Blogging For Beginners.

If you haven't heard of blogs by now, you must have been living on the moon for the past 3 years, they have grown to be one of the most popular ways of communicating with people on the internet, both people you know and, people you dont know. In this article we will take a look at some of the basic information you need to know about setting up your own blog, where to find blog scripts, what to write about and, most importantly, how to promote your blog.

So You Want To Blog?

That may well be a great thing, with millions upon millions of search results showing up in the major search engines for blog pages and archives one thing is for certain, if done correctly, blogs can yield traffic, lots of it, on mass. Lets start out with the basics of blogging, where to find the scripts.

Blog Scripts And Services.

There are many methods of operating a blog ranging from free hosted blog services such as Blogger.com or GWW Blog to installing a blog script on your own server such as wordpress.org or geeklog.com whichever method you choose though, you need to ensure that you have as much control over the appearance and, layout of your blog as possible, for this reason, i would suggest downloading and installing WordPress ( http://www.wordpress.org ) on your domain.

Installation + Setup.

For most webmasters, the thought of installing scripts on their server is a daunting one however, it must be said, installing a blog on your domain is, in my opinion, one of the easiest types of scripts to install in the world, it is often as easy as creating a MySQL database and uploading the .php files to your domain and, you are set.

What To Write About?

This is probably one of the most difficult aspects of running your own blog, what do you actually write about? Well, for many the answer is anything you want, literally.

Name a topic of interest and, the chances are, you will be able to find a blog about that subject, daily news, colors, gambling, even your favorite porn star, its all bloggable and, its all good. Obviously it makes sense to write about something you have a natural affinity for, if you know a lot about 'dogs' start a blog about dogs, if you like writing about 'news' write a daily news column, the sky is literally the limit when it comes to what you want to write about. Bear in mind though, the more focused and targeted your blog is, the more likely that your blog readers will be to return to it to catch the next installment.

Blog Traffic Generation.

Now that you have downloaded and installed you blog script and, hopefully have written your first couple of blog entries, how do you start getting traffic to your blog? Well by far the simplest method is to give all of your friends and family a link to your blog, ask them to pass that link on to their friends and their friends families and, after a while you should start seeing your daily visitors increase however, if you dont want to go that route, then you have several options available to you, if you post on message boards regularly, include a link to your blog in your 'signature', submit your blog index page to the search engines or, submit to a blog specific search engines such as BlogWise ( http://www.blogwise.com ) or BlogORama ( http://www.blogorama.com ) whichever method you choose, you must remember to try to keep to a regular schedule, traffic is all well and good but, if you dont give your blog visitors something to come back for, that traffic becomes worthless.

Blogging - Overview.

The internet is rapidly changing and, in the past 3 years alone we have witnesses the huge growth potential of bloggers and blogging as a communications medium, some of the most popular blogs started out as a hobby for their writers and have now become successful businesses. Give your blog a focus, it will afford you targetted traffic plus, dedicated traffic. Once you have that traffic, market to it using programs that fall within the 'theme' of your blog and you should do well from it.

Go forth and blog.

Article written by Lee.

http://www.gwwblog.com