20 tips for starting a blog

So you’re thinking about starting a blog yourself, but don’t know where to start?
Here are some tips helping you out.

If you’re not sure if you can keep up posting, put yourself to the test. There are numerous good bloogertools available to start with.
Blogger dot com is one for example.

Many bloggers stop posting after a few weeks, so test yourself first before spending money.

 

If you got what it takes to be a blogger for real, register a domain for your blog. Hosting isn’t that expensive, for about 40$/year you could find one.

 

Think about what script you’re going to use, Wordpress, Moveable Type, or write your blog yourself
like me.

 

Read other well established blogs, to find out how they work, how they write posts. Remember that most of these blogs have more then 1 blogger to submit content. So don’t be demotivated by the high frequency of postings over there. They also started little once!!!

 

Choose your blog’s template wisely. Or create one of your own

 

Ask your friends for an opinion and tell them to be honoust.

 

What do you want to blog about? Aiming for a “Niche” or a general blog? Search for blogs that could be a competitor for you in the future and subscribe to their RSS Feed!!!!!

 

Don’t forget to put up a RSS Feed yourself on your new blog!

 

Want to track how many users subcribed to your RSS feed? Use Feedster. Little tip, don’t display that you have 5 subscribed RSS readers. Only show it if you reach 100 subscribers or so.

 

Subscribe yourself to Technorati, Digg or Reddit. You can also post your site to Blog Directories

 

Subscribe yourself to Google Analytics, this will give you a good indication how people surf your blog.

 

Create a sitemap and post it to the Google webmaster tools

 

Learn how to use SEO, Search Engine Optimization, this will help you, so people can find your site with the keywords you’re using on your blog.

 

Get active in other blogs, post comments on their blogs.

 

Let people comment on your posts and suggest them to do so. They provide you input so you can make your blog better!

 

Read the comments you get for your post, reply to them if needed.

 

Use Categories, so people have a quick overview what you’re blog is offering

 

Try to post on regular bases. It’s easy to get traffic, but it’s harder to keep them coming back

 

Don’t know what to write about? Go to your favorites, look at some other blogs, search for an interesting article there and give your opinion on your blog reffering to the other blog.

 

Really think about your post’s title. This is what attract your visitors. And if your post is as good as the tilte, congratz!

Find these tips usefull?
Ready to start blogging?
Lets get busy to create your first post then. Oh, and you’ll have something to do for the rest of your life then. 

Done creating it, good for you, let me know where it is, I’m looking forward reading it!

Get your IP moaned out by a very sexy voice

Today I surfed to the moan my ip site to see my colleague’s reaction.
I must say, never seen him putting up this kind of WTF-face.
He immediatly started laughing and trying to say, forward URL please :-p

When I do support for customers, sometimes I let them surft to the what’s my IP dot com site, so I don’t have to bother them by explaining, click START, click RUN, type CMD (cutomer: “capital or not”, me: “doesn’t matter”). Then on the black window type IPCONFIG / ALL (customer: “can you spell it please”, me thinking “S - T - U - P - I - D B - * - * - * - H” but saying “I from Inge, P from Patrick, Config like in configuration,...”) and so there are allready 5 minutes passed.

Must admit this only works if the person is directly “attached to the internet”

So maybe next time I’ll let them surf to moanmyip.com? Uh, better not do this, don’t want them to get in any kind of trouble at their work, right?

Anyone knows some other sites like this?

Time flies when you’re having fun

I can’t believe how fast time goes. It feels just like yesterday when I’ve started this blog with the post “Going live on the 5th of July”.

Since the start I’ve made a lot of new posts, some bad, some better and some good
I’ve noticed that I was lacking of knowledge about how a blog works. So I did some google-ing and find numerous of high quality blogs out there.
And started to read them one by one. First up was Problogger a blog from Darren Rowse, truly a real inspiration for others.

Then I’ve came by John Chow’s make money online blog. Also here I’ve found numerous of useful tips and what I really like about John Chow’s blog is that he’s posting updates about how he’s making money and really explains how he did it. The 300x250 ad spot flipper is one of his latest for example. Although he “only’ makes 1000$ a month for it, the one’s who hired the advertising space is also making money of it by putting it up for rent again, ...

Before I’ve read these blogs, I didn’t know anything about SEO, Search Engine Optimization. I still don’t know everything about it yet, but I’m getting the hang of it.
We all know this is very important to attract visitors to your site. The higher you rank in the search engines on specific key words, the more chance you’ll have they visit you.
Not only keywords matter, also good fresh content.

As from yesterday Google advised me to set my crawl rate to “fast” instead of “normal”. If this is a good sign, only time will tell.
Also my Alexa ranking is increasing week after week.
As far as I can see, my Challenge blog is getting known on the net. The number of visits are rising and rising.
After 5 weeks busy blogging, I’ve got at least 1 hit from every continent in the world, so I’m officially known all around the world now.
In total 65 countries have visited this site so far. Most of them from United States, Canada and Belgium.
Not too bad for a n00b like me

What will the future of this blog bring to you?
Well it already seems to me that I’m hooked-up at this blogging thing, so I’ll continue to post here and improve the quality of my posts.
Also I’ll keep posting tips and links to help you guys get started on your own, for example you can use the list in my blog directories post to promote your site.

What did I earn until now?
Well not much, but I’ve expected this.
Here’s my list, don’t laugh
AdBrite 0,53$
Bidvertiser 0,21$
CashCrate 0,40$
So in total this makes a whopping 1,14$ !!!!

I’m almost at the same rate as John Chow’s make money online blog

What can I do about this?
Work hard!, Simple as that

Which browser you use? Ever heard of Maxthon?

Probably most of you uses Internet Explorer (IE) or Firefox (FF), but ever thought about Maxthon (MyIE in the early days)?
I started using it somewhere in 2004. Back then I’ve got a portable from work which wasn’t that impressive if it came to specs.
And I’m a freak regarding opening new links in a browser, it’s my habit to open them in a new window.
So on IE this sometimes results into 7 or 8 different windows which each represents a process.
My portable back then was suffering on memory

So I started looking at alternatives and found MyIE, now Maxthon. The biggest advantage to me in this browser was “opening links in tabs” and there is no need to start another process. You can simply hold your cursor over the link and with the left mouse button clicked, move it a bit. A new tab will be opened then.

With the latest version of IE7, Microsoft finally integrated this feature also (not the easy drag drop function). I know Firefox also opens links in tabs, but I don’t know why, but I don’t like the user experience I have in FF.

As time went by I always used the ‘old’ Maxthon as default browser, but 2 months back I received another new portable at work and the first thing I did was reinstall it of-course and then open IE7 (Thx Bill), and browsed to the Maxthon homepage. I saw there was a beta release of the new Maxthon, version 2.0 out and installed this one for a change.
- A few things I’ve notice to be different is that you now also can open a link in another tab by using the middle mouse button (like in FF). But I prefer the ‘old way’
- Another improved cool thing is ‘mouse gestures’, you can assign a random task to your mouse-click+ a move. Example, rightclick and move left, goes to the previous page, ...
- The ‘Web Sniffer’ shows the real URL of movies like on YouTube, which can be very useful sometimes.
- Also the shortcut keys that can be defined are useful, you can use a single key or a selection of keys to open up a particular website for example, or add a page to your favorites, ...
- Easy proxy integration, lets you surf via your preferred proxy or import a complete proxy list

If this isn’t enough, there also addons available, and they even have a Maxthon Wiki where you can find different tips.

The only minor things I found so far where:
- The Float button, with this you can simply zoom in or out on an image. But I’ve noticed that the button is appearing on the spot you shouldn’t want it to show up, so this is already disabled in my setup.
- The screen capture ability in Maxthon 2.0, but on my portable it only results in black screens.

But to end this post on a positive note, I definitely will continue using Maxthon in the future and maybe I’ve convinced some of you by this post?

The Best FREE race game ever!!!!

Yesterday i came by a link that pointed me to the Trackmania Nations site.
So I looked around the site a little, especially at the screenshots and then
decided to download the game. About 270MB was being transferred do my disk. So a few minutes later, started the setup and what an experience it was!

You’ll have the choice to play Solo, Against other players, Online, Peer tot Peer or via LAN.
When you play Solo, like me you have to complete special made tracks within a given time to be rewarderd a Brons, Silver or Gold medal.
There are 90 tracks included here !!!

But the real fun is online or via Lan, there’s tons and tons of maps to play online and they’re not that easy!

I would advice you to give it a try, fun guaranteed!!!

And if you ever get bored with the tracks they provide, why don’t you build your own? There’s a track editor inlcuded