Did you know that close to 175,000 blogs are added to the Internet each and every day? 175,000 new blogs added to the Internet on each of 365 days a year means an astounding 64 million new blogs appearing on the Internet each year. And that’s not all; with more people using the Internet each day, and existing Internet users becoming more technically savvy, the growth of the blogosphere has no end in sight.
How many movements do you know of with 64 million members joining each year? I can’t think of any! Blogging has almost unlimited growth potential. There are countless reasons why people are drawn to blogging: personal, writing a daily diary; educational,keeping a community of researchers up to date with the latest advancements in a field; commercial, augmenting a company website with current, relevant information about the company and industry in general—and it doesn’t end there!
No matter what the reasoning behind a blogger’s drive to post, all bloggers have the same goal—they want their voice heard.
BlogMaestro’s Guide to Blogging will bring you up to speed with the professional bloggers. It will let you in on their secrets, helping you attract a large reader base. Even if you are completely new to blogging the tips in this guide can help you draw the audience you crave.
Technically Speaking
A blog is a combination word for web and log and was first used by Jorn Barger in 1997. Blog was coined by Peter Merholz, who broke the word weblog into the separated we blog in the sidebar of his blog during the Spring of 1999. A blog is described as an online diary or personal reverse chronological log of thoughts published on a Web page.
Friendlier Definitions
If you ask five people to define a blog, you will more than likely get five very different answers:
* A blog can be a lot of things … It can be a place where you tell your life story or you talk about what’s important to you or it can be a place to write about your frustrations and stuff so that you don’t take it out on someone you love. I use my blog as a therapist sometimes … LOL. Basically you make it your own. There are no wrong or right ways to blog … just write what you’re feeling at the moment. 
* From what I have seen it is basically an online diary.
* A blog is where you post personal info about yourself.
* A blog is where you write about stuff.
* It depends on the blog; there are personal blogs that are about people lives, blogs with funny stories, blogs about a favourite hobby, blogs about political change, blogs can be about anything a person wants really. I have a blog and mine is mostly about news that I find interesting and politics.
Blogger, Google’s blogging arm, offers this definition:
A blog is a personal diary. A daily pulpit. A collaborative space. A political soapbox. A breaking-news outlet. A collection of links. Your own private thoughts. Memos to the world
Your blog is whatever you want it to be. There are millions of them, in all shapes and sizes, and there are no real rules. In simple terms, a blog site is a website, where you write stuff on an ongoing basis. New stuff shows up at the top, so your visitors
can read what’s new. Then they comment on it or link to it or email you. Or not. Since Blogger was launched in 1999, blogs have reshaped the web, impacted politics, shaken up journalism, and enabled millions of people to have a voice and connect with others.
And we’re pretty sure the whole deal is just getting started.
Although blogs look and feels like most other websites, they are different. They are web publishing platforms for publishing ideas, images and video without the hassles associated with updating traditional websites; they don’t require much technical skill on the part of the user.
Once Upon A Time Before Blogging Software
The difference behind a blog and a traditional website is the platform. Prior to blogging software, a typical blogger would:
1. Write content and save it to a file.
2. Send the saved file to a person with strong technical skills.
3. The technically skilled person would first code the writer’s content and desired format in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).
4. The technical middleman would then upload the HTML content to a website via a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) site.
5. Finally the technically skilled person would edit the other pages of the website, pointing users to the new page with a fresh link.
This complicated web publishing method was prohibitive to 99% of Internet users.
The Here and Now of Blogging
Over the past decade, blogging has become much easier for the average Internet user. With the new generation of blogging software the need for a technically skilled middleman has been eliminated. Novice bloggers no longer need a technical guru topublish their words to the web. Now all a writer needs to do is write content to one of the blog publishing applications, and with the push of a button, their new content is
uploaded and published to the Web. A writer with little or no blogging experience can setup a blog and post their thoughts to the world in a matter of minutes.
BlogMaestro’s Guide to Blogging
Blogging software typically has a word processing interface allowing the writer to write directly to the blogging application, eliminating the need for technical and time consuming HTML coding. Most blogging software comes with a large selection of attractive page templates making the technically intensive process of site design an easy and enjoyable task accessible to most users. Blogging software ranges in price from free for basic blogging capabilities to several hundreds of dollars for applications with more bells and whistles.
The Big Four
The four largest blog publishing systems are: BlogMaestro, Blogger, TypePad and WordPress. All of the major blogging platforms provide many attractive features to their users without any additional cost or coding required. Additionally, there are many add-ins, some free, some with a nominal fee, for users to spice up their blogs.
BlogMaesto
BlogMaestro.com offers uses an easy to use out of box solution for users who do not want to worry about configuring server setting. Users can signup to BlogMaestro for free and choose from over 100 popular templates. The BlogMaestro community is growing fast as it allows users to create a free blog in seconds.
Blogger
Blogger offers basic blogging features including: reader commenting ability, access controls and blogger personal profiles. Blogger also offers a host of free, easy to use features including adaptable templates and drag-and-drop page elements which allows the writer to easily design their blog exactly how they want. For the more adventurous blogger, Blogger offers HTML editing allowing users to highly customize their blogging space. User can also add photos, videos and links to their blogs with Blogger.
TypePad
TypePad offers a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor allowing the blogger to write a blog without knowing a skip of HTML. TypePad does offer HTML editing capabilities, making blog customization limited only to the extent of the writer’s HTML knowledge. The platform also offers post categorization and automatic archiving.
TypePad offers a collection of “widgets”, some free, some at cost, allowing the writer to embed content and functionality from sites including Amazon and blog aggregator
Technorati. With these “widgets”, writers can take advantage of one of the hottest trends in blogging—embedded advertising. The writer can also generate income by including ontext-relevant advertisements from companies like Google.
WordPress
WordPress has a variety of features in the basic package. WordPress also offers a completely customizable blogging experience with the help of plug-ins. Plug-ins extend WordPress’ capabilities. Some of these additional capabilities include: Publish to Facebook, which publishes blog posts directly to the popular social networking site’s mini-feed; Subscribe to Comments, which allows commentators to the WordPress user’s blog to be notified via email of any subsequent comments to your post; and WPUser Online, which displays how many users are currently on your WordPress blog. Plug-ins are an exceptional feature, but they are not for the novice Blogger. Many require custom HTML coding, placing the writer back in the position of having to use a technical middleman.
It’s So Easy
The blogging platforms mentioned above are great, but for the easiest transition into the blogosphere, we recommend using one of the popular blogging communities such as, LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, Yahoo 360, MySpace or America Online (AOL). What these services lack in customization, they make up in ease of use. After all, who learns to drive in a Lamborghini? Any of these communities are perfect for the beginning Blogger.
Blogging software and blogs in general, help writers get their ideas published to the Internet in a quick and fun way. Because the new generation of blogging software is so easy to use, a blogger can get their ideas to the eyes of the world while their ideas are still hot.
Who is Blogging?
Today’s bloggers come from every walk of life; from the lone entrepreneur writing about Internet moneymaking opportunities to the large corporation writing about industry trends and company goings on as an augmentation to their existing products and services.
Today major news agencies and corporations use blogs to spread news about new products and events almost the instant an event happens. Blogging is not only for large businesses; small businesses can use blogs to update stagnant, out of date websites. Small businesses typically use websites as an online brochure showcasing their company. With the addition of a blog, small businesses can add a fresh, interactive component to their website, creating a social community addressing customer needs and requests.
Personal blogs are another important area of blogging. Individuals writing about travel, day-to-day life, hobbies and relationship issues make up a large portion of existing and new blogs.
There are millions of people blogging everyday, and they are all looking for the same thing—readers. Every reader wants a blog-specific audience.
One of the initial problems bloggers face is gaining initial recognition for their blog. Often, only parents, siblings, friends, co-workers—people close to the blogger in everyday life—read the writer’s blog. This problem is not unique to blogs; it is common for every site on the Web. Because of the Internet’s vastness, new content, blogs, and traditional websites—everything—is nearly invisible when first launched; it is simply the nature of the game.
Today, hundreds of thousands of new traditional websites (blogs excluded) are
launched in hopes of becoming the next EBay or Google; in actuality very few people will visit or even learn about each new website.
Set Sail
It helps to think of newly launched blogs and websites as tiny islands in the vast Pacific Ocean of the Internet. There are thousands of these little islands and most people don’t even know about them. Of course everyone knows about the continents—EBay, Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL—but few even know of the tiny Pacific islands—the new websites and blogs launched everyday.
When users access the web, the majority of them will only visit the continents. Few users will spring from the major sites (the continents) and fly off to an unknown, exotic island (the new websites including blogs). The exotic destinations (new websites including blogs) are generally promoted by advertisements or links on the major websites; think of these advertisements as billboards scattered about the continents.
Or, think about the Internet as the airline industry. There are major hubs, or international airports serving the world’s largest cities, and smaller local, commuter airports, serving the world’s smaller cities. For the extremely remote locations, there are mountain and desert airstrips, simply a small, cleared path from which prop planes take off and land.
People aren’t going to immediately notice or even know about a new dirt landing strip on a remote Pacific island they have never heard of.
Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL are the international airports of the Internet. Ninety percent of the traffic on the Web is routed through these locations. As the user ventures away from these hubs, they will visit smaller websites and blogs hosting less traffic. New websites and blogs are the simple dirt airstrips on the remote Pacific islands. Maybe one or two prop planes (single Internet users) land there each month, but that is about it. Unless the website developer understands the basic concepts of Internet marketing (remember the billboards scattered about the continents), their website will likely stay a single, remote landing strip in some exotic location.
Blogs begin life in the same way that websites do; when a blog is launched generally no one will know the difference (just like no one will realize that someone has plowed a strip of earth on a remote Pacific island for prop plane landings). Blogs have one main advantage over traditional websites; their contemporaneous nature.
The Currency of Freshness
There are thousands of search engines and Web portals seeking the freshest mostrelevant content on the Internet. Because the Internet is so large remember, vast Pacific Ocean), search engines and portals can only focus on sites satisfying the world’s thirst for current information—focus on current.
Websites are typically developed once, and updated only rarely, if at all, with current content. Search engines like Google seek websites with relevant, up-to-date information. As time goes on, the websites with once relevant, once up-to-date information sit and age, sit and age, without the site developer giving a second thought to updating the site. If the site isn’t updated, it will no longer have the most relevant, informed content; it will be stale with old content. Search engines aren’t going to value the crusty old website as a source for current cognizant information; they have moved on to a site that does provide current, relevant information.
Search engines and other Web portals want users to keep coming back to their sites. As long as search results contain websites with the most pertinent information, chances are the users will visit again. It is in the search engines’ best interests to include only sites with the most relevant, contemporary information in search results because this keeps users happy, and happy users will likely return.
Major search engines and Web portals have gotten smart. They are now adjusting their search algorithms giving preference to sites with the most current information. Because blogs allow users to publish content almost instantly, search engines often find blogs as the most relevant, current source of information for a particular topic. Search engines often display blogs ahead of websites in search results, making sure that they deliver the most current information to the search engine user.
SOS BlogMaestro to the Rescue!
So how does the blogger keep up with all of this? Well, they don’t have to. This is where BlogMaestro comes in. BlogMaestro monitors the Web for all of the newest search engines and Web portals, making sure to get the word out about a user’s blog. BlogMaestro keeps an eye on all members’ blog posts, notifying everyone on its ever evolving list of any updates or new blog posts. Once a list member is notified about a new or updated blog post, the service visits the blogger’s site and syndicates the content to the thousands of visitors visiting the search engines and Web portals. With its automated system, BlogMaestro works closely with the top, most popular blog aggregation services getting the word out to hundreds of thousands of visitors each day.
Most people fail at blogging. You have probably heard the statistics about most businesses failing in the first five years. The same is true for blogging, but everything moves faster on the Internet, so blogs fail faster; generally within the first three months.
Bloggers fail for numerous reasons: burnout, lack of motivation, personal issues, boring writing, poor visual design, and of course, running out of creative juices. A Blogger needs to post at least two to three times a week in order to be successful. Blogging at this rate quickly eats through even the most creative blogger’s cache of ideas. With constant feedback from a dedicated reader base, it is much easier to come up with new, exciting blogging ideas. Feedback turns blogging into a social activity.
Bloggers also fail because they become disenchanted with blogging. Filled with creativity, new bloggers pound away at the keyboard recording insightful, interesting ideas. But no one hears them. People aren’t reading your blog because you don’t have anything to say. And it certainly isn’t that people don’t want to read what you are writing. The problem is, readers simply can’t find you (remember, tiny island in the Pacific?) Without readers, bloggers can’t enjoy the satisfaction and thrill of a solid reader base. No readers mean no positive comments or feedback; no criticism or controversy—two things that can really promote your blog. No readers means the blogger’s hard work writing and posting their blog is pointless. So what’s the blogger to do?
There are several things a new blogger can do to draw immediate visitors. Remember, your blog is a tiny island isolated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. When you launch your blog, very few people will know that it exists, let alone visit it.
Blogroll
Many professional bloggers use blogrolls to promote their blogs. A blogroll is a list of blogs, which the blogger reads and recommends, running down the sidebar of their blog. The list contains links to each of the blogs in the list. Many blogging platforms such as WordPress have built-in functions allowing users to create blogrolls instantly. When a WordPress blogger logs in to their blog, a list of all blogs listing (and linking to) their blog in a blogroll displays.
So how does this work? All bloggers want the same thing—to reach as many readers as possible. When you add a user to your blogroll, the blogger you have added may be notified (depending on the blogging platform being used) that you have listed them in your blogroll. In return, the blogger may visit your blog, and if you’re lucky, they will add you to their blogroll too. Should they link back to you via their blogroll, many of their loyal readers may become your loyal readers.
Trackbacks
Professional bloggers also use trackbacks to lure readers to their blogs. A trackback is a way to show other bloggers that you have linked to a particular post in their blog. Trackbacks should be one of your main tactics for drawing new readers to your blog. A blogger needs to remember that blogging is a social activity; another blogger’s devoted readers can easily become your devoted readers too.
How does this work? Let’s look at a new blogger writing about baby nursing equipment—which products work, and which ones don’t. A beginning blogger may sit at her laptop typing a thoughtful, intelligent post about her experiences with particular nursing equipment such as breast pumps, rocking chairs and bottles. Once she completes her post, she clicks Publish and sends her post to the Web.
Is this the right way for the beginning blogger to write her first post? No! Before even beginning to write, the professional blogger would first visit blog aggregator and search sites like Technorati and Google’s Blog Search to research current posts about baby nursing equipment. The professional blogger will spend some time checking out what other bloggers have to say about baby nursing equipment. Once the professional blogger has a handful of appropriate posts, she will sit down and begin to write her post, incorporating content and cites from the blogs into her writing. By adding links to the other posts within the body of her blog, she is creating a trackback.
When the new blogger’s post is published, several things happen. The new post displays in the new blog, and at the same time, all bloggers cited in the post are notified via a trackback that the new blogger has written a new post, and that you have been mentioned in the post. If the cited blogger has trackbacks enabled (typically they do) a comment is automatically written to their blog including a short description of your latest post. The comment also contains a link to your post.
When visitors to the cited blogger’s site read your comment (created by the trackback) they will see a link to your blog. If the new blogger does this for every post she writes, citing multiple blogs each time she posts, she will immediately draw new readers to her blog. If she is writing engaging content, many of the “trackback” visitors may become loyal readers.
Everyone has heard the advice about reading making one a better writer. The same is true with blogs! Most professional bloggers spend a lot of time reading other blogger’s posts to create trackbacks, drawing new readers to their own blog. BlogMaestro recommends doing this, but only when appropriate; for example, it doesn’t make sense to cite a blog about fishing lures in a blog about baby nursing equipment; unless of course the writer has found this to be the ultimate cure for a fussy baby!
If a writer uses trackbacks to cite blogs of little or no relevance to their topic, the
blogging community will spot them in a minute, often labeling the blogger as a spam generator. Once a blogger is marked as a spammer, they may not be able to legitimately use trackbacks again.
Social Butterfly vs. Wallflower
Blogrolls and trackbacks are two important rules in the new blogger’s reader-attraction plan. Another important tool is the simple tactic of being social.
Blogging has its own unique community. By engaging and offering constructive comments to other bloggers (and graciously accepting the same) the blogger becomes a part of the community. By putting one’s self out there, the blogger welcomes interaction. If the new blogger uses comments, blogrolls and trackbacks, others are likely to respond in kind.
The term constructive should not be taken lightly; today many blogging applications have built-in spam filtering for comments like, “I totally agree,” or “Yes, great post.” Comments like these don’t do anyone any good. Respond to posts as you would like others to respond to yours; thoughtfully.
Although vanilla ice cream tastes good and almost everyone enjoys it, very few people rush home from the ice cream parlor telling their friends that they ate the most amazing vanilla ice cream. If the ice cream parlor wants to get people talking, they should mix jalapeños with Captain Crunch cereal. Granted, not many people will enjoy this concoction, but you can bet it will certainly get people talking!
Don’t be another vanilla blogger! The world is filled with vanilla writers—we find their writing everyday in the newspapers. If you are going to blog, be objective and write about subjects that haven’t been writing about thousands of times before. The same goes for comments. Everyone loves to receive comments. Most people enjoy it when people agree with them, but when someone comments on a post, noting that they agree with everything the blogger has written; it’s boring; it’s vanilla. Bloggers don’t learn anything when commentators only agree with them.
If you want your comments to stand out from the group, you need to write an objective comment. Note which points in the post you agree with, but also note those that you don’t agree with, giving the reasoning behind your comments. In this way, you create a discussion (remember, be social), of good and bad, positive and negative, with the blogger. This helps the other blogger much more than a simple, “Good Job!” Which comments are you going to be more interested in? Comments that help you become a better blogger, or comments that simply affirm everything you have written? Also, remember to use restraint; no one wants to read a comment that is longer than the original post. And attacking another blogger is always a no-no.
Remember, there are 175,000 new blogs added to the Internet each day. With all of these new blogs popping up, an industry has sprung up to support, index and classify all of these new blogs.
Remember When
Search engines have been around for over a decade now. Almost everyone is familiar with Yahoo and Google. Yahoo and Google use the newest Internet search technologies, including updated website ranking technologies in their search algorithms, providing users with the most relevant search results possible. Should they fail to do so, their user base will shift to another search engine that does provide the highest quality results.
You might remember Altavista and Webcrawler. These search engines were just as popular as Yahoo and Google in their day. Both search engines failed, and are now only a shadow of their former selves. What happened? Altavista and Webcrawler failed to update their searching algorithms so lost out to more advanced search engines like Yahoo and Google. Yahoo and Google have both shifted focus from providing results via website-preferential treatment in their indices to a search process developed to deliver the most recently updated content to the user.
In the past, it took search engines weeks and sometimes months to find a new website, index it, and list it in its search results. Today, search engines use sophisticated technology making them much faster at finding new websites.
X Marks the Spot
The updated technology used by search engines to index websites is wonderful for established websites and popular, established blogs. However, new blogs and traditional websites still have a hard time being initially indexed by the major search engines. Sitemaps can help a new blog or website be found faster by the search engines. Many blogging applications have the ability to tie-in the functionality of an auto generated sitemap. So what exactly is a sitemap? It is a single file written specifically for search engines noting any added content or pages, and the time added, for a specific website.
So what’s the beginning blogger to do? Many major search engines offer a console where bloggers can create an account where they can direct the search engine to the sitemap of their blog. By doing this, search engines do not need to seek out each new blog post, the software does the work for them. The search engine can quickly visit a blog, request a sitemap and index only the new pages rather than having to crawl through the entire website. Sitemaps are a two-way relationship between the blogger and the search engine. By adding a sitemap to your site, you help the search engines continuously index your site, which makes your site more attractive because the search engine identifies it as an up-to-date, current source of information.
Blog Aggregators
The latest trend in the blogosphere is sites devoted to indexing and syndicating content of blogs specifically, rather than websites in general. Sites such as Technorati, My Yahoo Aggregator, and Feedburner exist for the sole purpose of indexing blogs. Because so many blogs are created everyday, it is overwhelming for the average Internet user to find blogs about a particular topic. As Google is the starting place for a basic Web search, blog aggregators are the starting place for blog searches.
Blog aggregators focus on keeping up to date with the most popular blogs; keeping up to date with millions of bloggers’ latest posts has the same challenges Google and Yahoo face when keeping up with general Web indexing. There is no way around it; it is an enormous task.
Over Here! Over Here!
New bloggers do not need to wait for the blog aggregators to seek them out; as soon as a new blogger publishes a post, they should step up and notify all of the major blog aggregation services and search engines; take the quest for readership into your own hands—let them know that you are out there and your blog is ready to be indexed. The blogger needs to announce to the world that they have written something and their site is ready to be indexed.
BlogMaestro can contact the blog aggregators and search engines for you, letting you focus on what you should be focusing on—writing your blog. As a blog writer, you don’t have the time to market and advertise your blog. You need someone who will do it for you so you can spend all of your time doing what you love and what you do best—writing. You need BlogMaestro.
As a member of our service, we will keep an eye on your blog, and whenever you
publish a new post, we will notify our ever-increasing list of sites that specializing in social media and user-generated content. Since you are already a blogger, or are at least considering becoming one, BlogMaestro is certain that you understand the shift in the way the Internet works; the days of publishing a website and expecting immediate traffic are long over. Web users are searching for fresh content and everyday, new sites are coming online in hopes of becoming the next hot site.
Today, there are millions of people looking for the newest, freshest blogs. These people are visiting the specialized sites catering to blog searches. As a member of BlogMaestro, you no longer need to perform the daunting task of notifying al of the blog aggregators and search engines about your new posts; BlogMaestro will to this for you. All you have to do is sign up; we take care of the rest. We don’t require you to place a custom code on your site, nor do we touch the technical makeup of your site. Once you sign up, we do all of the work associated with keeping the world up to date on your new blog posts, freeing you to focus on what is important—your writing.