the blog’s author and readers. Lifehacker has a good guide to weblog comments.
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Wow, this is an extraordinar post. I just loved how do you came and give for any possible question an answer,a lso i agree on: wordpress is the best software for bloggins, feedburner is a great feed aggregation and it allows you to grow your subscribers list, but also allows you to earn revenue and, technorati is the best for geeting knows (of course, along with google, yahoo nad msn search engines)