Each day blogging is becoming more and more popular because of the social connections it creates between the reader and the author. If you ever wanted to start your own blog, this article is for you. I will cover the fundamental steps to starting a blog. The aim of this article is to turn a total newbie into a blogging machine!

Blogging Prerequisites

Before we start diving into the finer points of blogging, you first need to have a blank blog ready to go to follow along with.

Get your free blog - If you are looking for a free blogging service, I suggest you check out www.wordpress.com

Start a professional blog - If you are looking to make a blog for your business or plan to make money off your blog in the future, I suggest you start with a paid blogging solution as this will save your time, money, and frustration in the end.

For a good blogging host, take a look at ReadySetConnect. Once you sign up, you can run the auto-installation program that will setup your blog for you. There are multiple blogging platforms you can choose from, but I suggest you pick WordPress as all my examples in this tutorial will be for a WordPress blog.

Keep in mind the above suggestions are not your only solutions for getting your blog online. I am merely suggesting the ones I think will be easiest for someone new to blogging.

Picking The Right Design For Your Blog

Once your blog is setup, you will notice it starts out with a very ugly, default template design. Luckily, these blogging platforms make it simple to change the look of your blog.

Don’t know a thing about web design?

Don’t worry! There are literally thousands and thousands of pre-designed wordpress templates free for download. You can easily find some real professional looking web designs very quickly.

First, find the theme you like. Here is the WP theme database. Or you can search google for other wordpress theme sites. There are endless amounts of them.

Now, installing the theme can be a little tricky but is easy to do once you have done it once. Instead of writing out the install process, check out this tutorial on how to install the theme you want to use.

Writing to Your Blog

Now that you have your design up, it’s time to start writing to your blog. There are two ways you can write to your blog – a post, or a page. A post is similar to a journal entry, while a page is good for things like contact info, author bio, etc. The post is what you should be using for your daily entries to your blog.

Top Tips For Blog Writing

• Do not write long paragraphs. No one likes to read long things on the internet. Use no more than a few sentences per paragraph. Use lists as often as you can. <—this format is a list.
• Add images to your posts – It’s good to have at least 1 image per post to keep them interesting. All text is boring, and gives people head aches!
• Always Add Tags - It’s a good idea to always add tags to your posts. Some sites will categorize your post based on your tags. Tags are also a good way to add keywords to your posts. Just make sure the tags relate to your post!
• Post Daily - You don’t have to do this, but if you post daily you will get a lot more traffic over time.
• Always use header titles for breaking up your posts - Headers will make your posts easier to read, as well as add some search engine ranking benefits to your posts.

Promoting Your Blog and Getting Traffic To It

Traffic building is probably the most annoying part of blogging in my opinion. It is also the most labor intensive part of blogging for a lot of people.

Social bookmarking

This seems to work well with blogging sites. Here is a good site that will bookmark your sites to about 100 different social bookmarking sites. You do have to sign up for each site before hand, but it is definitely worth it. It will take less than an hour to sign up for all of them.

Guest blogging

Guest blogging is a great way to get traffic. Basically what you are doing is writing a blog post for someone else’s blog. Simply search google for blogs related to your niche. For instance, I run a web hosting blog so If I wanted to find another web hosting blog to possibly guest post on, I would search google for ‘web hosting blog’.

Keep in mind that not all blogs will allow you to guest post. Simply keep looking until you find one that accepts guest writing.

Commenting on other related blogs

This is another good source of traffic. Simply find blogs related to yours and comment on them. Add your blog URL to the comment (most blog software have an option for this when commenting). Always write quality comments. The best way to get traffic from other blogs is to write solid comments. The reader will think to him/herself that if this guy writes great comments like this, his blog must be awesome.

Writing vs Promoting your Blog

It is often difficult to partition your time for your blogging activities. I think the best portion of writing to promoting is 25/75. If you write one post a day, spend the rest of the day promoting your post, as well as promoting your main URL. It is a good idea to always link build and traffic build to particular posts on your blog, as well as your blog root URL – www.yourblog.com.

Have any questions? Feel free to ask them via comments. I will try my best to clear things up for you! Good luck blogging, and most of all KEEP AT IT!

Related posts:

1. Advantage of a self-hosted Blog. Why using a paid web hosting service is better for blogging.
2. How can a blog help your main website? Setting up a blog to increase web traffic.
3. 0bones.com updated to 1.1. Start, build, and promote your website for free.

For todays post I am shifting from web hosting a little bit. I want to talk about internet marketing – specifically how to develop a marketing plan for your website and business. The hardest internet marketing concept for me to grasp was how to properly link to your website and how to funnel targeted traffic to your sales pages. I hope that after you are done reading this post, you will have a better understanding of how to market your website and how to properly funnel traffic to the different areas throughout your network of websites, articles, and social bookmarks to make a sale.

Since the success of your website mostly depends on your internet marketing efforts, you should have a well developed plan or blue print on how to market your business products and services.

Most important tip: No one likes websites that sell things

The truth is, driving traffic to a website that is made solely to sell things(a business website) is quite difficult to do. It is even harder to get people to link to a website that sells things – after all, most products are not link worthy/interesting to write about. Unless of course the site linking to you gets something in exchange (affiliate sale).

So how do you get people to buy your products online?

What I have found to be the best way to drive traffic to your business website(or sales pages), is to make a ‘buffer website’. It is important that your buffer website has no sales pitch what so ever. A good buffer website is a website(blog, forum, wiki, etc) that is a hub for free, useful information and freebies.

I am going to use my web hosting business for example, since after all this is a web hosting blog. You may have noticed that this blog is full of free information and tools. You will find very little sales propaganda through the pages of my blog. However, my blog is setup to funnel traffic to my business website where I make the sale. When the user reads my free info I provided, it develops a level of trust and bond with the reader. Therefore, when I forward them to my sales pages, they are more willing to buy from me since I am seen as a ‘friend’ to them – after all, I just provided them with some useful information they didn’t know before.

I wrote an article awhile back on how a blog can drive sales to your business website. You should check it out for a better understanding of buffer sites.

OK. Now to the point – the marketing plan.

Below is a bubble map of how you should setup your websites in order to make the sale. This setup will work for almost every niche on the internet.

The arrows represent where you want to flow your traffic and link building efforts to.

Article Marketing

Write useful but incompletely articles. Word the articles so that they have to visit the site in the resource box of your article to get the finished information. For instance, if I were to write an article about green web hosting, I would say something like ‘green web hosting is somewhat new so there are few companies in the industry. The green web hosting market is completely untapped yada yada yada’. Then in the resource box you would say something like ‘[link]Check out my post about how to turn your web hosting company into a lean, mean, green machine![/link]‘.

You have just provided them with useful information – the green web hosting market is completely untapped. However, you have not said HOW to tap the market. In your resource box, they will know that in order to find out how to go green, they have to read another article that is on your blog or website.

Mini sites like Squidoo and Blogger

What I like to do is setup a couple mini sites that cover similar topics of my info and sales website. If we use web hosting as an example again, I would have my sales website(sells web hosting), my info/buffer site(useful info on web hosting), and a mini site(web hosting company reviews). I would setup the flow of traffic so that the mini sites send the traffic to my info site, and from there you go for the sales page.

Social Bookmarking

With social bookmarking you definitely want to avoid sales pitches at all cost. If you flow traffic directly from the SB to your sales site, I guarantee you that your visitor will leave within seconds. People on social websites are not looking to buy stuff(directly) but looking to be social and read and learn. To convert these people into sales, you need to send them straight to your info website first.

Forum Marketing

Forum marketing is a great way for instant visitors. It is possible to make sales directly from a forum board, but only in certain situations. You can probably get instant sales by posting ads within the forum where it is allowed. In most cases however, It is a good idea to setup your signature to flow the traffic to your info site first.

Word of Mouth

Word of mouth will generate much more quickly for a free and useful web site. A user will forward a friend to a website – ‘hey man I found this great webpage on how to market a website…check it out at http://whatever.com/’

Your Mailing List

You want to build up your list as much as you can from both your sales website and info website. Every time someone buys from you, add them to your mailing list. Every time someone is sent to your info website, try and capture their contact info to add them to your mailing list. Your mailing list is your friend. Be nice to your friend. Don’t send nothing but advertisements to your mailing list. Send them like 5 useful emails that direct them to your info website and on your 6th email, you can slip in a product or two.

The Complete Marketing Plan

By now you should have a general idea of how to flow traffic to your sales pages. However, in order to complete your marketing plan, you need to experiment. As I said before, this strategy will work in almost every niche around, but you need to practice. Figure out which traffic generation sources work the best for your niche and focus on those. Social bookmarking sucks for some people, while other people swear by it. It is just a matter of the niche you are in, and what the buying trends are. Just keep practicing!

Related posts:

1. Web forum marketing: Forums are the best free way to promote a website
2. Connecting your domain name to your web hosting plan. DNS forwarding vs name servers
3. How can a blog help your main website? Setting up a blog to increase web traffic.

Computer technology has evolved exponentially over the years, and all of the new technology requires new terminology so that geeks have an idea what other geeks are talking about. Some hosting terms are acronyms, others are initialisms, and a few are combinations of everyday speech with a little twist. Today we’re going to look at the meaning of DNS and DNS propagation.

DNS – DNS is short for Domain Name System, which is a fancy term for the link between the website you enter into your web browser (http://www.readysetconnect.com) and the actual machine that stores the website’s files. We discussed a portion of the intermediate step in our article on Name Servers, but today we’re going to go a little deeper.

All modern technology revolves around the two digits 0 and 1 in the form of binary code. Binary code can very often be deciphered by humans in simple terms, but trying to read or write in binary is near impossible. Saying “hello” would look like: 01101000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111. No one wants to read that, so our computers convert the digits to human-readable text. This makes our lives easier. The same process occurs when dealing with computer-to-computer communication.

All devices connected to the internet or some form of computer network are identified by a number called an IP address. For example, the IP of the computer you’re reading this article on is more than likely 127.0.0.1. But like binary, who wants to remember randomly and sometimes frequently-changing numbers just to visit a website? No one does, so the domain name system was created. DNS is the system that associates human-readable text (website addresses) with the number-based IP address of the remote computer. Instead of having to remember 209.85.171.100 when you want to visit Google, all you need to remember is Google.com. That’s much easier.

DNS Propagation – In our article on Name Servers we discussed the idea of a name server being equivalent to the listings of a telephone book. The name server is the machine that associates the name you remember and the address of the destination. DNS propagation is simply the time it takes for the new records of the name server and remote IP addresses to update on all computers. Thinking of our telephone book analogy, your friend may move to a new address, and it only takes you a minute to update your own phone book. While you may know the new address immediately, you will have to wait for the next round of phone books to ship from the phone company. This could be next week or, if the latest book just came out, as much as a year or two away. Fortunately, it only takes several hours for the changes to update for all computers on the internet, but the process is not instantaneous. Under normal conditions, it can take anywhere from 0 – 24 hours for all computers to be pointing to the same machine. So while you may be seeing that awesome new website you just posted, your friend down the street may have to wait a little while for his computer to update.

Related posts:

1. Web Hosting Jargon – Name Server
2. Connecting your domain name to your web hosting plan. DNS forwarding vs name servers
3. Hosting your website off your home PC. Is a personal web server a good idea?

Ever feel like you’re talking to someone from a foreign country when all you want is a little help with your website? This series explains what some of the web hosting industry’s technical terms mean, so the next time you contact tech support you’ll feel like you’re talking to someone who lives a little closer to home. Today we’re going to look at the job of a name server.

Name Server – The internet is made up of millions of computers located all around the world. Life would be much easier if these computers all talked to each other and knew exactly what you intended when you click a link on a website or enter a web address. Due to the internet’s technical nature, this perfect world doesn’t exist, so some of the busy work is left up to you, the user.

Whenever you type in an internet address such as http://blog.readysetconnect.com, your computer has no idea what remote machine it has to connect to. There are millions out there, but where should it go? How should it get there? The solution to this problem is the real-world equivalent of a telephone book. Given a name, you can search a telephone book to find a person’s phone number, and in many cases their home address as well. The listing in the phone book and the concept of a name server are synonymous. The name server’s job is to point the user (or in this case, the computer) to the destination where the website can be found. If someone moves or changes his or her phone number, the entry in the telephone book must be updated.

So what does a name server do?

The name server acts as the link between the user’s computer and the remote destination in that it tells the computer where it needs to go. Your job, when setting up a website, is to enter the name server into the phone book. Normally this is accomplished at the domain registrar website (the place you used to register your domain). The registrar will give you the option to configure anywhere from one to four or more name servers. Usually you will enter two, however more adds redundancy. After you update the name server, it can take anywhere from 0 – 24 hours for the registry to update. Once everything is online, your computer will know where to go when accessing your website, assuming the name server is configured correctly. That’s usually something you don’t have to worry about, and your web host will be able to help you if you have any problems.

For more information on DNS propagation, check out this post.

Related posts:

1. Web Hosting Jargon – DNS Propagation
2. Hosting your website off your home PC. Is a personal web server a good idea?
3. Securing a Server Tip #1

We’re going back to the basics today by defining what web hosting actually is. It’s actually quite hard to find a good definition of web hosting so I’m going to give you my technical definition. I will also give a couple good definitions that the layman can understand.

Every time someone asks me what it is that I do, I always have a hard time explaining to them what web hosting actually is. I always say something similar to:

ME: “I provide people with hard drive space on my web servers so that they can have their website online and viewable by other people.”

And almost always the persons’ response is “so you build websites or something?”

Then I will continue to go on for another couple minutes trying to find the best way to explain it to them until they eventually understand.

Help from other people to define web hosting

It was becoming apparent to me, that I was simply unable to provide a good explanation to the layman as to what web hosting really was. I guess my explanations have become tainted by years of working in the web hosting industry – too much jargon and I was assuming too much when describing to the person my job.

So I decided to get some help at www.webhostingtalk.com and I got some great definitions that are much easier to understand than mine.

• “Providing websites a home to live.”
• “Space for your sites on the internet.”
• “A business that allows customers to operate their own website without having to have their own computer running 24/7″
• “I have a computer that displays websites online. Customers pay to put their site on my computer so that their sites display online.”

It’s funny to me that there are so many ways to describe web hosting, some ways a lot more efficient than others. I think the above 4 definitions are the easiest to understand regardless of the persons background with website development/internet.

Got a better definition for web hosting?

Please share your definition with us. I am always looking for different ways to define my field of expertise that is simple for newbies to understand.

Related posts:

1. How much to spend on your website hosting
2. Hosting your website off your home PC. Is a personal web server a good idea?
3. Web Hosting Jargon – DNS Propagation