Once your blog is set up, the act of “blogging” is very simple. These 9 steps to blogging are written specifically for those who set up a WordPress® blog, however I think they are generic enough to help a wider audience.
- Open a browser.
- Enter the web address of the dashboard (maintenance panel) for your blog.
- Enter your blog username and password.
- Click on Write a Post.
- Type your thoughts into the data entry for the blog content window.
- Give the piece (post) a title.
- Associate it with a category.
- Save it.
- View the blog.
That’s it! The blogging software takes care of archiving and categorizing the blog content by month or year.
The challenge of blogging is adhering to a schedule and blogging at a consistent frequency. When you blog at a consitent interval, you set expectations for your audience (they know when to expect another post), plus you train the search engines with regard to how frequently they should return to your blog.
What do you need to blog?
- Blogging software installed at your website.
Adventures Online believes that it is best to blog at your own website. See the two posts below in order to understand why it is in your best interest to blog at your own website.
Blogging at Your Site or a Public site – 1
Blogging at Your Site or a Public site – 2 - A little bit of training on the blogging interface.
Since the interface is not as robust as your desktop word processing tool, some training is recommended in order to become familiar with the icons, and learn how to upload images and podcasts, and create links within your blog. - A blogging strategy
- Identify your target audience.
- Create a list of topics that are of interest to them.
- Start blogging about those topics.
- At least one “expert” to write in your blog.
More than one expert? Yes. It is likely that you consider some employees to be better versed than others in different topics. You can leverage their knowledge by having each write the content for the topic in which you consider them to be the expert.Blogs allow you to define almost unlimited number of categories (topics). Caution: If the topics are sufficiently unrelated, or the amount of content for one category will be overwhelming, consider implementing more than one blog. The industry trend is to implement a blog per major topic. - A schedule for posting blog entries.
Since the most difficult part of having a blog is writing in it with predictable frequency, it is very important to create a schedule that indicates when your experts will be writing in the blog. You may not stick to it, but, at least your intention is known.
Next Steps
You are interested in blogging and want to learn more…
Visit the Blogs topic in our “Web News and Blogs” blog. Still want more… Continue to watch our blog.
You are not sure that blogging is for you…
Create an account at a public blogging site and practice. Some popular blogging sites are: Blogger™, Bloglines, LiVEJOURNAL™, MOVABLETYPE®, or TypePad®. When you’ve developed the “habit” of blogging and fine-tuned your ideas about what you want to blog about, install blog software at your website, and get blogging!
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