Success in Blogging

It is tough to have a successful blog. You need to do a number of things to even have a chance. You should be unique. You also have to get the time to regularly post. Get your own domain name. Then do not change it.

Be original and professional. You blog should have a short bio on yourself. It should also provide a way to contact you. I am not too good in these two areas.

You need to get out in the online community for people to notice you. Do that by becoming active in other blogs. Be active in forums as well. Don’t go for volume. Be active and respected in a few places online.

In addition to having an online presence, you need to meet in person as well. You should attend some live events such as tech events. Then go meet and talk to people. Be direct. Let them know who you are and what you want. It is ok to sell to people. Bring your business cards.

The Google Effect

Google has a lot of great free products. I make use of a number of them. However I just read an article about a dude who uses Google tools all day long. Let’s look at some of these tools.

Gmail is the big winner at Google. You get a whole lot of space. It is free. The ads are not too noticeable. Then we have Google Reader. That let’s me track a number of blogs efficiently.

As you can see and probably know, I use Google AdSense to place ads on my blog. There is also AdWords if you want to pay to advertise. I personally do not buy ads on the Google network. Another tool I don’t use is Google News.

Google Maps is another one of the popular tools from Google. I don’t use it. I also don’t use or know much about Google Talk. I am slowly trying out new Google tools. I love the price. And everything is accessible on the web which is convenient.

Wordpress Basics

Blogging is a mainstream activity. There are many choices of blogging platforms. These include Blogger, Typepad, and WordPress. Today I discuss WordPress. My information comes from a book on being a great WordPress designer. I skimmed the table of contents and read the first chapter. So this will be an overview.

WordPress is highly customizable. Many content management systems (CMS) advertise customization. However almost everything in WordPress can be customized. This makes for an ultra flexible CMS.

WordPress is an open source product. It is written in the PHP programming language. The WordPress.com sight is a hosted version of WordPress. Therefore you cannot do heavy customization of the product on that sight.

WordPress.org is the home for the open source software. Note that WordPress needs MySQL to run. MySQL is an open source database management system. An important plugin for WordPress is Akismet, which is a spam filter.

Themes are customizations consisting of PHP and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) files. Linkbacks are other sites linking to your page. Linkbacks are also known as pingbacks or trackbacks. The WordPress documentation is called the WordPress Codex. It is available online.

The default WordPress installation comes with same posts. Delete them before your site goes live. I exclusively use Blogger. But I like checking out the competition occasionally.