Blogging

How To Grow Your Blog and Build an Audience

How many of us post away to our blogs and then feel like we’re in a ghost town? I can almost see the tumbleweeds gathering around a couple of my blogs! By the way I’m not talking here about niche blogs in the marketing sense ( ie slap up 10 posts in a targeted niche, monetise it, drive traffic, rinse and repeat). I’m talking about blogs where you are building a reputation, authority and expert status. So I’ve been looking into improving that situation and here is what I have found. 1. Have a theme or purpose to your blog… Read More »How To Grow Your Blog and Build an Audience

Beating Writer’s Block – Fill Your Blog

Having to keep up a regular schedule is something many people do well. There is another cohort of us who have great intentions. Other things seem to get in the way and we find ourselves staring at a blank blog page for a few days or, even worse, weeks. Ok. Maybe months. Anyone see tumbleweeds? So what’s the best way to keep your productivity up when you’re struggling? Here are a few tips that should help. 1. Write more when you are in the writing mood. I know when I’m in the mood to write I can pump stuff out… Read More »Beating Writer’s Block – Fill Your Blog

Getting Indexed in The Search Engines

Being indexed in Google, Bing and elsewhere is one of the key things you need to do to get some traction under your spanking new website or blog. I have a little site on one of the grab-and-drop self-build-it sites. It has worked fine until I mucked it up today and inadvertently enabled redirection on my domain manager. Brian not engaged. Of course that threw out my domain pointing and well, let’s just say I lost the site for a few hours. TIP – if you are pointing your domain to another webhost DO NOT enable redirection Anywho, as I… Read More »Getting Indexed in The Search Engines

Top 10 Tips For Participating in a Challenge

The fact that we have so many Challenges around these days must say something about the human psyche. I guess we’re a competitive bunch. And we love competing against ourselves. (I wonder if self development is a predominantly first-world problem?) No matter what you want to improve you can bet there is a Challenge somewhere which you can participate in. – 30 Day Challenge – 500 words a day Challenge – Video a day Challenge This year I have been involved in the Article Writing Challenge. It’s run by Bonnie Gean and she does a stellar job. She also leads… Read More »Top 10 Tips For Participating in a Challenge

Product Review: Editorial Calendar App

So I have been checking out Editorial Calendars. Every now and then I need to regroup and be more organised. That means I need to look at the systems I use (assuming of course I’m using one!) and review how effective they are. I have a couple of editorial calendars on my desktop. The problem is these are not portable and often get out of date. I could load them into Dropbox or OneDrive or Evernote but I find I don’t work well that way. I also have an editorial calendar plugin on a couple of my websites which is… Read More »Product Review: Editorial Calendar App

Basics of Blogging 101

Blogging 101 is fundamentally about the blogging lexicon – all the basics that let you know what you are dealing with.

To understand blogs, you need to know the terms blog, platform, domain, and web host.

Once you have mastered these key elements of blogging, you can enter any conversation about blogging with confidence. After you know what exactly a blog is, you will be on your way to passing the final exam of blogging 101!

“Blog” is actaully short for “weblog”, which simply means a series of online posts presented in reverse chronological order. That’s all! Easy, eh?

Most blogs are text, but there are also photo blogs and video blogs.

The rest of blogging 101 has to do with the technical side of things.

If you are setting up a blog, you will need

1. a platform,
2. a web host, and
3. a domain.

A blogging platformRead More »Basics of Blogging 101