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    • « Twitter Rocks! But… | Home | How to Start Blogging - Keeping it Simple »

    Intro to Blogging-the Basics

    By wahms | July 2, 2008

    The blogging phenomenon has been steadily growing for the past few years. In fact, the number of new blogs started every day is estimated at a staggering 40,000! That’s each day! Hard to believe, isn’t it? The appeal of blogging is understandable, though. Any would-be journalist can enjoy publishing their articles on a daily basis without having to worry about publishers or editors. Anyone with anything to say can instantly publish their thoughts, ideas, opinions or stories and reach potentially millions of readers with ease.

     

    Blogs should be updated on a regular basis to encourage active readership. Luckily, this is extremely easy to do with any of the blogging platforms out there. For example, if I wanted to put up a new static web page on my website, it would take me a minimum of 20-30 minutes just to get the html, graphics, and site layout all ready. Then another 20 minutes to write my content. With a blog, 20 minutes to write the content, and another 30 seconds to write my tags and hit the “publish” button. That’s it. I’m done.

     

    Blogs are normally arranged in chronological order, such as you can see this one is. So, your latest posts are seen at the top of the page. Another bonus of blogging, is the search engines tend to crawl blogs more frequently than static sites because it is expected that a blog will have more frequent updates than a static site.

     

    Content

    Typically, a blog’s content will greatly depend on the topic it’s dealing with. If you’re advertising something - perfume, apparel, or a vintage automobile, you could feature catalogs of these products on your blog. Personal blogs usually consist of daily happenings, observations, thoughts and comments about the author’s views or interests, or perhaps commentaries on other people’s blog entries.

     

    Feedback

    Comments are very much welcome on most blogs. Come one, come all! Reader interaction is great. The more you get your readers involved, the more useful and interesting your blog becomes. Bottom line: whatever you’ve written had an effect on that mind and aroused some opinions to merit it. Always welcome comments.

     

    Tools and Concepts

    As I mentioned before, blogging in itself is very simple to do. There are, however, a few terms and processes to learn to really use blogging to it’s fullest extent.For instance, what in the world does RRS, URL, blogroll, and all that stuff mean? What is it for? Don’t worry – it’s not complicated at all. To help you along, here are some terms and definitions of some of the common terms associated with blogging.

     

    I’ve composed the Blogging ABC’s cheat sheet to help you out.

     

    Archives – older entries in the blog, often categorized monthly.

     

    Blogrolls – categorized list of other blogs and websites that you want to share with the reader.

    Comment Spam – irrelevant comments posted on a blog, often by spam bots. These should be deleted as soon as they appear.

    Download – to save a file from a remote location to your local computer.

    Excerpt – a short soummary of a post usually made up of a part of the entire article

    Feeds – syndicated content of your blog that are sent through RSS technology to your readers via RSS readers or email.

    Guests – are the readers, viewers, spammers, etc., who visits your site

    Hosts – web sites that house your blog and other files online.

     

    Introduction – preliminary part of the blog page showing the personal profile of the author or a brief description of the subject

     

    Links – hypertext links for navigation within the site or to another site; also known as a “permalink” or “hyperlink”

     

    Plugins – scripts that add additional functions to the blog

     

    And that’s it. All primary words elaborated above embody the blogging community. Easy access to the blog doesn’t mean easy manipulation. You do need certain concepts and tools to make blogging successful. The posts are one thing, how to capture the attention is the objective.

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    Topics: blogging |

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