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Hi folks. This will be the first installment of what will become a complete bloggers guide. Do you like to write? Are you good at it? Can you put your thoughts into words? What is your favorite subject or thing to do? Is it skiing? How about fishing? What do you have a lot of experience in?
The hardest thing about blogging is settling upon a subject to write about. Only blog about something you know a lot about. That will make your job a lot easier. Hopefully what you like to talk about is a subject of a universal appeal. Subjects that appeal to a wide-ranging audience tend to get more visits and withstand the test of time.
Do you want your blog to generate revenue? Are you planning to make a living at blogging, or just want your own little cubbyhole online to hang out with people of similar interests? You can have both just so you know.
The difference is a larger learning curve and lots more work.
Monetizing a blog is not simple or easy. But that will be a discussion we will have for later down the line here. If you like to jump ahead occasionally you can go over to "Personal Development For The Gifted" (jimisound.com) and read the tech blogs and marketing blogs there.
For now, I want to help new bloggers with a good strong send off for their blogging startup. It will save you time and labor once you have your blog up and aired to be free of the rookie mistakes most beginning bloggers make starting out and eventually have to live with for quite some time before getting around to correcting them.
My first impulse is to tell you everything I know about blogging right here right now. But of course that would be impossible. I've been blogging for four years come January 2016, not counting the first year I started, 2011.
That year what I was writing were basically articles. I really only wrote 10 blog segments that year, and that's not blogging. That's less than one blog a month. Not blogging!
When I worked for Examiner I had to write a new blog post every day. If not then write two to three new blogs a week or I didn't make any commissions. What is most important is that you are CONSISTENT. This is how you will develop a steady flow of traffic to your blog and it is the best asset to your SEO work.
That's one great tip, here's another: Most of my time was spent learning the technology aspects (web coding technology) my first year. Learning the various CMS's out there. And speaking from experience, that never goes away.
If you're going to become a blogger you're going to be learning a lot more than just how to write enthralling blogs. You'll also have to learn about content management and website technologies. Basically what that means is you'll be learning how your blog site works, it's design and function abilities.
How to use the tools provided by my sites host took time.
The host is the platform upon which your website lives and breathes. The host you choose for your site will be the determinant of your success or failure. Hosting problems can and do discourage emerging bloggers.
Hosting problems can introduce overwhelming technical obstacles to your learning process which interferes with and complicates all the other processes you have to learn about becoming a notable blogger. Learning How to choose a host for your blog is the second most important decision you will have to make for your blog business aspirations.
If you choose Blogger by Google, the platform this blog is on, that's a good decision for bloggers who want to stay with the basics, publish quickly and be secure. Blogger is stable, secure, has been around a long time and is owned and operated by Google. But if you really want to grow, expand and become a dominant force on the Internet you'll need to move on into VPS and shared hosting.
Don't get me wrong, if you are tech savvy you can take a Blogger platform and do some pretty cool things with it. I've managed to take "The Unspoken Truth About People" to the first page of search in that niche. And that's pretty good considering Blogger is a subdomain (subdomains are more difficult to rank in search).
Aside from that, Blogger behaves more like a shared hosting platform with the only difference being in the way you get help for issues concerning the platform
But in my opinion, the money is in the versatility of a blog template and platform. I ran into SEO limitations with Blogger sites until I matured as a tech source for content management systems.
The most important SEO asset you'll have with a Blogger site for organic SEO is in the titling of your blog. But if you blew it titling your Blogger blog all is not lots. You can buy a domain with a title that suits your blog and just point it at your Blogger blog and make your blog recognized for that title and domain later. And, you can do that right from your Blogger "settings".
I've spent the last five years learning everything there is to know about blogging, digital marketing, hosting and web technologies. I'd like to think that has done me some good. But as we all know, technology is going to change on you so you have to keep learning new stuff. And I still have a long ways to go. I'm not a know-it-all. The moment I think that, is the moment I seize to learn new things.
This is my fifth blog site, not counting the social media blogs I write. If you count them I manage over 25 sites, not including the new Alchemy Internet Marketing site being built as we speak. It too will have a blog on it. It is a Word Press site. In my opinion, Word Press makes the most versatile and professional looking sites. (update: other co-opts and CMS companies are creating better-looking sites that require little or no coding)
You'll need to learn about plug-ins and a few other things to operate a Word Press site but overall its worth it.
A plug-in brings features to a site, template or browsers that were not a part of the original version. They make them cable of other things not originally a part of the initial package. Midway into 2015, there were about 38,400 plug-ins in the Word press directory. The Word Press plugins allow you to customize functions and add features to make your website unique to your business and ensure efficient performance. That's what makes Word Press so versatile.
Now, four years in, I have begun looking seriously at monetizing my blogs the right way and building the "right" consistent high volume traffic to them. By right I mean people who would click the advertisers and by my products. It's easy to have the wrong kind of traffic for your blog. Much easier than getting the right kind of traffic.
Though I make some money right now, I'm not making what I could be making this far into the process. Some of my blogger acquaintances are making tens of thousands of dollars per month. And I'm fine with that, revenue wasn't ranked high on my list of priorities; how to write, what to write, when to write, where to write was. Now that I've learned that stuff its time to make money with my passion.
Though it does comfort me to know that the high money making bloggers have been at it an average of three years longer than me, that is no consolation. I cannot be complacent anymore about money. Blogging is a business and businesses need to make money to make it worthwhile.
The other reason for that is diversity. I've not focused specifically on making money up to now because I've been focused on the technology and building an empire that in the end will be imbued with various marketing channels and conversion sciences.
Some that lean more towards articles, some to support other blogs, some primarily to generate revenue and some to grow my brand and my marketing services. So my approach to blogging is probably a little different than yours would be.
I got caught up in blogging during that school break and have been a prisoner to it ever since.
It wasn't something I had planned to do. It began during a school break in between degree programs in 2011. I had been working in the entertainment industry doing several things. Writing songs for myself and others, learning piano and learning to arrange in a variety of music genres. When things got slow in music I would work in television and television lead to working in movies. Nothing big, nothing famous, but I did draw paychecks and that was the main thing to me; to supplement my job as a reporter for the San Diego Reader magazine and the job as a songwriter in the music industry.
So as far as I was concerned I worked in and for Hollywood production companies and that was good for me to grow. But that was only an income stream for me. I had also just finished The Cisco School of Computer Networking back then which had wonderful promises. My first job after finishing Cisco school was in Spain, but divorce set in and I had two small daughters both whom I love dearly. I couldn't take a job so far away from them. Confused I stayed in the states worked this job and that job till I was sure of what I wanted to do with my life.
I decided to go back to school. Divorce began in 2000, by 2010 I had finished Cisco school, and a degree in college working as a business consultant, San Diego music scene reporter for the magazine, and working at Staples as a customer service specialist.
It was in college that I learned that not only could I write poetry, music, and songs, but I could write good papers, white papers, articles, and letters. In college, my writing skills and techniques were being fine-tuned. The magazines I had been writing for up to that point had been publishing me because they saw potential, but I'm a much better writer now compared to then. I never got less than an A on any paper I wrote during both my college degrees.
So in 2010 during school break, I started Jimisound.com a music and entertainment industry blog and website. That was the evolution of becoming a blogger. Yours will be different, not less in any way, just different.
Now that I've shared that with you, let me tell you this. You don't have to be a trained writer to operate a blog.
Expressing your thoughts and information in a way that people can read and understand what you're saying is all that is necessary to be a blogger. You just need to know how the report what will actually help the people in your audience. True, some people will leave a blog if they see a spelling error, mistake in grammar etc., but most readers won't be that sensitive about a work unless its just bad, I mean really bad.
Print errors can occur for a number of reasons. Fatigue, tired eyes, being distracted, and they can also occur by word processor malfunctions, internal computer processor delays, republishing, text degrading, and other things like space box allocations or restrictions. So even when you've dotted all the I's and crossed all the T's something unforeseen during and sometimes after the publishing can occur.
That's why proofreading after publishing is important and it's a good idea to proof read more than once to catch these errors. I always proof read again after publishing a blog. Because you'll almost always find one or two small errors on a page you've published. A letter missing from a word, typing "there" when you meant "their" That's just the world of writers. Get use to correcting your work. And finding some you missed.
I knew nothing about internet marketing and even less about blogging when I started. I only knew that I loved music, had been there and wanted to help others with their own music business endeavors.
I didn't know anything about making money with blogging, I didn't know what blogging was. I just knew I loved to write. So I did, I wrote and I wrote on jimisound.com.
And, well over a year later learned that I was blogging.
I wrote everyday from experience and research filling the site with content as I learned about creating and managing websites and learning new web technologies as they developed. The point I want to make here is that I knew everything and then some about what I was writing about. And you must know everything there is to know about the subject of your blog (s) or almost anyway.
Lots of times when you're writing. some things you know don't come to mind. Researching your subjects is good for that and of course many other reasons. I can't tell how many times I've been doing the research on a subject I'm about to blog and have my memory jogged. It's like, oh yeah, I knew that. So do the research first. It will help you to write more useful information into your blog.
Then you must organize your information. You can do that using a pre-designed outline template or you can doing it proof reading, but you'll need to organize the information in your blog.
It was easy and fun at first, but then came marketing the website. That puts you and your writing to the real test. It's very challenging. There will be some apprehension on your part at first but you'll get trough it.
How was I to make jimisound.com known in the world. That was an overwhelming thought. You mean I have to build the website outline, create the content and then market the website? I thought that was automatic! I thought you just title your site smartly the host takes over and people find it.
I thought people just came to your site once it was finished. Finished? No such thing! A blog site is never finished. Just like a song. Oh, you may decide to produce the song and publish it at some point, but a song is never finished. They are endless. And, so are blogs!
Enter the concept of link technologies. Link technology is a marketing process I and other marketers employ (its just one of many sciences Internet marketers use) and will be discussed in more detail in my marketing blogs at a future date. The (marketing) SEO blogs I am writing are found on jimisound.com if you didn't know already.
Oh my, this is just getting deeper as I go I thought. Can I do this I thought? Oh, no, and I have to go back to school in a few months. What have I gotten myself into? Needless to say, going back to school sent my website soaring downward. I just couldn't put the time into learning everything I needed to know while carrying eighteen credits a semester.
But worse was I didn't have time to write new and fresh material to it every day. But I moved forward with it nervously stumbling, getting stumped on every occasion with the technology part and the design parts.
And design, oh don't even mention that. A mind boggling energy draining black hole depending on the nature of your website. And I'm not speaking of my girl friend. Honestly speaking, it wasn't until I was out of school (2014) that I was able to really invest time into jimisound.com and Blogger and Word Press.
My favorite color (one of them) is blue. So I made the jimisound.com site blue. That was lucky because it just so happens that blue is one of the best colors for a website, particularly a business site. Look at the worlds most popular sites, Facebook, Google, Linkedin etc, all blue!
This is the first blog here, so I will be experimenting with this sites layout and colors too; so bare with me on that too, please.
There are color psychology schemes you can apply to your websites. For instance orange motivates people to spend. Yellow evokes positive thinking. Having a shade of orange in, on and around your ecommerce site can do wonders in that way. School started and I was immediately over whelmed. I was in a private, accelerated university carrying 18 credits, an honor student with collateral duties, and I was in trouble, or more to say jimisound.com was in trouble. To be continued...........
Recommended: Journal Blogs-the building of jimisound.com
I think the journals begin at entry no.2-6
Are you enjoying this? Is sharing the details of my beginnings as a blogger helpful to you? Eventually, I will cover all aspects of blogging so you continue to learn by my mistakes. Come back here and learn as you grow into each phase of the blogging experience. I think beginning it this way can put some things into perspective for you in a way that you might relate to easier and quicker. Lets stop here for now and pick it up in the next segment. I am publishing this draft now so you can get started reading it. Thank you for being here. Take care, see you very soon with the next installment of "THE BUSINESS OF BLOGGING"
Happy Blogging!
The hardest thing about blogging is settling upon a subject to write about. Only blog about something you know a lot about. That will make your job a lot easier. Hopefully what you like to talk about is a subject of a universal appeal. Subjects that appeal to a wide-ranging audience tend to get more visits and withstand the test of time.
Do you want your blog to generate revenue? Are you planning to make a living at blogging, or just want your own little cubbyhole online to hang out with people of similar interests? You can have both just so you know.
The difference is a larger learning curve and lots more work.
Monetizing a blog is not simple or easy. But that will be a discussion we will have for later down the line here. If you like to jump ahead occasionally you can go over to "Personal Development For The Gifted" (jimisound.com) and read the tech blogs and marketing blogs there.
For now, I want to help new bloggers with a good strong send off for their blogging startup. It will save you time and labor once you have your blog up and aired to be free of the rookie mistakes most beginning bloggers make starting out and eventually have to live with for quite some time before getting around to correcting them.
My first impulse is to tell you everything I know about blogging right here right now. But of course that would be impossible. I've been blogging for four years come January 2016, not counting the first year I started, 2011.
That year what I was writing were basically articles. I really only wrote 10 blog segments that year, and that's not blogging. That's less than one blog a month. Not blogging!
When I worked for Examiner I had to write a new blog post every day. If not then write two to three new blogs a week or I didn't make any commissions. What is most important is that you are CONSISTENT. This is how you will develop a steady flow of traffic to your blog and it is the best asset to your SEO work.
That's one great tip, here's another: Most of my time was spent learning the technology aspects (web coding technology) my first year. Learning the various CMS's out there. And speaking from experience, that never goes away.
If you're going to become a blogger you're going to be learning a lot more than just how to write enthralling blogs. You'll also have to learn about content management and website technologies. Basically what that means is you'll be learning how your blog site works, it's design and function abilities.
How to use the tools provided by my sites host took time.
The host is the platform upon which your website lives and breathes. The host you choose for your site will be the determinant of your success or failure. Hosting problems can and do discourage emerging bloggers.
Hosting problems can introduce overwhelming technical obstacles to your learning process which interferes with and complicates all the other processes you have to learn about becoming a notable blogger. Learning How to choose a host for your blog is the second most important decision you will have to make for your blog business aspirations.
If you choose Blogger by Google, the platform this blog is on, that's a good decision for bloggers who want to stay with the basics, publish quickly and be secure. Blogger is stable, secure, has been around a long time and is owned and operated by Google. But if you really want to grow, expand and become a dominant force on the Internet you'll need to move on into VPS and shared hosting.
Don't get me wrong, if you are tech savvy you can take a Blogger platform and do some pretty cool things with it. I've managed to take "The Unspoken Truth About People" to the first page of search in that niche. And that's pretty good considering Blogger is a subdomain (subdomains are more difficult to rank in search).
Aside from that, Blogger behaves more like a shared hosting platform with the only difference being in the way you get help for issues concerning the platform
But in my opinion, the money is in the versatility of a blog template and platform. I ran into SEO limitations with Blogger sites until I matured as a tech source for content management systems.
The most important SEO asset you'll have with a Blogger site for organic SEO is in the titling of your blog. But if you blew it titling your Blogger blog all is not lots. You can buy a domain with a title that suits your blog and just point it at your Blogger blog and make your blog recognized for that title and domain later. And, you can do that right from your Blogger "settings".
I've spent the last five years learning everything there is to know about blogging, digital marketing, hosting and web technologies. I'd like to think that has done me some good. But as we all know, technology is going to change on you so you have to keep learning new stuff. And I still have a long ways to go. I'm not a know-it-all. The moment I think that, is the moment I seize to learn new things.
This is my fifth blog site, not counting the social media blogs I write. If you count them I manage over 25 sites, not including the new Alchemy Internet Marketing site being built as we speak. It too will have a blog on it. It is a Word Press site. In my opinion, Word Press makes the most versatile and professional looking sites. (update: other co-opts and CMS companies are creating better-looking sites that require little or no coding)
You'll need to learn about plug-ins and a few other things to operate a Word Press site but overall its worth it.
A plug-in brings features to a site, template or browsers that were not a part of the original version. They make them cable of other things not originally a part of the initial package. Midway into 2015, there were about 38,400 plug-ins in the Word press directory. The Word Press plugins allow you to customize functions and add features to make your website unique to your business and ensure efficient performance. That's what makes Word Press so versatile.
Now, four years in, I have begun looking seriously at monetizing my blogs the right way and building the "right" consistent high volume traffic to them. By right I mean people who would click the advertisers and by my products. It's easy to have the wrong kind of traffic for your blog. Much easier than getting the right kind of traffic.
Though I make some money right now, I'm not making what I could be making this far into the process. Some of my blogger acquaintances are making tens of thousands of dollars per month. And I'm fine with that, revenue wasn't ranked high on my list of priorities; how to write, what to write, when to write, where to write was. Now that I've learned that stuff its time to make money with my passion.
Though it does comfort me to know that the high money making bloggers have been at it an average of three years longer than me, that is no consolation. I cannot be complacent anymore about money. Blogging is a business and businesses need to make money to make it worthwhile.
The other reason for that is diversity. I've not focused specifically on making money up to now because I've been focused on the technology and building an empire that in the end will be imbued with various marketing channels and conversion sciences.
Some that lean more towards articles, some to support other blogs, some primarily to generate revenue and some to grow my brand and my marketing services. So my approach to blogging is probably a little different than yours would be.
I got caught up in blogging during that school break and have been a prisoner to it ever since.
It wasn't something I had planned to do. It began during a school break in between degree programs in 2011. I had been working in the entertainment industry doing several things. Writing songs for myself and others, learning piano and learning to arrange in a variety of music genres. When things got slow in music I would work in television and television lead to working in movies. Nothing big, nothing famous, but I did draw paychecks and that was the main thing to me; to supplement my job as a reporter for the San Diego Reader magazine and the job as a songwriter in the music industry.
So as far as I was concerned I worked in and for Hollywood production companies and that was good for me to grow. But that was only an income stream for me. I had also just finished The Cisco School of Computer Networking back then which had wonderful promises. My first job after finishing Cisco school was in Spain, but divorce set in and I had two small daughters both whom I love dearly. I couldn't take a job so far away from them. Confused I stayed in the states worked this job and that job till I was sure of what I wanted to do with my life.
I decided to go back to school. Divorce began in 2000, by 2010 I had finished Cisco school, and a degree in college working as a business consultant, San Diego music scene reporter for the magazine, and working at Staples as a customer service specialist.
It was in college that I learned that not only could I write poetry, music, and songs, but I could write good papers, white papers, articles, and letters. In college, my writing skills and techniques were being fine-tuned. The magazines I had been writing for up to that point had been publishing me because they saw potential, but I'm a much better writer now compared to then. I never got less than an A on any paper I wrote during both my college degrees.
So in 2010 during school break, I started Jimisound.com a music and entertainment industry blog and website. That was the evolution of becoming a blogger. Yours will be different, not less in any way, just different.
Now that I've shared that with you, let me tell you this. You don't have to be a trained writer to operate a blog.
Expressing your thoughts and information in a way that people can read and understand what you're saying is all that is necessary to be a blogger. You just need to know how the report what will actually help the people in your audience. True, some people will leave a blog if they see a spelling error, mistake in grammar etc., but most readers won't be that sensitive about a work unless its just bad, I mean really bad.
Print errors can occur for a number of reasons. Fatigue, tired eyes, being distracted, and they can also occur by word processor malfunctions, internal computer processor delays, republishing, text degrading, and other things like space box allocations or restrictions. So even when you've dotted all the I's and crossed all the T's something unforeseen during and sometimes after the publishing can occur.
That's why proofreading after publishing is important and it's a good idea to proof read more than once to catch these errors. I always proof read again after publishing a blog. Because you'll almost always find one or two small errors on a page you've published. A letter missing from a word, typing "there" when you meant "their" That's just the world of writers. Get use to correcting your work. And finding some you missed.
I knew nothing about internet marketing and even less about blogging when I started. I only knew that I loved music, had been there and wanted to help others with their own music business endeavors.
I didn't know anything about making money with blogging, I didn't know what blogging was. I just knew I loved to write. So I did, I wrote and I wrote on jimisound.com.
And, well over a year later learned that I was blogging.
I wrote everyday from experience and research filling the site with content as I learned about creating and managing websites and learning new web technologies as they developed. The point I want to make here is that I knew everything and then some about what I was writing about. And you must know everything there is to know about the subject of your blog (s) or almost anyway.
Lots of times when you're writing. some things you know don't come to mind. Researching your subjects is good for that and of course many other reasons. I can't tell how many times I've been doing the research on a subject I'm about to blog and have my memory jogged. It's like, oh yeah, I knew that. So do the research first. It will help you to write more useful information into your blog.
Then you must organize your information. You can do that using a pre-designed outline template or you can doing it proof reading, but you'll need to organize the information in your blog.
It was easy and fun at first, but then came marketing the website. That puts you and your writing to the real test. It's very challenging. There will be some apprehension on your part at first but you'll get trough it.
How was I to make jimisound.com known in the world. That was an overwhelming thought. You mean I have to build the website outline, create the content and then market the website? I thought that was automatic! I thought you just title your site smartly the host takes over and people find it.
I thought people just came to your site once it was finished. Finished? No such thing! A blog site is never finished. Just like a song. Oh, you may decide to produce the song and publish it at some point, but a song is never finished. They are endless. And, so are blogs!
Enter the concept of link technologies. Link technology is a marketing process I and other marketers employ (its just one of many sciences Internet marketers use) and will be discussed in more detail in my marketing blogs at a future date. The (marketing) SEO blogs I am writing are found on jimisound.com if you didn't know already.
Oh my, this is just getting deeper as I go I thought. Can I do this I thought? Oh, no, and I have to go back to school in a few months. What have I gotten myself into? Needless to say, going back to school sent my website soaring downward. I just couldn't put the time into learning everything I needed to know while carrying eighteen credits a semester.
But worse was I didn't have time to write new and fresh material to it every day. But I moved forward with it nervously stumbling, getting stumped on every occasion with the technology part and the design parts.
And design, oh don't even mention that. A mind boggling energy draining black hole depending on the nature of your website. And I'm not speaking of my girl friend. Honestly speaking, it wasn't until I was out of school (2014) that I was able to really invest time into jimisound.com and Blogger and Word Press.
My favorite color (one of them) is blue. So I made the jimisound.com site blue. That was lucky because it just so happens that blue is one of the best colors for a website, particularly a business site. Look at the worlds most popular sites, Facebook, Google, Linkedin etc, all blue!
This is the first blog here, so I will be experimenting with this sites layout and colors too; so bare with me on that too, please.
There are color psychology schemes you can apply to your websites. For instance orange motivates people to spend. Yellow evokes positive thinking. Having a shade of orange in, on and around your ecommerce site can do wonders in that way. School started and I was immediately over whelmed. I was in a private, accelerated university carrying 18 credits, an honor student with collateral duties, and I was in trouble, or more to say jimisound.com was in trouble. To be continued...........
Recommended: Journal Blogs-the building of jimisound.com
I think the journals begin at entry no.2-6
Are you enjoying this? Is sharing the details of my beginnings as a blogger helpful to you? Eventually, I will cover all aspects of blogging so you continue to learn by my mistakes. Come back here and learn as you grow into each phase of the blogging experience. I think beginning it this way can put some things into perspective for you in a way that you might relate to easier and quicker. Lets stop here for now and pick it up in the next segment. I am publishing this draft now so you can get started reading it. Thank you for being here. Take care, see you very soon with the next installment of "THE BUSINESS OF BLOGGING"
Happy Blogging!
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