A Beginners Guide To Blog Writing – Part 1

admin — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 13:21:03 +0000

Blogging is perfect for anyone that’s interested in sharing their thoughts and interacting with other people over the Internet. If you’re a new blogger and want to get started, here are tips that will guide you along the way.

What is a Blog?

The word blog is a contraction of the words “Web” and “log.” To all new bloggers, a blog is a website where you write commentaries, events in your life, movie reviews, personal thoughts, poetry, interesting blog topics, or a combination of these topics. A blog can also contain pictures and videos. It’s basically an online journal.

Blog posts are usually arranged in a chronological sequence, with the latest entry at the top and the older entries at the bottom. Moreover, blogs don’t have to be maintained by just one person and they don’t have to be personal. It can serve as a website where a company posts news and interesting blog topics, for example. You can also use your blog to sell stuff.

Choosing a Blogging Platform

Now that you have an idea of what a blog is, let’s move on to how to set one up for the new blogger.

First off, the new blogger should look for a blogging platform that has the features that suit their needs. The more popular blogging websites include WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and SquareSpace. Registering in some of these websites is completely free. Whichever you choose, all blogging platforms can work well for the new blogger.

Identifying Your Niche

Once you’ve chosen a blogging platform, it’s time to determine your niche. This means that you have to decide on a specific subject area or theme. You can always talk about various interesting blog topics, but if you want to focus on a specific subject matter, here are two ways to determine a theme:

Look for a Subject

Ask yourself what you’re interested in, what you’re an expert at, what interesting blog topics are missing on the Internet, and such questions. If you want good ideas, read popular blogs, and take inspiration from them.

Define your Audience

For the new blogger, the target audience will also define the blog’s content. For instance, if your blog is primarily for keeping in touch with friends and family, then your blog would mostly be filled with personal, interesting blog topics. If you want to target other professionals in your industry, however, the blog’s content should contain tips, strategies, commentaries and other relevant information about your business.

Give Your Blog a Name

When it comes to naming your blog, you have endless options. For new bloggers, your easiest and safest bet would be to name your blog after yourself. You can also name the blog based on interesting blog topics. You could call it Gadgets and Gizmos, Hollywood Gossip, or Heart Health. If not, the blog name can be completely random, like say I’m Your Mom, Ripples, or Humicorn.

Update Your Blog Regularly

Basically, these are the steps that will help the new blogger get started. The next step would be to update your blog on a regular basis. You don’t have to do it every hour or every day, but try to post interesting blog topics every week at least.

Blog SEO for the New Blogger

For many newbie bloggers, search engine optimization is too big a topic to dwell on. In fact, it could make your head spin if you don’t have background knowledge. On the other hand, if you want to reach more people, increase sales or become a popular blogger, blog SEO is something that you need to take seriously.

SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, in a nutshell, is the process of promoting your blog or website so that it ranks high in search engine results. When websites are higher on the rankings of search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, your site is more visible to Internet users, and this translates to more clicks, traffic and views.

So how do you do blog SEO?

Although SEO is a broad and ever-changing field, creating a list of keywords that are related to your topics or niche, and then inserting these keywords into various areas within each post should be the first thing a newbie blogger should do. A keyword density of one percent will do. This means that your keywords should show up five times in a 500-word article. Make sure to include the keywords in the titles and subtitles as well.

These keywords are the words or phrase people type into search engines. You want to make sure your blog will show up in the search results for those keywords.

Once you’ve created keyword-rich content, don’t stop doing so. Otherwise, you’ll lose your search engine rankings. Blog SEO involves adding new content frequently so that your blog remains friendly towards search engines.

Another way the new blogger can do blog SEO is to link your site or the pages within your site to similar websites. This will increase your blog’s popularity and exposure. To get even more exposure, you can also submit your blog to general directories as well as blog directories.

Blog SEO isn’t only for professional websites. It’s effective for the new blogger as well. Follow these steps to have a highly-visited blog.

Stay tuned for the second part of this post where we will discuss more exciting ways of attracting traffic to your blog via search engine optimisation.

The post A Beginners Guide To Blog Writing – Part 1 appeared first on AddMe Blog.

Google Trends, Historical Search Trends in Google

admin — Wed, 27 May 2009 14:28:57 +0000

Now here’s a service Google has offered for some time now which is yet to get enough recognition, Google Trends.
Google Trends is a brilliant service giving you insight into historical search trends, complete with pretty graphs.

Granted not everyone will get excited about this (I do, though I find myself easily entertained) that said, I strongly recommend you check this out.

For this example I used the term “Ipod” and then graphed this over a 5 year period. As you can see from the thumbnail, the terms use within Google increases over Christmas time, this is clearly due people beginning their search for Christmas presents.

Another feature of Google trends is comparing multiple search terms, thus giving you a clearer understanding about which terms or perhaps brands a more popular. Try comparing “BMW” and “Mercedes”.

Taking a quick look at the trend graph above you can clearly see BMW being the more popular searched for term within Google. Note the spike in search for both brands at the end of 2007, shopping perhaps? Both brands have had a steady increase in news references over the past 4+ years.

If you’re running a paid search campaign it’s a good idea to throw some of your more popular keywords in here and spot any trends that could be occurring. Using the first example (Yes this is a no brainer though should give you the drift) start bidding on a broader number of “iPod” type terms heading into the Christmas period. You may even be able to beat some of the rush and get the terms in there before your competitor does thus capturing the first Christmas traffic and also helping to increase your Google quality score, lowering CPC etc.

So, next time you’re looking for some further insight into a brand, what search terms to target or even want to compare who’s more popular, Britney Spears or Madonna, don’t forget to drop by Google Trends.

The post Google Trends, Historical Search Trends in Google appeared first on AddMe Blog.

AddMe Blog » admin

A Beginners Guide To Blog Writing – Part 1

Google Trends, Historical Search Trends in Google