A South African blogger has been hit with a R 461 500 defamation case after he blogged
about his experiences with a timeshare company.
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The other day I had a post on HOW TO START BLOGGING and i thought it would be great to ad this post to that one.
Today I would like to show you some blogging essentials.
Blogging is fun but at the same time blogging can teach you a lot of great stuff. One of those things is management. A blog has to be managed, almost like a business. If you dont do certain things a blog will just go dry. And soon the blog that is left to survive on its own will just become more search engine clutter with no real humans behind the box.
The Blogging essentials that I am writing about today are not all needed but they are great tools to have. And if you dont know about them all you might find a treasure between all these things. If you know of everything that is listed here, feel free to add something I have missed.
Rank
Rank is important both for advertisers and for your blog to grow. While you or I dont really care much about rank, it still is a factor when trying to get your blog to the point where you can make a living from blogging. As some of you might of notice, its not a as you imagined before you started blogging. Blogging is tough. At least that is what I think. Ranking also enables you to make more money. For instance: People with a Pagerank of 6 could easily ask a nice price for advertisers whereas blogs that have a pr1 or 2 would not make that much money. Ranks reflect your blog's community and traffic. Most of the time.
One thing about blogging is that the better your rank the more traffic you get and the more traffic you get the better you will rank.
Here are some places to check your rank or status:
Alexa
Old, belongs to Amazon if I am correct. Alexa is not as accurate as some would claim, nevertheless people still use it and if you rate very high (low) on Alexa you can get more money for advertising space. Some companies use Alexa ranks to choose if they want to buy or sell domains. Alexa rank is important for your blog even with it's inaccuracy.
Pagerank
Pagerank used to be the biggest way people would rank a site. But in recent months no one really cares about Pagerank, or at least know one I know including me. That is because they have changed the old realiable way it worked. I am guess it was a good thing since they are improving their search, but for me, watching my PR go up and down every month is just to annoying.
Technorati
Technorati is also a great ranking tool. Technorati is also well known, they trace a few million blogs all over the internet. If you make it to the top 100, you've basically made it as a blogger. I would'nt mind.
But recently technorati removed all Wordpress 2.3.3 blog. Maybe not removed but they stopped indexing them because of the vulnerability in Wordpress 2.3.3. I think I lost my technorati rank as well. But they did it so people's blogs wont get hacked.
Amatomu
The reason I am putting in Amatomu is because I am a South African. Amatomu matters for South African bloggers because it shows you where and how you rate between South African bloggers.
Compete
Another ranking system.
Wordpress
Adman
Adman is a great plugin for Wordpress. Adman enables you to insert Google Adsense or other code generated by PPC or affiliates into your blog posts and on the frontpage. Adman has three options, paste it in on the top of your posts in the middle and below. There is also a setting that enables you to have a ad in the first post of your blog on the front page as well. Adman works great with Wordpress 2.5
Related Posts
The related Posts plugin is great to enable your readers to explore your blog more. Using it underneath your post or below the comments where they can see it will also increase your pageviews because they might just read more posts. Related Posts works great in Wordpress 2.5
Popularity Contest
Many Wordpress themes need this plugin to display the popular posts on the right hand side of the blog. It enables your readers to see which posts are nice and those that other people have liked.
Money
Adsense
Adsense is well known. You can make a lot of money using Adsense if you use it correctly. Adsense was started a few years ago by another guy and got bought by Google. That is why we now know it as Google Adsense. Just a bit of info.
The most famous adsense format is the 300x250, it is said that is the adsense format people make the most money with. I have to agree. Although many bloggers do not like seeing Adsense on other blogs, it is still widely used. Some people might disagree.
Chitika
Chtiika is one of my favourite ways to make money online. They offer a lot of formats and things that you can use to make money. I think the most famous one is the linx code. Linx code is the one I like the most. They also have a referral program where you can refer people and friends to them. You get paid for everyone you refer to them.
Smorty
Smorty offers a lot of different affiliate banners to choose from. Smorty is another way of blogging and posting payed blog posts. A nice way to make some more money.
Linkworth
Linkworth has many, many options and ad formats to choose from. you can also do payed posts for Linkworth to earn extra cash from your blog.
Seo
Headspace2
Traffic
Entrecard
Entrecard is a great way to get people to come to your site. You will just have to use more methods of attraction than the Entrecard widget itself. Entrecard is great for sites that first start out. But one thing you have to keep in mind if you are using entrecard is Adsense. Adsense and Entrecard does not work well together. That is because a lot of people come to your site just to click, but that brings your revenue from Adsense down.
Feedburner
The reason this is under traffic is because I first wrote it. I guess feedburner can go under tools or community. Feedburner is a way to keep track of your feed statisctics and helps you optimize your content. You can also make money with your feed by embedding Adsense in your feed through Feedburner.
Community
Blogcatalog
Blogcataglog is the bussiest blog community site I have found so far. On Blogcatalog you can get a widget to embed in your blog. You can also get a lot of traffic from Blogcatalog if used correctly.
Mybloglog
Mybloglog is also a blogging community site.
Theme
Getting a unique theme or making your own theme unique is very important for branding purposes. A great theme will help you make more money while giving your viewers some eye candy. This is obvious. Your blog has to stand out from the crowd and be unique. It should reflect the blogger's taste.
Firefox
Scribefire
or
Deepest Sender
Stragedy
Having a blogging stragedy (plan or whatever its called) will enable you to work towards a certain goal. Here are some stragedies in blogging:
Linking and networking with other bloggers
This is really important. Since most people reading blogs are bloggers themselves. We as bloggers need to network and help each other. Networking is the most important thing that will keep your blog going. After all, remember when you did your first blog, it felt so stupid because it felt like you were speaking to yourself. That's how I felt. Not networking would mean you basically blog on your own.
Commenting
Commenting to show others that you actually read their blogs and participate is actually part of networking. Commenting is participating in the blogging community. Commenting should be done with caution. You can delete a crap post but you cant delete a crap comment. Comment on as many blogs as you can BUT do it sincere and not just to get people over to your blog.
Competition
Running competitions on your blog is a great idea to get your blog out there.
Read more here
Learn
Wikipedia
You can learn a lot of blogging terms at wikipedia. Although you cant trust everything you read its still worth something.
Problogger.net
I guess everyone knows problogger but I have learned a few things on his site and its worth including.
So there it is. A few things that could help you start with blogging or further your blogging career / hobby.
If you liked this post please consider bookmarking this on Sphinn / Stumbleupon / Digg or any other site you use.
Have you ever read someone saying start a blog but dont quite get it? I used to read people saying all the time " start a blog " but I did not understand why. Well here is a few (10) reasons why to start blogging that I have learned since I have started blogging
1. Blogging can give you better writing skills Since I have been blogging my grammar and spelling has improved greatly. Also with the help of Firefox and its spell check. When I do make a mistake I see it and next time I know how to spell the word. By the way, my first language is not english.
2. Blogging can teach you people skills Blogging can teach you how to handle certain situations. When conflicts arise you can learn in blogging how to handle it. And when you leave your computer you have those skills.
3 Blogging can teach you how to socialize While it might be a bit different than normal socializing, blogging can teach you how to socialize. Blogging is not just people blogging about random crap but it involves skill and one must be able to socialize in order to have a successful blog.
4. Blogging can teach you how to do Marketing To have a successful blog you need to learn how to market your blog. You need to learn how to advertise your blog for as cheap as possible and get ways to get more traffic to your blog. Blogging can teach you a great deal of marketing.
5. Blogging can be a business for products Instead of listing products on a normal site, why not blog about them. The more you blog about them the more you stand the chance of being found on search engines for that specific product. While this is not that easy with things like computers its way easy if you have a small product you are trying to sell that is not as famous as computers. Just think about it. What would get more traffic? 100 products listed on a site or 1000 blog posts, 10 posts about each product linking to each other? Obviously the blog would get more visitors.
6. Blogging can help your typing skills This is if you can type already. Blogging can increase your typing skills. This will greatly help you if you want a job as a secretary or such.
7. Blogging can give you self confidence Blogging can give you great self confidence and make you feel better about yourself. To afraid to take chances and speak to people? Well as my blog grew I started to speak to people more. Now I have confidence to speak to anyone.
8. Blogging can get you a job. Being a authoritative blogger in your are of expertise can get you a job in that area or niche. If your design blog rates higher than for instance a design company you might get a job.
9. Blogging can make you some spare cash or you can make a lot of money from blogging. Blogging for money is easy but it takes a lot of work. Quiting your job is possible though. Blogging for a few months can make you some spare cash if you know how to work those ads. Try google adsense. You can make a few bucks a day with that. The point is blogging can make you money.
10. Blogging is fun If you enjoy doing puzzles and thinking. You will enjoy blogging. Blog like you are playing a game and think of new topics every day. It will keep you young no matter how old you are. Blogging is fun and if your are not blogging you are missing out. Thank you for reading please bookmark this on all those nice places that brings more people that would enjoy this article. Remember to keep on blogging!