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.

We have learned how to automatically publicize and share to Twitter in a WordPress.com blog. In this post, we learn how to automatically publish posts to Twitter from a hosted WordPress blog. Before following the tutorial, be sure that you have set up a Twitter account and an RSS feed.

Instructions 

1.) Register a Twitterfeed account.

2.) After registering, login to your Twittefeed account and your Twitter account.

3.) In your Twitter Dashboard, click the Create New Feed button

4.) Type your feed name in the Feed Name box, paste your RSS feed in the next box, and then click the Continue to Step 2 button. This will bring you to the Available Services of the Feed Publishing page. Notice that  Twitterfeed can also be integrated to Facebook,  Linkedin, Status net and Hellotxt.

5.) Select Twitter in the Available Services list. This will bring you to the New Twitter Service page.

6.) In the New Twitter Service page, select the click the Authenticate Twitter button. This will take you to a page where you will be asked to “Authorize Twittefeed to use your account. Now, click the Authorize App button. Your authenticated Twitter account name should appear in the Authenticated Twitter Account list box.

7.) Now, click Create Service button at the bottom-left of the page to finish.

After doing the steps above, everytime you posted a new article, it will be automatically imported as tweet in your Twitter account.

One of the challenges that face bloggers after the launch phase is building a community. Of course, we’ve talked about some of the things that you need to do within the first three months (LINK) of your blogging journey. However, writing lots of posts alone cannot “get you there”; you need a community that will, in a way, support you while growing your blog.

So what’s a community? In blogging, a suitable explanation is a group of people with the same interest, who visit and interact with you on your blog by posting comments and, in a way, helping you promote your blog to other people or bloggers in their own networks.

A community builds up in the long run anyway, but of course you should not wait for that long a period to have your own group of bloggers sharing the same interests. There are a few ways that you can do to make sure that people would find your blog, start commenting on your posts, and eventually interact with each other through your blog.

Here are some tips on how to do just that:

1. Post comments in other blogs

The first way of starting to build your community is by commenting on other blogs. Of course, you have to make sure that most blogs you would be commenting on are on the same, or related topic as your blog, to make sure that you have “something in common”. Although of course you could post comments on other types of blogs, but the odds of them interacting with you and answering your comments is higher when you are on the same “wavelength”.

Comments could come in the form of:

- Responses to posts

- Questions related to posts

- Reaction to other people’s comments

2. Invite readers to share their reactions and opinion

Apart from just commenting on other bloggers posts, you should, at the end of your posts, pose interesting questions that will entice readers to give their comments. If people did comment on your posts, be sure to thank them and, if they posted their own questions, make sure that you will respond to their questions.

3. Create interactive tools

You could create polls and, sometimes – if you have some interesting stuff that you could freely give away as prizes – contests that will entice your readers to do more when visiting your blog.

4. Invite for contributed posts

Another way of getting people to start doing more for your blog is by inviting them to submit contributed posts. Apart from building your community, this will also add fresh content – from a fresh perspective – in your blog. At the same way, you should also return the favor by proactively offering to contribute posts on other blogs.

Doing these simple things is one way of promoting your blog, adding more content to your blog, getting people to do more when visiting your blog, and eventually building your own 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 →

Now that you have kick-started your blog, it is important, especially during your first three months of blogging, to really remain committed to it. Posting at least one good article per day is one way. It doesn’t have to be super long article (if such is the case, you can break it and make it a two-part post – just as what I am doing in this blog post). The idea is to have that impression that your blog is up-to-date, and that you really care about your blog.

But of course, you have to make sure that the articles you will write and post are of good quality and are original content. Regardless of the tips you will find here at Blogineering, if you will write poorly, then readers won’t surely revisit your blog again.

Before we move on to the tips that you should consider during the first three months of your blogging, why “first three months?” We think that blogging is, in a way, a habit that you develop if you put your mind into it, and if you do it regularly. It’s just like exercising. During the first few weeks, it will feel great and you feel definitely committed to doing it. However, there will come a time that you will skip a day, or two, or three, or a week. And the drive won’t be there anymore. But you will realize that once you developed that habit of making sure that you will do it at least once a day, you will definitely be driven to hit the gym at least for an hour each day. By the end of three months, blogging, or exercising, will be a part of your daily routine. It is like developing a commitment. Read the rest of this entry →