Building a blog is not a one-time process; you have to be at it continuously as long as you continue blogging. However, before you monetize your blog, here are the first five steps that you through creating your very first blog. So, here we go:

Step#1: Choose The Platform: Technically, blogging platform refers to the application software where you create your blog. There are several blogging platforms out there, but choosing the right platform is critical to your blogging experience as well as online exposure.

Some of the blogging software applications are available for free while the rest are paid. Obviously, you’re not supposed to go for the paid ones as you need to spend some time on learning the ins and outs of blogging until you know how different platforms affect your blogging experience.

Speaking of free blogging platforms, both Blogger.com (by Google) and WordPress.com (Open source software) are immensely popular across the bloggers. However, with the invention of social web (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), the popularity of WordPress blogging platform has gone off the roof. Again, as a novice, WordPress.com is more likely to offer you a better blogging experience than Blogger.com. Therefore, choosing WordPress software for your first blog is always a smarter option.

Step#2: Create A WordPress Account: When you log on to www.WordPress.com, you can the home page filled with some chosen WordPress blogs from various bloggers. If you work hard and smart, someday your blog could show up on the home page, who knows!

Anyways, on the right side of the home page, you will find WordPress’s message for you that says, “Express Yourself and Start a Blog”. All you need to do is click on the Sign up Now button and fill in the necessary steps to compete the signup requirements to create your first blog. The good news is WordPress understands your concerns on how to go about starting your very first blog, so it offers you a step by step guide here.

Step#3: Choose A WordPress Theme: Once you’re done with the WordPress account creation process (I hope you didn’t have to face much problem), it’s time to dress your blog with a theme that appeals to your blogging needs. The choice of the right WordPress theme is important for several reasons. First, a proper theme inspires you and your audience aesthetically. It’s worth mentioning that the first impression of your potential visitors typically stems from the theme, images and post headlines you have on your blog. Therefore, you have to be thoughtful and innovating about how you present your blog by choosing the theme that most appropriately associates your blogging ideas with it.

The only bad news is that, WordPress.com doesn’t allow you to choose a theme of your choice. But then you can’t get everything you want for free. So, let’s make the most of what we have at our disposal, right? The good news, however, is that you can modify your existing theme to suit your blogging requirements. But that’s an advanced step and let’s not get into that as of now. Just choose the right them that represents your blogging philosophy. If you’re still confused on how to go about it, here is the link to help you.

Step#4: Plan Your Monthly Blogging Schedule: One of the most common responses from first time bloggers is they tend to go overboard with the blogging planning. You may feel like you’re ready to write several posts a week, but eventually, this fad might not last as long as you thought it would. So, get real and plan your writing schedule realistically. Maybe, just 3 posts per week? How about that for a great start!

Since you can’t plan your annual blogging schedule in one day, you can probably prepare a weekly or monthly schedule of 12 posts. Just write down the probable topic titles which you’re going to write on across the month. It helps a lot to stay focused and saves a lot of time that you would spend in pondering over what your next post should be about.

Step#5: Write Your Very First Post: Since you have a blog, you can write anything you please? Never start blogging until you have a plan in place. Your very first blog post requires as much deliberation as your annual blogging schedule. So, before you jump into writing your first post, hold back and make a plan on what you’re going to write and how frequently you can write your posts.

Assuming that you’ll listen to my advice and write 3 posts a week, your first post should talk about what you’re going to offer to your audience in general and a generic introduction of what your blogging plans are.

So, there you have it, your very first WordPress blog. With a little bit of discipline, planning and resolution, you can sure make it a hit across the Web. In future, we’ll talk about how to make your blog more interactive by creating audience-centric content.

Feel free to tweet this out if you feel others could benefit from it. Alternatively, leave a comment below. Insightful comments will get a link back to their blog.

So writing these articles has become one of the lucrative business opportunities for e-commerce entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs use how-to articles to build insane traffic by building an information web portal based on how-to articles.

The writing of a how-to article has become much easier as you can write these articles on a wide variety of topics conceivable under the Sun. Here are six tips following which you can get a head-start in developing your own how-to article information portal soon:

Devise a Plan: Before jumping head on into the game of writing how-to articles, it is very important for you to devise a proper plan. There are some areas of everyday life which you can pick to provide useful information on. You cannot write on any topic under the sun, so you have to select and list down the topics about which you want to write your how-to articles. You cannot move anywhere without devising a proper plan.

List Topics: Every subject contains a number of topics on which you can write some useful and informative how-to articles. However, you have to look at the possible aspects of every subject and write on each topic and sub-topic in a way to offer information on a periodic manner. For example, if you select photography as the subject to write your article on, you have to explain the process of taking photos starting from the scratch. You must form an effective strategy simultaneously addressing both the amateur photographers and experts.

Do Research: Writing how-to articles requires a lot of research. You have to remember that you are addressing your article to a worldwide audience consisting of readers who have a varied degree of knowledge in specific subject matters. So ensure that the information you provide in your article should be updated, new and fresh. If your articles appear shallow, they will fail to attract the substantial traffic to your portal.

Ensure Copyright: While writing a how-to article you may have to use or refer to some information or images already existing and available online. You can use these information or images as this is an acceptable practice, but ensure that you don’t violate the copyright policies of the concerned author or website which might invite legal actions from them.

Avoid Sensitive Topics: None of us can write expertly on all topics due to lack of expertise on every subject matter. So always try to provide providing information on what you are sure about and can claim to be true. There are some sensitive topics like legal information or health issues which you must avoid to write the articles on as any misinformation can lead your readers in a wrong direction and create some trouble for you in future.

Provide Solutions: You write the how-to articles to offer solutions for everybody’s problems and day-to-day activities performed by common people. While writing these articles you have to keep in mind the real-life situations and provide solutions thereof in an easy-to-understand manner. You have to occasionally use images or videos to better explain your steps. You can also use a number of software application to make your own images or videos and incorporate those in your articles. You should spend more time in ensuring that your articles become really useful and informative for your audience which will result in attracting more traffic to your portal.

These are just the basic information on writing how-to articles. As you go down the writing lane, you will gather more experience and knowledge on how to better write these articles to build decent traffic to your how-to portal. Remember, it’s all about passion.

What is Google Caffeine?

Google Caffeine is an advanced and revolutionary algorithmic improvement in Google’s indexing criteria. According to Google, it will index the new updates faster to present its users with the very latest updates and information.

This basically means Google will index the social updates like Twitter, Facebook and other social websites to serve its visitors with fresh and relevant content in on time. While this takes Google way ahead of its competitors, it also necessitates websites around the world to update their websites on a daily basis or at least as frequently as they can.

While the traditional Google algorithms would take roughly two weeks to index your new updates, they will now take practically no time to index your pages and show them on Google search results for your keywords.

What Sorts of Updates Does Google Caffeine Prefer?

Since Google’s primary focus is to offer its visitors the latest and most relevant information, it would probably index all updates on your SEO campaigns. Whether you write fresh content on your business blog, post a video on YouTube, bookmark your websites for relevant information or update your Twitter Page and Facebook Fan page, each and every content update will be critical to your websites rankings on Google search results.

How Do I Make Sure I Show Up On Google Searches Now?

Google Caffeine insists on regular updates on your website, which essentially means it doesn’t allow you to slacken up your content writing efforts whether it’s related to writing regular informative entries on your blogs for your visitors or adding fresh content to your website.

Here Are A Couple of Things You Must Do to Appease Google Caffeine

Create A Facebook Fan Page
If you haven’t yet, get one created one now as a Fan Page helps Google index your updates faster. Make sure you update your Fan Page with relevant updates that actually help your fans. Google has a way of valuing pages that are more relevant to search queries for certain keywords. Hence, if you update you Facebook Fan Page keeping with fresh and relevant updates optimized with keywords, it can really help your Google rankings. Well, it might require you to research and read more, but higher Google rankings seldom come easy.

Update Your Twitter More Frequently
Since last year, every Google user observed a change in Google’s search results. More often than not, Google showed the real-time results for a search query. It was pretty interesting as none of the other search engines had done something similar to that. It was when everybody knew Google Caffeine had arrived.
In terms of both higher visibility and rankings, Google Caffeine allows you to a unique opportunity show up the SERPs ladder by updating your Twitter with loads of informative, keyword-rich and relevant tweets on your industry.

Have Social Updates
Aside from Facebook and Twitter, Google also cares about other social websites like Propeller, Squidoo Pages and Slashdots. Make sure you sign up with them and update often enough to show up within the top-ten bracket of Google SERPs.

Write Relevant & News-Worthy PRs
No prize for guessing why you need to write relevant and news-worthy press releases for your website. Press Release Directories have always remained Google’s most favorite hang-out zone starting pre-Caffeine era. Hence, Google Caffeine would like you to let out as much relevant information on your products or services to your visitors as you can.

Hire An SEO Content Writer

With so much of emphasis being put on the content updates, you shouldn’t really wonder why you need an SEO content writer in the current scenario. In order to stay ahead of you and conform to Google’s new search indexing criteria, your competitors would go all out and blast informative, keyword-rich and users friendly content to barge ahead of you. Think of blogging, press releases, social updates on a daily basis, and an experienced SEO content writer comes to the picture quite instantly.

However, you can’t really write off the benefits of Article Marketing completely as many online marketers still rely on article marketing to drive classified traffic to their websites. Since Google changes its algorithm of weighing the links you generate from various campaigns, it’s extremely vital that you evaluate your online marketing strategies and streamline it from time to time. One of our previous posts offers 5 tips on how you can get more from your Article Marketing drive. Take a look and it may be useful for you.

Guest blogging still remains a potential method of generating valuable back links for your website or blog. Two years ago, I did my very first guest post for Malcom, a very talented copywriter and owner of Gill Media based in Canada. Guest blogging was probably wasn’t as widespread then as it is today.

How to Determine Which Blogs to Guest Blog for?
Although guest blogging is a potential tool to achieve Google-friendly inbound links to your website and establish your authority as a niche blogger, it is not as easy as it sounds. I mean if you want to reap the benefits of guest blogging, you should be targeting popular blogs instead of just any blog out there.

You can do a search on your niche and find out at least 50 best blog sites that have people (read potential traffic) frequenting them every once in a while. Make sure you want to guest blog for those blogs that have a decent traffic coming to it and have a reasonable page rank. You can make a list of blogs you want to request for guest blogging. This is because you want to improve your odds of getting a “yes” from most of them. Given that popular blogs receive more requests than they can handle, you should go that extra mile to improve your chances of being accepted for guest blogging.

Here are a couple of tips that might help your cause:

Proofread to Perfection:
Popular bloggers know the importance of being perfect and hence, they make sure there are no issues with the post prior to publishing. If you want to make the first impression and improve your chances of being well received, make sure you proof read your posts for typos, grammar, syntax, facts and flow of writing. You may have to do little extra effort, but it’s well worth it.

SEO Optimized Posts:
Popular bloggers don’t have the time to optimize your posts – so it leaves you with an opportunity to impress them by doing it at your end and saving them the pains. Use the keywords at proper places and make your posts SEO-friendly. Well-optimized posts bring as many benefits to their blogs as to your website.

SEO Optimized Images:
It’s a no-brainer that posts with relevant and innovative images attract more eyeballs. It is important to consider adding some images to your posts before you send them to the bloggers. Moreover, try optimizing the images with keywords to improve their SEO value and you are more likely to elicit an entrancing response from the bloggers. But, make sure your images are not copyrighted as it might create unwanted issues for your blogger. Worse, you might lose your credibility in stead of gaining it.

Right Format:
Popular bloggers are rather busy writing stuff and hard-pressed for time. Do them a favor by sending your guest posts in a format that help them to post quickly. You may ask them about the proper formatting of your text that might help them to post your blog entries without much hassle. For instance, you can format the headings and sub-headings using proper HTML tags. The bloggers will know that you care about their time and it will improve your chances of being well-received.

What more can you do to boost your chances of being published in your attempt to guest blogging? Any ideas?

Some tips on the blogging:

• Keep your blog short, crispy, informative and interesting, preferably between 250-300 words. Remember, people tend to ignore posts that are longer than 300 words.
• It is essential to link some of the keywords to other potential and informative websites so that your audience gets to know them. There are many interesting websites full of useful information, but many people will miss out on them unless you share. For example, if you are writing a post on ‘blogging’, you need to link it to a website that you think offers some really useful information for your audience.
• Allow other bloggers to write guest entries on your blog. It will add to experience of your readers to find a wide range of bloggers to hear from.

However, continuously creating interesting and quality blog content requires a great deal of research which may drive you away from your core business competencies. So the solution lies in hiring full-time professional blog content writers to take care of this critical aspect of online promotion.

Patience is the virtue
It takes time to be successful in any sector and blogging is no different. There is no shortcut to make it big overnight, hence, patience plays an important role here.

Be proud of your blog
If many people don’t visit your blogs, that doesn’t mean yours is not good. You have just started, so give yourself some time and be confident of your blog content writing skill.

Polish your writing skills
Improvise your writing skill and for that, you need to read a lot. Read inspiring good articles or even follow other successful bloggers posts.

Don’t consider blogging as a mere job
If you are passionate about blogging, the result will definitely show in your writings. Hence, never treat it as any other job or never write only for money, else the end result will be a monotonous blog.

I hope these tips will help you tackle the blogging burnout menace to some extent. So wish you a happy blogging expedition!