blogio blogging blog

When writing a personal blog it’s usually quite easy to find subjects to write about. Things you’ve done that day or places you’ve been to are frequently encountered in personal blog posts. When writing for a niche blog, however, there’s a lot less to choose from, topic wise. Still, you have to come up with new posts frequently or your blog will quickly lose it’s subscribers. When just starting a blog you can probably think of tons of topics to write about, but as your blog grows, your pool of ideas shrinks.

Here are a few ideas to come up with new ideas for your blog posts.

Make a mind map
A mind map is a great tool to plot down your ideas. Start with a clean piece of paper and write the topic of your blog in the middle of it. Don’t write down a whole paragraph of text, pick the single most important word that describes the topic of your blog. Now think about subjects that relate to your blog, this would probably be the post categories already on your blog. Draw lines to connect each topic to the word in the center. Next you start splitting up each category into sub-categories. Each one could be the topic of a new blog post or be further split into new topics. You’ll be amazed at how fast you fill up the whole sheet of paper with ideas.

Look what others are writing
There are probably other blogs in the same niche. Have a look around and steal borrow ideas from them. An easy way to keep a tap on what other bloggers are writing is build right into every blog: rss feeds! Just add the rss feeds of every blog you can find in your niche, to your rss reader and you will always be up to date on what they are writing about. This also keeps you updated on industry news from your niche, that you might have missed otherwise.

Get away from it
Sometimes you just have to let it all go and do something completely different to get your creative juices flowing again. Get out, take your dog for a walk in the park, go for a bike ride, a subway ride to some random destination or whatever other activity you can think of, that does not require you to be near a computer screen. You can even take a piece of paper with you to work on that mind map.

WordPress is a great software package. One of its greatest features is the plugin engine that enables programmers to easily add new functionalities or change existing ones. Many people have created great plugins, so you don’t have to. Currently there are over 3400 plugins listed in the WordPress plugin directory and many more plugins are available on the authors websites.

Here are some of my favorite plugins:

Akismet
The ultimate comment-spam buster! If I could only use a single plugin, this would be the one. Akismet protects your blog from comment spammers that put links to all sorts of nasty websites in your post comments. Without Akismet you will be spending a lot of time digging thru the spam comments. All you need to do to activate the Akismet plugin is get a free API key from the WordPress site. The plugin itself doesn’t need installing as it comes bundled with the WordPress installation.

All in one SEO pack
WordPress is not fully optimized for the search engines, but that changes after installing the all in one SEO pack. This plugin gives you full control over page titles, meta tags and keywords.

Broken link checker
Whenever you put links into your posts, there is a chance that you will have broken links on your site in the future. This plugin checks all your outgoing links and lets you know if any of them are not working any more.

do-follow
Get rid of the no-follow attribute, because it doesn’t help.

feedburner feedsmith
If you want to be able to track your rss subscriber numbers, I suggest you sign up for a free account at feedburner. Once you have your feedburner account, you’ll need to change your rss feed links to point to the feedburner feed. “Where are the rss feed links located that need changing?” you might ask. That’s where this plugin comes in: install, activate and put your feedburner feed URL in the config screen.

no self pings
This plugin prevents pingbacks from showing when linking back to your own posts.

share this
A nice little button to enable visitors to submit your blog post to various social bookmarking sites or send an e-mail to friends.

top commentators
Say “thank you” to your top commentators by giving them a side wide link.

wordpress automatic upgrade
Upgrade your WordPress installation to the latest release from within the admin panel. Upgrading this way saves a lot of worries and time.

wp-cumulus
A beautiful flash tag-cloud to spice up your blog. This is probably not helping with SEO, but it looks awesome!

There are many more great WordPress plugins available, but these are some that I really like. Oh hold on, I almost forgot to mention the best plugin of them all: my very own ad buttons plugin! Actually, it’s not that great yet, as it is still a work in progress, but feel free to download it and give it a try.

I don’t think I, or anybody else, has the time to give the thousands of plugins available on the WordPress site all a try. Do you know of some particularly good plugins, please let me know!

With your domain registered and hosting taken care of, it’s time to install your blog software. There are different software packages available for blogging, some free, some paid. The only one I have ever tried is WordPress and I didn’t ever bother to look at others, that’s how much I like it.

Being a programmer myself, I know a good piece of software when I see it. WordPress is one of the software packages that I’ve liked from day one and it is getting better with each new release. The feature I like most has got to be their plugin engine. Once you figure out how it works, it’s very easy to write your own plugins for WordPress that add functionality or change existing functionalities of the software. If you are not a programmer, there are free WordPress plugins available for most tasks you can think of and installing them only requires uploading the plugin files.

I’m wandering off, this post should be about installing WordPress, but it’s turning into a WordPress promotion, I’ll save the rest for a later post. Truth is, there’s not much to write when talking about installing the software. After downloading the latest stable release from the WordPress download page, all you have to do is edit the configuration file, so the software can access your database. Detailed installation instructions can be found on the WordPress site.

Once you have your domain name registered, you will need to sign up for a hosting account. Hosting accounts come in many forms and sizes. Think about what you want to put on your website, so you can get a hosting account that can handle the task. My preferred blog software is WordPress, which needs php and MySQL running on the server, other software packages might require a windows server and asp. Make sure you know exactly what type of hosting you need before signing up for one.

A server running on Linux is usually cheaper, because it doesn’t require an expensive software license like Windows servers. Php and MySQL are also free to run unlike Microsoft’s SQL server.

Another option would be to host your website at home, but I would not recommend it, even if you have the knowledge to run your own server. No matter how well you manage your server, there are tons of things that can go wrong and bring your website down. When things go wrong it is usually when you are not there to fix it, preferably when you just left for a long weekend away. When you sign up for a hosting account, the hosting provider will look after the server and make sure your website is accessible day and night.

There are numerous blogging services available that let you sign up and start blogging for free. They all have one important thing in common: they leave you with limited control. When seriously blogging, full control is what you want need! So, do yourself a favor and put down a few bucks to register a domain name. An added benefit of your own domain name is that you can have your own e-mail addresses.

This step can be a bit tedious, as most names you can think of have already been registered, many of them by domain hijackers who offer them for sale for ridiculous amounts. Don’t give up, eventually you will find one that is free and can be registered for under ten bucks.

When I look for a new domain name I usually grab a piece of paper and a pencil and I start writing down words that relate to the subject of my planned website. Combining the words in the list will quickly result in a big list of potential names for the website. If you think your list is too short, add terms like net, web and online and use these to make new word combinations.

Once you feel that your list of potential names is big enough, go online and check if any of them are available for registration. I use Dynadot for all my domain registrations and I’m very happy with their service. Dynadot is an ICANN accredited domain registrar and webhost, which means that they are right at the top of the domain registration chain, unlike domain resellers. The domain registration is fully automated, meaning that whenever you register a new domain name, it is ready for use within seconds.

Other domain registrars I have worked with require human intervention on the registrar side, which can take anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days until you can use your domain name. Another big plus of Dynadot is that they accept PayPal payments, so you don’t have to wait for bank transfers to complete or checks to clear. Dynadot also offers hosting services. I have not used their hosting service myself, but I’m sure it’s as good as their domain registration service.

If the .com name you like has already been registered by someone else, you might be able to register the .net or .org or some other extension. If multiple extensions are available for registration, you could register all of them, so no one else can register them later and cause confusion on your name.

If you want to start a money making blog, the first step is to find a niche market to serve. Don’t try to cover every subject in a single blog, but make it a blog specialized on a certain subject. It would be better to start a blog about dogs rather then pets, since people interested in dogs might not want to subscribe to a pet blog, because they don’t want to read about hamsters and cats.

Take care not to over-specialize though, or you’ll end up with a too small a group of people to market to. Staying with the dogs blog example: a blog about dogs in general would have a far bigger potential than a blog about blind German Shepherds with a wooden leg.

Which subject should you pick? I’m sure you can think of something! You don’t have to pick the subject that has the biggest income potential, but rather the one that interests you most, because it is far more fun to blog about something you are interested in. Pick a subject that you already have knowledge on or something you would like to learn about yourself. This makes writing posts for your blog a lot easier and more fun. Even if, in the end, it’s all about the money, you can choose your subject, so why not select something you are passionate about!

Today everyone and their mother seems to have a blog. Free blog services like Blogger, WordPress and numerous others, make it easy to start your own blog at zero cost and without any specialized knowledge. Thousands of new blogs are started each day, many in a spur of the moment.

People start blogging for various reasons, which need different approaches. If you start a blog to let your friends and family know what you’re up to, the easiest way is to just sign up for a free blog service and start typing away. Many bloggers, however, want to achieve something specific with their blog. They want to promote their business or product, or, just build up a blog with a big readership, so they can cash in on advertising on their blog.

If you are in it for the cash, welcome to the club! But don’t expect fast and easy money. Building a popular blog with a big reader base takes time and effort. Some people want to make you believe that you can make some quick money with blogs and they will sell you a step by step guide on how to set up multiple blogs, quickly fill them with some content and cash in on advertising clicks. Truth is, the only one making money is the guy selling the book.