I am learning each and every day about blogging, I have been blogging since June 2008 with my first blog, but then started a replacement blog Dragonblogger.com in August 2008.  So I really have only been blogging for about 3 months and only seriously and with wordpress for about 4 weeks.  Each and every day I am learning new things about blogging, how to write more engaging blogs, how to promote your blog, how to market and properly praise other bloggers…  Tools, Techniques, Tips…etc

A new blogger starts out with the following in mind:

• 1)  Do I want to blog and why?

Find out why you want to blog, what is the purpose?  Is it just to share your opinion and thoughts and life with the world, is it to make money online, or maybe a little of both.

• 2) What type of blog service should I use?

If you are doing a personal or diary type blog, with only casual advertising pick up, or if it is your first blog then I would recommend using Blogger, or a Free Wordpress blog.  If you want to develop a professional blog, or you want to have a string of multiple blogs, then you will need to pay for web hosting and install and configure a wordpress blog.

• 3)  What do I want my blog to look like?

This is one of the hardest things, how to style your blog.  Many bloggers like artistic and wildly colorful blogs and many of them look great.  I kind of fashion the following rule:  If you are blogging about art, music, entertainment then I think an artistic blog is much more attractive and fits the bill.  If you are doing a political blog, having a theme with flowers and kittens is a little out of character.  Plain generic white themes with 2 columns are also the most popular, and functional, but personally in my humble opinion I like to see a little “Personality” in a blog site.  Even if it is a colorful logo, or some borders.  Generic white blogs to me tend to reek too much of “Regurgitated content” and my initial impression is that maybe someone didn’t put time into stylizing their blog because they aren’t that serious.

That being said, plain simple blogs are fine for many people, and there is nothing wrong with them.  I may use one for one of my blogs, but I tend to like a little color and a little style that makes your blog stand out a little from the rest.  That being said, my black with silver theme is fairly common too, I have truly seen some really nice templates out there.

I recommend having a blog with no less than 3 columns
Content Column – Where all your posts lie
Advertiser Column -  Where you can put all your 125×125 ad buttons or links
Social Column – This is the column where you put all your social traffic stats, rank badges…etc.

Some people just have 2 advertiser columns and mix and match advertisements with badges, traffic…etc which is fine as well.

If you use Entrecard put it at the top of your site, so that people can find it easily.  It is very annoying to bury it down at the bottom of a site, or in the middle where people have to scroll and search really hard to find it.  This tends to prevent people from dropping and may hurt your drops in the long run.

• 4)  What widgets, plug-ins and text links to put in:

I highly recommend getting a Google PR badge, Alexa Badge, Izearanks Badge, and Technorati Badge as the starters.  I would also recommend getting a Feedburner or other RSS plug-in which displays your readers.  A feedjit feed is also good and fun, the map isn’t necessary, but its nice to show a list of people who are visiting your site.  It is also cool as heck to watch the real time live feed, where you can see people pop on your site from around the world.

Create some “Advertise Here” and “Hire Me” buttons, this tip provided by my good friend Damien Riley.  You want to let advertisers and companies know that they can hire you or sponsor your site.  Create a Hire Me page, with a contact form “cforms II” is my favorite forms plug-in for wordpress.

• 5)  Create your first 10-20 good quality posts

Before you even start advertising, you need to establish some base content.  First create an introduction page, include a disclosure agreement as a widget, or in your introduction page.  Then create 10-20 good quality blog posts about your chosen blog topic, or if you are a personal diary, write about some recent things.  These posts should be at least 250 words in content and have no more than 2 links out per post.  (Too many links out of your site, will hurt your site rating I am told).

• 6)  Join Socialspark, Entrecard, StumbleUpon, Digg, Technorati…etc

Join as many social networks as possible and create accounts and information about yourself and your blog.  This will help you get established and start building a network of friends.  Some people can be very helpful and others not so much.  I have made some great friends already, people whose generosity really makes me glad to have started blogging and met them.  Don’t overkill and spam people to visit your site, just casually add people to be your friend, or visit their blog, and leave a comment on one of their posts.  Find people who use commentluv, which will link back to your blog.

• Final Thoughts

Those are some of my tips for today, I will post more as I learn more.  I will be posting soon about setting blog goals for yourself after getting an established blog.  Remember, blogging is about expressing yourself and your thoughts, opinions.  Don’t regurgitate content if you can avoid it, if you find an article you want to quote, put it in your own words, and then link to the original article.  Don’t cut/paste content verbatim from other sites just to fill POST quota.

Enjoy Blogging, I really am finding it quite an addicting endeavor

-Dragon Blogger

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