Which Blogging Platform To Use?
October 29, 2008 by Albert
Filed under Make Money Online Basics
As a blogger, you will be spoilt for choice in selecting which blogging platform to use. You have a choice of having a hosted or non hosted blogging platform. Hosted blogging platform refers to blogging platforms such as Blogger or WordPress.com which will host your blog for you. Non hosted blogging platforms refer to blogging platforms that are hosted on your own hosting servers which in other words meant that you need your own domain name and hosting.
There are many blogging platforms around, and the best of them have to be WordPress currently. Although I may be biased in saying that but having used WordPress for quite a period of time, I find that no other blogging platforms offer the same power and flexibility that WordPress offers.
I have previously written a post on “6 Reasons To Use WordPress” and you should check it out to know why WordPress remains the choice of blogging platform for many bloggers and online marketers.
TypePad is another popular blogging platform for many bloggers. I have no prior experience using TypePad so I do not have any comments to make about this blogging platform. But judging from TypePad popularity, you can be sure that TypePad will be another viable option for bloggers.
Alright, before I drifted off topic, here are the blogging platforms that you can look into in the event that you want to start a blog:
1. Blogsmith
2. Expression Engine
3. Movable Type
4. Typepad
5. Wordpress
And for those of you who prefer the free option, here is a list of sites that you can host your blog for free:
1. Blogger
2. LiveJournal
3. Multiply
4. Wordpress
5. Xanga
For those of you who are unsure of which blogging platform to go for, go for WordPress. You will never go wrong with Worpress just like me. 
Setting Up A WordPress Blog
October 24, 2008 by Albert
Filed under Make Money Online Basics
WordPress is simply the best blogging platform out there for beginners and experience bloggers alike. For those of you who are looking to set up a wordpress blog on your own domain and hosting, you can get a feel of the WordPress blogging platform over at WordPress.com. Basically, what you need is just an email account to sign up for a free hosted wordpress blog to get started.
This simple tutorial is to guide those who are new online to sign up for an account with WordPress.com and set up their very first free hosted WordPress blog. Just follow these simple steps and you will be well on your way to your first WordPress blog.
To sign up for you’re a free hosted WordPress blog, just click on the big blue “SIGN UP NOW” button. It will then take you to the next screen.
You have a choice of straightaway having a blog of your choice or just signing up for an account. Remember to tick on the “Legal Flotsam” box after reading the terms of services first. Fill up all the necessary information and proceed to clicking on the “NEXT” button to go to the next screen.
Over this screen, you can choose the blog domain name to be hosted at WordPress.com. Please note that this domain name must be unique. If the domain name that you have chosen is not available, you must select another. As for the blog title, you can choose any name as you like. Once you have filled up all the information, click on the “Signup” button.
At this point, an activation email will be send to the email address that you have used for registration. You need to click on the link inside the email to activate your account or else you will be required to register again. Once you have activated your account, you can then log in to your blog’s account to write your first post.
Inside your WordPress blog control panel, you can choose a different theme for your blog. There are many plugins and themes to make your wordpress blog a complete CMS. However to take advantage of the full benefits and features of WordPress, it is better to have your own hosting and domain. Take your time to play with the functions and settings inside WordPress and when you are ready, get your own domain and hosting to make some money blogging.
Setting Up A Blogger Blog
October 19, 2008 by Albert
Filed under Make Money Online Basics
If you are keen to explore blogging further, it is advisable for you to get a feel of what blogging is about by starting a free hosted blog at one of the free blog hosting sites such as Blogger. As Blogger is one of the most popular free blog hosting sites around, I have set up this simple tutorial for those who need help on their first steps towards blogging success.
As Blogger is owned by Google, you can use your existing Gmail account to log in to Blogger and create your blog. Although you can use your Yahoo! Or Hotmail accounts to register for a Blogger’s account; I find it best to use my Gmail account for accessing my Blogger’s account.
Alright, here’s to the first step. If you have an existing Google account, just sign in using your email and password in the boxes on the top right corner. Otherwise if you do not have any exiting Google account, just click on the “CREATE A BLOG” orange button.
Once you click on that button, you will be direct to the next screen below. Fill up all the necessary information indicate in the boxes.
When you have finish, just click on the “CONTINUE” button to go to the next screen.
At this stage, your account is already registered and it is time to name your blog. Choose a suitable name for your blog. You can choose anything as the name need not be unique. However, it is a different issue when it comes to the blog address or blog URL. You need select one that has not yet been selected by others. For example if you type “ProfitablePoint” into the empty box, you will find that it is already taken up by yours truly.
To check for the availability of each blog URL, just click on the underlined “Check Availability” link. As for the part on the advance options, just ignore it for the time being. Once you finish filling up all the boxes, just click on the “CONTINUE” button to go to the next screen to select a template for your blog.
Now it is time to select a template for your blog. Go through the available templates and choose one that you like. When ready, click on the “CONTINUE” button to go to the next screen.
Now that you have finished setting up your blog, it is time to start blogging. Just click on the “START BLOGGING” button to start writing your very first post for your blog.
As you can see, getting started on blogging is not as technical or difficult as it seems. Once you got your Blogger’s blog started, start playing around and familiarized yourself with the functions and settings inside. You will find yourself mastering blogging basics in no time.
Traffic Generation For Beginners
October 15, 2008 by Albert
Filed under Make Money Online Basics
Traffic generation refers to the process of generating and driving traffic to your website. A website without any traffic is not going to make you any money and which is no wonder why all webmasters are always trying their hardest to drive traffic to their websites. It is not just any traffic but targeted traffic which is the key to making money or not.
As a newbie, it is important for you to understand that even though traffic is important, if you do not have any idea how to monetize them, you are leaving a lot of money on the table. Therefore, besides knowing how to drive traffic to your site, you also need to learn how to monetize your traffic which will be discussed in another post.
Here are some tips and free methods which will help you to generate and drive traffic to your website.
Article submission
Submitting articles to article directories is a good way to drive targeted and quality traffic to your website. The key is to write articles with enticing titles and a good author bio to boot. These two points will help to increase CTR (click through rate) to your website.
Blog Comments
Be the first or first few people to comment on high traffic blogs in your niche. This ensures a high degree of visibility for your comments and if your comments are well written, you can be sure that more people will find their way to you through your blog comments.
Forum Signatures
Forums are a great way to drive large volume of targeted traffic. Similar to commenting on blogs, you can also make suitable postings to hot threads to drive traffic to your website.
Quality Content
It is important to retain existing visitors rather than keep on driving new visitors to your website. Therefore, quality content is the single most important element in making sure people keep coming back to your website.
Regular Updates
It is especially important for bloggers to keep their blogs updated regularly. A blog or website without regular updates is definitely not going to have any repeat visitors much less new visitors. Stick to a regular updating of your sites to keep people coming back. This comes hand in hand with having quality content.
Social Bookmarking
Submitting articles and content to social bookmarking sites is another good and effective way to drive targeted traffic to your website. There are probably hundreds of social bookmarking sites around but you do not need to go to the extent of submitting to all of them. Just choose a few such as Digg, Propeller and StumpleUpon to focus on will do.
Social Networking
Many marketers and webmasters are leveraging on social networking sites such as FaceBook, Friendster and MySpace to build large networks of friends and market their products, services and websites to their networks. This is a highly effective method to generate and drive traffic and one which you should adopt as soon as possible.
There are more ways to generate and drive traffic to your website but these tips and methods will go a long way to helping you score your first visitors. Some of the methods such as PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising requires a certain amount of investment and is more suitable for experienced webmasters than newbies. Therefore, it is better to go for the free route first before venturing into paid methods. For more information on generating and driving traffic to your website, you can check out my section on “Traffic Generation”.
Link Building For Beginners
October 11, 2008 by Albert
Filed under Make Money Online Basics
Link building is an integral part of any webmaster’s online activities even though it is the one of the most time consuming and tiring tasks for webmasters. Link building refers to the process of acquiring incoming links from other websites to boost your website rankings in the search engines. When your site has a lot of incoming links from quality sites, your website be deemed as trustworthy and will be place higher in the search engines giving you a bigger pie of the organic traffic from search engines.
If you are new to link building, just understand that a link coming from a quality site is deem more useful than a few links coming from inferior sites. For example, a link coming from a PR4 (Page Rank) site will be considered by Google to be better than 10 links coming from 10 PR1 sites. Having quality incoming links will give a quick boost to your SERPS (Search Engine Results Page) placement, especially in Google.
However, even though quality links are very important, it is also difficult to get a lot of quality links initially. This is why it is important for you to build links of all sorts and types, regardless of page rank. There are many ways to build links and I have listed down some common methods which you can start building links for a start.
Article Submission
Submitting articles to article directories is one way of building one way links and driving traffic to your site at the same time. Many articles directories are highly placed in the search engines. When your articles are approved and published, most likely your article will get indexed within 24 hours or less, giving you another quality link to boot.
Blog Comments
Commenting on blogs is also another good way to get more links and also drive traffic to your site. Just make sure your not spamming other people’s blog just for the sake of getting some links. The trick is to provide decent comments on the posts.
Directory Submission
Submitting to quality website directories will provide you with quality incoming links for a start. This should be your initial link building method when you are starting a new site. There are both paid and free directory submissions but the frankly for me, the free directory submission will be more than enough for a start.
Forum Signatures
This is another popular method to build links and drive traffic at the same time. Most forums will allow registered users to include links in their signatures and when you make a post; your signature together with your links will appear underneath your posting, giving you another link. The more you post, the more links you will have pointing back to your site. Same as blog comments, the key is not to spam the forum but make intelligent postings.
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking is a relative new way to build links by bookmarking or submitting your content or web pages to social bookmarking sites. This is a good way to boost traffic and build quality links at the same time as a lot of social bookmarking sites have high PR.
As you can see, the methods listed above are more than enough to get you busy for an extended period of time. There are some tools and software that can give you a head-start and save you much time in building links. I have used Article Post Robot, Auto Social Poster and Directory Submitter for my link building efforts and I can say that these are the few tools and software that can really help you a lot. There are some other advance methods of building links which I will talk about another day in another post but for now, these methods will be good enough for you.
