If you are blogging you need to know have a few blogging instructions to make sure you are starting out on the right foot.
1.) What type of hosting service should you use – I am not talking about specific hosting services I am referring to whether you should be using a free service like WordPress.com or whether you should purchase your own domain name and hosting.
If you are blogging for profit you should be on your own site with your own domain name. Yes, it is possible to make money with the free blogging services but you will either have to be lucky or work much harder.
Having your own domain name and your own site makes it so that you can add features like plugins that will optimize your site for better performance in the search engines which should bring more targeted prospects to your site.
2,) What blogging software should you use – you have the choice of lots of software but I recommend you stay with WordPress because it has the most support, the most plugins and the most themes and almost all of them are free and easy to use.
3.) Only blog about one topic – stay on target with your blog. Yes, you can have all kinds of sub-topics but they should all be related to your main niche.
If you keep your blog in one niche the likelihood of getting readers to come back time and time again is greatly improved. This brands you as an expert in your niche and builds loyalty with your prospective customers.
You should also make sure that your niche is a topic you like. You don’t have to know everything there is to know about it but you must be interested in it enough that you will put in the time that it takes to make your site popular.
4.) Use keywords that get searched – a lot of the traffic you get to your blog comes from keywords that are searched in the search engines. Do a little research and see if the keywords you are targeting actually get searched.
Google’s keyword tool is a free service where you can see exactly how many people are searching for your keywords on Google every month. This is a great place to start your keyword research.
5.) You should be the star of your blog – let the readers know who you are, put your picture on the blog and a short biography. This will help the reader relate to you and will end up getting you more loyal reader then trying to be an anonymous expert.
These are some the most important things to know about blogging if you use these as your guideline you will end up with a blog that you enjoy working on and your viewers enjoy reading.