Abstract

It seems as though everyone and their mother has a blog nowadays, but quite frankly, most of them suck and don’t have many visitors. The few people who do visit wound up there on accident and usually leave quickly – they aren’t likely to read any content let alone click on an ad! In this post we’ll look into some of the reasons why many blogs fail, and answer some basic questions.

I have extensive experience in web design, programming, information technology, marketing, and business in general. I’m tailoring this post to Wordpress because it is by far the most popular blogging CMS out there. Some information is in this post will apply to most other blogging platforms and content management systems as well, although it may require the use of plugins or other more complicated modifications such as editing the CMS itself. You may wish to read on just for ideas.  We’ll start off with some basic ideas and move on from there.

I’m assuming, perhaps ignorantly that you already know generally what your site is going to be all about – what it will center around. Usually this is something you’re interested in or passionate about. Personally I don’t see the point of writing about any other topics because it won’t be fun, will require an intensive amount of effort on your part, and probably won’t come out right. Blogs that don’t come out right suck because you can tell that the author is full of it – he doesn’t know a thing about what he’s talking about – so the user leaves. The only exception would be the get-rich-quick scheme “blog,” but even some of these have a surprising amount of enthusiasm.

Once you have everything set up correctly, you can start to focus on other things like creating content and promoting your site through the endless marketing channels, many of which are free. It is my goal to bring you to the point where you have a great looking blog, with all the right settings and everything set up for success. By the end of these posts you will be inspired to write creative, unique and exciting content on a blog that will be found by the people who you want to find it. We’ll talk briefly about advertising and creating revenue from your site at this point, but it should be noted that this cannot and should not be done until you have a blog that has a sizable number of unique visitors every day. So let’s get started!

A blog is Content, a Blog is Marketing Yourself

Every successful blog has a good amount of (valuable) content on it. You should make it your goal to write at least two posts a week if you’re busy like me (working and going to school full time) and many more than that if you have a lot of time on your hands. Sometimes I miss that mark, but I usually make up for it the next week.  The point here is that you can spend all the time in the world tinkering around with SEO settings, themes, HTML and PHP, reading other blogs, reading about blogging, et cetera and never get anywhere. The whole idea of a blog is to post information which hopefully, others will find valuable.  I shouldn’t even use the word hopefully – if you continue to diligently write, it is inevitable that you will provide value to your readers. Some posts will be unpopular, and others will be a big hit right away. Most importantly, you will become better at blogging over time as you realize the overlap between what readers want and what you want to write.

On Content

So what do you write about? Write about what ever you want! That’s what’s fun about blogging – every post is a new adventure. You take an idea and you run with it. It doesn’t matter who wants to hear what, just write. You should get in the habit of brainstorming things to write about; these things should be topics that interest you, perhaps inquiries you wish to explore. Also, make it a habit of keeping a notepad with you to write ideas down when they come up, I use the voice recorder on my IPhone instead of a notepad.  You can keep track of your ideas how ever you like, just make sure you do it somehow.

Make sure you truly believe that your blog will be good, i don’t mean tell yourself that without meaning it, I mean truly believe it – There is a nut to fit every bolt including your blog.  The readers will come no matter what you write about as long as you’re writing. It seems like the internet is overpopulated sometimes, as if there is too much information, but this is a fallacy. Define overpopulated. I see new, successful sites popping up every day, and I can tell you with certainty that there are a LOT more Internet users than there are contributors. You’re making the decision to contribute because you now realize a fact that many woulda-coulda-shoulda been bloggers don’t: that your articles are worth something to someone.

Taking the First Steps Towards Success

OK, so now you’re pumped up. You know basically what you want your blog to be about and you believe you can do it. Now what? Choose your blogging engine / content management system (CMS) carefully. There are many to choose from and they all differ in features and functionality. If you have absolutely no idea which one you’d like to use I highly recommend using Wordpress. It is the most popular blogging system on the internet and as such, has the most plugins, themes, the best support, and the most stable and high quality system. The other systems that are close competitors are good too, but you’ll be hard pressed to find anything better than WordPress.

IMPORTANT: You can have a free blog on Wordpress.com, but they will not allow you to use any kind of advertising so I would forget about it unless you’re not in it for any kind of monetary gains. There are other obvious disadvantages to using their hosted version versus a standalone one which include: less support for plugins and themes, an inherent inability to customize the blog to suit your needs because you can’t edit the PHP files, and scores of other things. What you should be doing right now is looking for a web host.

Finding a Web Host

You’ll probably want to start off with a shared-hosting plan. Shared hosting means you are sharing a physical server with other sites, but it is transparent to the end-user. This is the way web hosting companies utilize their servers to capacity and are capable of providing valuable services at an affordable price. Conversely, dedicated hosting is where you get your own server. These kinds of plans are typically for sites with a lot of users and the plan usually has a set bandwidth and storage limit and a certain amount of power depending on what kind of server you “buy.” Dedicated hosting would be overkill for almost any blog, even the more popular ones. Shared hosting companies offer a wide variety of plans, with a range of features so it can be confusing to find the right host.

I recommend HostMonster (the service I currently use) for a few reasons. Firstly, they have excellent customer service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They also have very liberal hosting plans for reasonable prices and a set of features that simply can’t be beat. I got in while they were doing a promotion for $5.95 a month. They actually run this promotion fairly often, so be sure to check them out. The features I have in my plan include unlimited bandwidth and storage space, up to 5,000 email accounts, 999 parked or addon domains and 999 subdomains, etc. They also offer SSH access which was what I really needed! All you have to do is provide valid ID and use a private key.  You can see what I mean by “liberal.” I’ve done a lot of research on hosts, and as far as shared hosting goes for personal sites and even medium to large sized blogs, HostMonster is the best one out there.

Whatever web host you go with, make sure they at least offer a good amount of storage and bandwidth, several MySql databases, PHP, etc.  Wordpress runs best on a LAMPP platform, or actually a AMP platform.  LAMPP stands for Linux+Apache+MySql+PHP. In reality, several databases work with WordPress and you don’t have to use Apache web server or even Linux for that matter. Consult the WordPress documentation if you’re not going to use MySql.  You will need PHP support, that’s one thing that is mandatory.

In the next post we’ll cover installing WordPress on your web server…