Advice and Tips on Creating Your First Blog

You have a topic and are ready to begin writing and publishing articles for the entire world to see. You know exactly what your going to write about, but where do you start your blog? There are many popular blogging platforms out there, both free (hosting) and paid (hosting). It can be tough to choose which route to go with at first, it really depends on how serious you are about blogging. It's a sad truth that most new bloggers start out strong (posting frequently) and then end up forgetting about the blog all together. If you're not sure then I would recommend a free blog, so you can test the waters (so to speak).

The two most popular free hosted blogging platforms are Blogger (which Google owns) and Wordpress. In this article I'm going to recommend you go with Blogger because it seems to rank higher in the search engines (which is a very good thing). Goto www.blogspot.com and if you already have a Google account then just sign in, if you don't than you'll have to create one. Once your signed in its time to create your blog. They hold your hand through the whole process so I'm not going to go through it with you, it is very easy so don't worry.

Some things to keep in mind are SEO (which is short for search engine optimization). Here is a VERY brief crash course. SEO determines how well your website or blog will rank in google. The kind of SEO we need right now is mainly keywords. If your blog is about Chinese Kittens then its a good idea to use the phrase "Chinese Kittens" through out your blog as a whole (header,title,posts,footer,etc). The more you use the word in your blog the more the search engines will relate your site to that phrase. Just make sure you don't get carried away with it, we don't want to spam!

It's also a good idea to use your subject in your blog url. So if your blog is about Chinese Kittens than something like "http://chinese-kittens-are-cool.blogspot.com" would be very awesome. This also helps with SEO, and it is entirely optional. Some people consider this tacky, but I don't see anything wrong with it.

So now the main part of setting up your blog is over with. Before you begin posting you may want to take a look at some of the templates blogger offers. To do this simply click on the templates tab at the top of the site. Templates change the way you blog looks. They have a few you can choose from, if you don't like any of the ones offered you can also upload your own. That's beyond the scope of this article but you can find out how to do this by doing a simple search in Google. Maybe I'll write a how to guide related to this soon.

Once you get your blog looking the way you want its time to start posting! Remember to include some keywords related to your niche in your posts. This is crucial if you want to get traffic through the search engines. You cannot rank for a phrase unless you use it! You should aim to write at least 5 pillar posts in the beginning. A pillar post is a very well written article covering your topic of choice. By well written I mean something that takes you a decent amount of time to do.

The reason we want to get 5 main posts is so that the readers have something to judge your blog by. If they like what they read then they are more likely to come back and to tell their friends. Once you get these 5 posts out of the way its time to get the word out. I'll cover this in detail in one of my next articles as well. For now just go to www.socialposter.com and submit some of your articles to the sites listed there. This will inform people of your blog and it will also give you some incoming links (SEO stuff again). That's it for now, I'll continue to cover blogging and online money making in my next articles!