Blogging 101 For The Not So Tech Savvy

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This is a guest post by Alexis Bonari. Should you wish to guest post in this blog, please visit the guest post guidelines.

Whether you’re promoting your business, looking for alternate sources of income, or sharing ideas with whomever might be looking in, blogging cultivates and depends on relationships.  Your blog can allow potential clients or friends to see what makes you different from the other companies and online journals abounding on the web. To that end, you have a few tough decisions to make.

1. What is your goal? Are you blogging to spread information?  To promote a business? To connect with others? To some degree, all successful blogs have to be about connecting with readers, so be sure that, whatever you do, you’re relatable, reliable, and responsive.  This means that when readers leave comments on your post, you must thank them for their attention, answer their questions, and return the favor by commenting on their blogs or sites.  You might even dedicate an entire post to a reader’s question or comment.  The more work you put into a blog, the more you reap.
2. What is your subject? Unless you’re blogging to keep in touch with friends, you must have a niche subject or message. Currently, four big niches (as these themes are called) are blogging, wealth, health, and lifestyle.  Click around the Internet to see what your competition is up to.  Rather than mimicking them, try to see what you could have done differently and make it your own.
3. What is your brand and how will you portray it? People choose Microsoft over Apple (or vice versa) for their own particular reasons but the fact is that they’re choosing one brand over another.  Your audience needs to come to your site for specific reasons and the reason must be clear.

Finding the Perfect Medium

Now that you’ve got your message, it’s time to decide on a medium.  Find a blogging platform (a website that hosts your blog) that appeals to you personally.  These are two of the most popular:

• WordPress.com is easy to use and boasts one of the strongest SEO rankings (SEO being search engine optimization, meaning when someone Googles a keyword like Health, your site based on popularity appears at the top of the results).  Monetizing via WordPress, however, isn’t possible.
• Blogger.com, owned by Google, is one of the easiest platforms to use and is quickly detected on a search.

Tools of the Trade

Once you’ve started blogging, you might consider adding a few tools to your arsenal, such as an email subscription service like mailchimp.com, which is a free service for your first 2,000 subscribers to your blog.

You’ll also want to offer readers an RSS feed.  RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and allows readers to receive updated posts without having to remember to revisit your site.  Use Feedburner to manage your RSS feeds.

You’ll find as you continue blogging that spam can be a real problem and an eyesore for potential clients and readers.  Check out Akismet to filter out the junk; eliminating your readers’ ability to comment altogether will harm your ability to build relationships online.  Remember that blogging is all about the connection.

Bio: Alexis Bonari is currently a resident blogger at College Scholarships, where recently she’s been adobe scholarships as well as adult student scholarships. Whenever this WAHM gets some free time she enjoys doing yoga, cooking with the freshest organic in-season fare, and practicing the art of coupon clipping.

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