Saturday, 16 June 2012

How do you blog?


So you have decided to start your own blog/CMS site and want to join the crowd.. read on..

I will try to cover generic topics in this article that you need to start blogging or CMS site. Details will follow in future posts. 

Step One – What do you want to blog about?


You need to make sure that you select right area in which you are good. For example if I am asked to write a review of Indian classical music, then god save me and reader. Similarly you need to make sure that you are good at the topic you are writing about. Secondly use “Google Adwords” and “Google Trends” to figure out you don’t have too much competition on the similar lines. For example you may be having heavy “keyword” competition for “textile waste recycling” but low competition for “textile recyclers”. Start with the topics which face low competitions but have low to medium traffic generation. Once you have figured it out, you are all set to look for technology/platform.


How do I host my blog site?

It depends whether you are a techie with a decent knowledge of webserver or an IT muggle. If you are the muggle kind, you have following choices:

1)      Blogger – The best, easiest and free to link domains
2)      Wordpress – Nice but costly
3)      Tumblr – Low priority stuff

You can register yourself with any of the above for free. The catch is if you want to link your own domain name to any of the blog, Blogger is free. Wordpress charge money on monthly basis for linking domain name to blog site. The advantage of Wordpress is that you can have lot of plug-in and other stuff which you won’t find easily for Blogger. I don’t recommend tumblr and other sites as primary blogging site but just use such portals for backlink generation. You can register your domain name with GoDaddy which has auto configuration utility for Blogger at Go Daddy Blogger DNS Setup site. Once done, your domain name will be pointed to blogger blog. Select a template in blogger and your good to go.

If you have access to Linux webserver, you have choice among various Content Management Systems. You can get CMS in Perl, php, asp, Java, Python, Ruby on Rails, SAS or in form of proprietary software. Some of the good free CMS are Typo (Ruby on Rails), Drupal (PHP), Joomla (PHP), Wordpress (PHP) {that’s why I love PHP, even FaceBook is using it but I don’t know why their stocks are going down. May be they should lose some passwords like LinkedIn}, WebGuI (Perl), Orchard (ASP), dotCMS (Java), OpenCMS (Java), Plone (Python) etc.. Being a PHP lover, I will cover Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress. Its like comparing oranges and apples, all three are different. Drupal and Wordpress are designed for easy deployment and Joomla is a bit difficult to run. I will recommend wordpress and reasons for that are following:
Wordpress
Drupal
Joomla
Ease of Deployment
Very Easy
Easy
Not easy
Frequency of updates
High
Medium
Low
Plug-ins
15000+
9000+
8000+
Number of Themes
1500+
1000+
200+
Market Capture
15%
2%
2.4%
Average Monthly Maintenance Cost
Very Low
Medium
Low
SEO
Very Good
Good
Good
Ease of Moderation
Very Easy
Easy
Not Easy

Clear Winner




Making Post

Now once you have set up your blog, it’s time to post some content to your site. While making post keep in mind following things:

i)                    Post original content – Though you may take idea from other sites, never copy paste content. Search engines are smart to figure out original and copied content based on content index date.
ii)                   Always put relevant tags, description in the post.
iii)                 Don’t make the post too long or too short. Length will depend on the type of content of post.
iv)                 Keep the first paragraph strong and catch. Spend more time there.
v)                  Make regular posts on your blog. Among 200+ points google look for while coming up with search result, frequency of update is one. At the same time don’t post 50 irrelevant articles a day.

Making your website appear in search results

Use following tools to promote your blog
Google Analytics – Use it to track your visitor and build a trend.
Google Webmaster – Use it to upload your sitemaps
Back links  - Create as many backlinks as possible to your site. Use relevant websites only to provide you backlinks
Question Answer Site – Join question answer site and generate back links from such websites to your blog.


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