blogio blogging blog

I like checking out other blogs for inspiration. Sometimes this brings new ideas that I can use on one of my own blogs, but I also see blogs that show you what not to do. I’m not going to point the finger at anyone, but there are some blogs that are just too horrible to visit. Here are a few things for you to think about when figuring out the layout of your blog (or any other website for that matter)

Readability
People come to your blog or website to read your content, so make sure they can read it. Some people like to use pretty background pictures that continue behind the text and make the content very hard to read. Use an even background color for your content and make sure your text has sufficient contrast to the background. Font size is another important factor to think about. Too big or too small makes text hard to read.

Video and audio
Video can be a great medium to communicate a message to your website visitors, but it shouldn’t start playing as soon as your page opens. Please let me decide if, and when, I want to press play. The same goes for audio, I don’t need to hear your favorite song playing when I visit your site.

Ads
Some people have more ads than content on their website. Ads should be subtly integrated into your website, if at all. All too often I see sites trying to sell their own product or service and show ads of their competitors. Do you want to sell your own stuff or make your visitors aware of the competition?

Plugins
There are a great number of useful plugins that you can add to your blog. Before adding them all, think about which ones would be useful to your visitors. I don’t care what the weather forecast at you place is. I’m also not likely to be interested in the current moon phase when reading a blog about cars. When adding widgets to your sidebar, try to use static ones. Flashy, animated gifs distract your visitors from the content.

If you don’t agree with the above advice, you are not alone. There’s a huge website with people just like you, it’s called MySpace.

You see this same question over and over again: how can I make lots of money with my blog? Especially on the a-list blogs. People want to know how these bloggers pulled it off to become so popular and make mad money with their blogs. Like the question, the answer is also the same each time: you don’t!

There’s no money in blogging, sure there are a few that reel in the cash, but there are millions of bloggers that don’t make any money at all, or at least not nearly enough to justify the time they spend on their blogs. Try to blog for money and you will be frustrated pretty soon. In stead, treat it as a hobby, hobbies cost money. If you do it for a few years, maybe, you can turn your hobby into your job.

As soon as you stop worrying about the number of visitors and the number of ad clicks you get each day, blogging becomes so much more enjoyable, as a hobby should be. Readers will notice a positive change in your writing and before you know it, positive things will happen.

I am running a couple of different blogs, one of them never got too much attention, but these last few weeks I have been feeling very positively about it and really enjoyed working on it. Last week I suddenly got an e-mail from an editor of a printed magazine. He liked the information on my blog and wanted me to write for the magazine!

I know, it’s not the jackpot, but I got a few hundred bucks for about a days work plus very targeted advertising for me and my blog to 70000 magazine readers. Plus, they liked my writing so much, that they offered me a regular column in the magazine.

It’s stories like this that the big bloggers will also tell you: the blog doesn’t make the majority of the money, but it helps the money to find them.

It’s probably every webmasters dream to have his or her site featured on the front page of Digg. A lot of website owners, however, still have nightmares about the day they got Dugg. The avalanche of visitors hitting your site can cause a number of bad things to happen.

Getting shut down by your hosting provider
The sudden increase of traffic can cause some alarm bells to go of at your hosting provider. Some server administrators will mistake the ridiculously high hits on your site for a DDoS attack and take your site offline.

You can prevent this from happening by letting your hosting provider know that a page from your site made the front page of Digg. This is, of course, providing you know you have been Dugg.

Another reason, your web hosting provider might have, to take your site offline, is that your account has used up it’s available traffic resources. A page with only a few images and scripts can easily add up to a few hundred kb of data being transferred on a single page load.

Looking at my website statistics, it seems that my average page size is about 35 KB. If I would be running on a hosting account with a 10 GB a month data limit, I would be able to serve about 285.000 pages a month. That is plenty for most sites, but being on the front page of Digg can drive crazy amounts of visitors to your site, which can chew up your 10 GB plan in no time.

But there is something that can be far worse than having your site taken offline for reaching the bandwidth limit: it’s having your site stay online after using up your monthly bandwidth and
Read more »

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.