www.diyara.com

1. It is perfect for creating a web presence for independent professionals who have something to say and who need people to get to know them and what they can do for them.

2. Having your own business blog gives you credibility and a forum where you can show your expertise.

3. Readers can comment directly onto your blog, creating interaction and interest.

4. No more waiting for your web designer to update your web site.

5. You can post to your blog yourself, about any issue, daily if you wish, and get it broadcast into the blogosphere instantly.

6. The search engines love blogs and will pick up your keywords easily, boosting your rankings, making it easier for people to find you on the web.

7. Customers are drawn to personality behind the business. Human voices convey intimacy beyond PR-babble. (To read about this topic read The Cluetrain Manifesto. The first chapter is available free online: http://cluetrain.com/apocalypso.html.)

8. You can network and build up a community of like-minded readers. You blog, people comment. Others blog, you comment. Before you know it, more people have heard of you and your business because the buzz gets passed around.

9. You can test out new ideas and get instant feedback. Get your customers and prospects in on the act now and let them help you help them - invite them to talk back! Let them see how you develop your products and services and they can show you how to best to serve them.

10. You can use your blog side-bars to promote your products, your affiliate products, run blog ads, sell books, and any other product or services you have. You don’t have to include this in the body or content of your article; therefore your posts - your writing - can remain content rich and free of promotional hype.

Finally, email marketing and electronic newsletters are struggling because of over-crowded inboxes, spam problems and filters.

- On the average, 64.7% of the business e-mail you send is not even opened, let alone read. [source: Q3 2004 Email Trend Report, DoubleClick ]

- E-mail marketers are seeing their open-rates range from only “mid-20s to just over 50 %” [source: ClickZ.com]

- That means that you are losing at least 50% of your prospective buyers or readers. How much does that amount to in losses over the course of the next few years?

- AOL receives roughly 2 billion e-mail messages a day, of which about 75 percent are blocked and another 4 to 7 percent are sent to the bulk folder. [source: ClickZ.com]

Sit up and pay attention. The time to start blogging for your business is now.

Denise Wakeman of Next Level Partnership, and Patsi Krakoff of Customized Newsletter Services, have teamed up to create blogging classes and marketing services for independent professionals. You can read and subscribe to their blog at http://www.buildabetterblog.com

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(Continued from Blogging Your Way To Success Part 1)

By now, you have already configured your blog name, description, personal profile, and the page template. As soon as you set up your blogging account with Blogger, you will need to do this next:

Post At Least 20 Articles

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While this may sound like hard work, there is no short cut around it. This, you have to do. It is mandatory. Why?

Before you start whining, let me remind you that you are in business. If you are serious enough about making your money then this should not bother you much. Now, the reason I ask of you to post at least 20 articles is because you need to have a REAL website to be in the game of Internet Business.

In the later part of this series, you will find out why this is important for setting up your AdSense account.

Anyway, post at least 20 articles. I recommend you post 25 or 30 articles to start with. Your articles need not be long. At least 200-500 words would do. Post them all in a day, if possible.

Be sure that your articles are relevant to your topic or niche. For example, if you are authoring a blog on Internet Marketing so let all your articles be related to Internet Marketing.

If 20 articles sound very hectic for you, you can source for other people’s articles from article submission web sites such as www.ezinearticles.com and www.articlecity.com as long as they have reprint rights and you include the authors byline. This can give you a good start but be sure not to keep using other people’s articles too often as this can damage your own reputation in a long run. Very soon, you will need to write your own articles. This is your blog.

Keep A Daily Archive

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If you would browse your Blogger settings, you will want to set your archive to “archive daily”. So now, you have at least 20 articles which mean 20 posts. And since you have set “archive daily”, you have at least 20 pages of REAL content now.

Awesome!

Get A Feedback Form

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This is the next important thing to do on the list. You want people give you their feedbacks, comments, suggestions and also constructive criticism. This involves more technical knowledge. If you are not familiar with scripting, I have two great sources where you can get the scripts for free and does not require a lot of technical knowledge.

http://www.freedback.com

http://www.bignosebird.com

Set up the forms on your blog for your visitor’s convenience. You want to know what they think of your web site and at the same time, find out what their demands are so you can cater to them accordingly.

In the next part of the series, we will get you an account with AdSense.

(To be continued in Blogging Your Way To Success Part 3)

Copyright © Edmund Loh

About the Author:
Edmund Loh is the author of the E-Biz Wiz Blog and Starting An Internet Business Special Report. Visit E-Biz Wiz Blog for proven ideas, tips and information on starting your own Internet Business and subscribe to the 12 Day Internet Marketing Success Course. http://ebizmodelsyoucancopy.blogspot.com

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Warning: this article, by necessity, touches on some technical webmastering details. If you want to set up a blog but do not want to use a free host, then this article is for you. However, if you find it too technical, you may want to consult a a friend who understands this stuff. I’ll do my best to keep the technical aspects to a minimum. I do not provide specific details of installation and configuration.

So, you’ve decided to forego a free host and use your own web domain for your new blog because of the freedom it affords you. The steps to do so are functionally simple, but there are important differences compared to using a free host. Here are the general steps:

1. Choose a domain name for your blog that best represents what you will be writing about.
• When you choose a domain name, you might consider the terms “blog”, “diary”, “journal”, or “letters” as part of the name. There are some bloggers who think that the term “blog” might not be in use in a few years. I personally don’t think it matters that much: use what you are comfortable with.
• Unfortunately, a lot of short, popular keywords and phrases have already been registered as domain names. You may have to come up with a large list of name options, and check them in decreasing order of preference.
• There are a number of websites that offer free domain name checking. For example, http://www.internic.ca, http://www.internic.com, and variations thereof for several other countries. Most Internet hosting providers also offer a domain name checking service that tells you whether the name is taken or not.
• If you plan to use your website to promote your business, it is recommended that you register your domain name for at least two years. This helps your standing in the Search Engines, and indicates that you intend to do serious business on the Internet instead of becoming a “spammer”. Of course, if you are promoting your business, the domain name should probably be similar to your business name. Your blog can then simply be setup in a subdirectory of your domain.
2. Choose a hosting plan.
• Once your domain is registered, you need to pay for the monthly cost of site bandwidth. With most hosting providers, you can register a domain and set up the hosting all in one session. However, you should understand the difference:
• Registering a domain name is like registering a business name with the government, but it also gives you your future web address, or URL.
• Setting up a hosting plan is the equivalent of paying for monthly rent for an office space for your business. If you choose the right hosting provider, you can do all the setup in one place.
• Compare the hosting plans of several hosting providers. Most of them will let you upgrade later, painlessly. But changing providers later is a pain and is best avoided, so choose carefully. If you’re just starting out, there’s no need to spend lots of money getting advanced hosting plans. Unless you have tons of money and plan a huge promotional campaign. In which case, it’s unlikely you need to read the rest of this article or series
3. Set up your blog. Here’s where things could get technical, and there are a lot of options.
• If you don’t have a technical friend you can rely on, your hosting provider may offer a service where they do this for you, as part of their hosting account package, or may charge you a setup fee. One of my providers has an administrative panel where you can enter some information (such as your new blog’s name, etc), and the blog will be set up for you after you click “install”. Many providers offer this type of easy install, but they do not always have any of the popular blogging platforms.
• If you want to use one of the more popular platforms, such as MovableType, WordPress, TextPattern, Drupal, etc., you’ll need to download the software from the source, then upload it to your new domain’s web server (host), then install it. This is too technical to explain properly in a single article. I recommend finding a host or a webmaster that will do this for you. For example, both MovableType and WordPress have teamed up with hosting providers to do this. You would have to register your domain name elsewhere, but then set up hosting with them.
• There are far too many blogging platforms and too many differences of installation to get into the details here. In fact, I could fill a book talking about the different blogging platforms. All of the popular platforms have reasonably well-written instructions. Here’s my summary of a few platforms I’m familiar with:
• While Blogger.com is most often used with the controversial Blogspot.com domain, you can use Blogger.com’s interface to set up a blog on your own domain.
• Blogger.com is very easy to set up and use. It’s a bare-bones blogging platform, but it’s not a bad starting point for new bloggers.
• WordPress.org’s WordPress is super-simple to install and has a whole host of “skins” (templates) and plugins for special functionality. I love the easy install, but many of my favourite WordPress plugins slow the website down, forcing me to disable them. This platform is quite popular amongst non-technical bloggers who manage their own domain.
• SixApart.com’s MovableType is easy to use. I enjoy the interface, and use it almost daily for a blog I write for someone else. But because I focus on free, OpenSource CMSes (Content Management Systems), I haven’t used the full version of MovableType on any of my sites. (There is an older free “personal” version.)
• SixApart also offers their own free OpenSource platform called LiveJournal. You can use their free hosting, which in principal is like Blogspot.com. But if you don’t want their banner ads showing, you have to pay a monthly fee. You can also down load the LiveJournal platform code and install it on your own domain. Unfortunately, unless you have a background in using the Linux operating system, you probably shouldn’t even attempt it.
• Drupal.org’s Drupal is arguably one of the most versatile and well-supprted blogging platforms. I’ve selected it for my next round of blogs. However, it’s not an easy install like WordPress. Furthermore, according to the Drupal community, domains set up with some hosting providers may produce database problems. I’ve encountered this issue myself and haven’t decided what to do.
• TextPattern, BoastMachine, Nucleus and several other newer platforms are gaining in popularity. They’re relatively easy to use and install. In fact, some hosting providers offer one or more of them with point-and-click install simplicity.
• Most of the above require that you at least know how to “FTP” files, and what that means.
• OpenSourceCMS.com has a detailed survey of many more blogging platforms and other CMSes. There are demos of each platform as well.
4. Set up a welcome page. Once your blog is set up, you can start posting entries. Most blogging platforms display entries in reverse chronological order. Nevertheless, it’s appropriate to start with a “welcome” post, explaining what your intent is, what you will be writing about, and how often.

Keep in mind that you can combine a regular website with a blog. In such an instance, the main page looks like a regular website, but there would be an area on the page with a “featured article”. My suggestion, if you’re just starting out, is to keep it simple. There is time later to re-design your website, and to customize the page template. I know I’ve glossed over a lot of very technical details, but you can learn along the way.

In the next article, I’ll talk about how to promote your blog, whether you’ve used a free host or a private host. In a still later article, I’ll talk a bit about ad networks and how you might earn some advertising revenue.

(c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, Chameleon Integration

Raj Kumar Dash is a writer, author, and Internet consultant. Visit his hubsite at http://www.chameleonintegration.com/ to find the full introduction to blogging. (A free ebook on blogging is in the works.) Newbie bloggers can also visit Raj’s BlogSpinner blog at http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/ for a “how-to guide to blogging”.

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