I am interested in starting a blog to supplement my income. Can the great folks on this site who have had personal experience with doing this give me tips or point me to relevant sites/books related to the technical side of this.
I am looking for information about starting the site and getting advertisers. I have plenty of written material to stock the site. If I Google this topic there are a trillion responses that I don't have time to sort through. Any proven hints from people who have started a successful blog would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
By Pghgirl40 from Pittsburgh, PA
The technical part is easy. Just go to wordpress.com, fill in your particulars, and they will set it up for you. Start posting whatever you think your fans will be interested in. As you get comfortable, you can get fancy and pretty it up.
Your blog will be hosted there at wordpress.com. There will be some ads to pay for that, but that is no big deal while you are learning and getting comfortable.
If you want to make money yourself, and not just make money for others, you will need a domain of your own. Brainstorm with an expert (you need to have Skype installed for that) or with friends for a good name, get it registered and choose a web host.
For your first web host, don't pick the cheapest one! You will wind up arguing with auto-responders and get very frustrated. Select a host who includes friendly coaching.
Once your site is set up, goof around with HTML. Yes, just play and learn the basics. It is actually very simple and a lot of fun, if you have a coach to ask questions.
Put up some text about your business or future business as early as possible, so that the search engines can catalog it. The search engines don't care if your design is amateurish. They just catalog the text.
When your site starts looking presentable, go to wordpress.org (not .com) and download the blog software from there. Upload it to your site. Now you have a more professional and more versatile blog, that is still quite similar to operate as the beginner blog.
Continue posting and increasing the daily readership. Don't expect that to happen overnight, even if you have extremely scandalous news! Once you have earned the trust of loyal readers, you can start recommending items you have for sale or that you promote as an affiliate. Keep in mind that it takes time to get a big enough number of fans to make a blog cost effective compared to the same time spent elsewhere.
Most people realize income quicker with a newsletter, and use their blogs just as a back-up. Start a newsletter, register it with, http://Ezinefinder.com to get free publicity and at the same time test the responsiveness of your audience. If they don't even vote for you, they probably won't buy from or through you either. Posting your newsletter content to your blog only takes a minute at most, and gives you additional exposure.
Have FUN! DearWebby
http://webby.com/humor/blog (09/23/2009)
By Helmut
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