Blogineering

A lot of people nowadays maintain blogs. Initially, it is the web version of diaries. But with the openness of the internet, blogging has evolved into something quite beneficial for bloggers—be it for personal, social, or business purposes.

For now, we will focus on the personal benefits of blogging.

1.       Improves your writing skill

In blogging, you have to be a good writer to be able to turn out quality posts. If you are not that confident of your writing, blogging will help you improve your article crafting skills over time because not only will you write, you will also be compelled to read a lot of materials online to get your ideas from as well as to visit other blogs to build your community. Such activities will not only enhance your vocabulary skills, you will also get bits and pieces of how to write really good content for your blog.

2.       Expands your knowledge base

Because you will need to read lots of articles – blogs, news, and definitely, articles from Wikipedia – you will definitely increase your knowledge base because of the amount of information you come across. Blogging will also help you become a better researcher because oftentimes, you need to have a good grasp of what you will be writing about.

3.       Name and fame in the blogging world

Continuing to write quality posts in your blog will eventually lead to your readers wanting to know more about you, and recommending your good posts to their friends or networks. And because you are writing about your interests on certain subject matters, people will get to see your expertise on that particular subject, and soon your subscriber base who shares the same interests will definitely grow.

4.       Building a network

This is related to Point 3. As people with the same interests get to know more about your blog and your expertise on the subject you are writing about, this will lead to your community or network of other bloggers. You will eventually be opened to the world of other successful bloggers, and know their thoughts, ideas and opinion on your topic.

5.       Motivation

Knowing that people do read your blog posts, and seeing their wonderful comments or constructive criticisms, will really push you more to write more on the subject and deepen your understanding or knowledge of the subject you are writing about. You will be motivated to write more and connect more with them.

6.       Income

Definitely, a lot of bloggers out there have monetized their blogs after a certain period of time of maintaining them. In fact, the potential income part is one of the reasons some people do jump to blogging. But of course this is not easy; you have to establish yourself first in the blogging world, and you have to make sure your articles are really relevant to your readers. This way, they will continue to visit your blog, and after a while, start interacting more with you through your blog. Eventually, as you gain the name in your subject matter in the blogging world, potential advertisers in the same space would get to notice your blog, and as they begin to feel confident, advertisements/sponsorships could begin to come in. But of course there are no shortcuts to this. You have to religiously update and maintain your blog, interact with your readers, and build your community.

If you have written a significant number of posts (20 or 30 maybe), the things that you should do next is to start promoting your blog. Here are the few things that you should do in your first three months of blogging.

1.) Submit your blog to search engines to get indexed. This is one of the really important things that you should do after a month or two of blogging. Although, according to blog experts, this has a very small impact for new blogs, but there is no harm in trying.  You should submit your blog to the three giant search engines: Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

2.) Strengthen your links. One fast way to get indexed in a search engine is to get back links from other reputable blogs or websites. You won’t have a lot of back links in your first three months, but you can improve your internal links. Try to link as many as you can within your blog. Having three related posts link in each article is a good practice. Read the rest of this entry →

If you have followed our past tutorials so far, you would have enough basic knowledge to keep your blog rolling. This particular guide helps you to finalize setting up some of the minor details in your blog.

Here are some final tweaks to do before you embark on your blogging journey:

The General Settings page (Figure 1) enables you to change the name of your blog, your tagline (a catchy sentence or phrase that describes your blog), your email address, and other information.

Set up your Widgets. In this post, we discussed how to work with widgets.  Of course no one is limiting you how many widgets to place in your blog, but you must prioritize the important ones, including Calendar, Recent Posts, Links, Email Subscription box, and Top Posts/Top Rated. Note, however,  that the more widgets you have, the longer your blog to load. Read the rest of this entry →

In our previous tutorials, we’ve shown you some of the basic things to consider – from creating and setting up your blogs, to posting your content and adding links and images.

In this short tutorial, we will show you how you can customize the look of your blog/website. Here, we will focus on the theme of your blog. Technically speaking, a theme is a preset package containing graphical appearance details, used to customize the look and feel of (typically) an operating system, widget set or window manager. (Wikipedia)

In short, it is the appearance of your blog; its motif. The multitude of themes – whether paid or free – available for you to download and use, allow you to have different customization for your blog. It kind of enables your blog to have a personality. It can be a free theme which can be found on your Appearance panel (or can be downloaded from www.wordpress.org) or a premium (paid) theme. One difference between the two is that you will get more technical support when it comes to the paid theme. You could also expect most features of the premium theme to be optimized and are really top-notch. However, that doesn’t mean that the free themes aren’t as good. They are, really. But you really have to check the developers of such themes, and see how they respond to technical queries from people using their themes in their blogs. When creating your first blog, it is important to learn from the free themes first, instead of shelling out about $70 or $80 or $90 for a premium theme. Once your blog picked up and becomes successful, then you could opt for a more professional, “premium” look. Read the rest of this entry →

Words, Words, Words

Words are very important on the internet. Websites are found by search engines using keywords and phrases. That is why we need to use appropriate keywords for our websites or blogs.

Tags and categories are several of the things that use the “word technology” in classifying and identifying blogs. In this post, we are going to learn how to use categories and tags appropriately. Read the rest of this entry →