How to be a Successful Blogger (Lesson 2)

How to be a Successful Blogger

 

Welcome to Lesson Two

Today's lesson is specifically important for those who are considering starting or building blogs and website where they can share their contents to an audience be it a sport, news, music, religious/motivational, fashion, or educational blog. I spent almost seven years of aimless blogging before I was able to discover these things. Glad you are knowing these even before you start your blogging and web design carrier. 

It is very possible not to be a successful blogger regardless of how inspired you are. It all about understanding the basics....

What do you need to do before starting your first blog?

1. Find Your Niche.

You needn’t have a niche, but it helps. When learning how to be a blogger, it’s important to ask yourself what you’re passionate about. Running? Cooking? Being a parent? Have you found your passion? If so, whatever it is, write about that. If not, then you must first find your passion. Our niche at techlink.com.ng for example is ICT and telecommunication while at creativearena.com.ng is purely literature (like stories, poetry, fiction etc)

Don’t create a blog about something unless you have a unique perspective.

2. Define Your Ideal 

 Readers. Once you’ve found your niche, you need to know who will be reading your blog. For example, If you want to write about your newborn baby growing up, that’s wonderful: your ideal readers are probably your friends and family. If you want to write about restoring classic cars, that’s cool, too. Tailor your writing to your readers (whether it’s your family or local community or whoever else will read your blog). Blogging about sports or movies (your target is mainly the youth). At techlink, we target those that are willing to learn things like web design, telecom business etc

3. Add Value.

Your blog must add value to its readers’ lives. This is the only way you will get Great Quality Readers to your site (and keep them coming back). Adding value is the only way to get someone’s long-term buy-in. You don't just write for writing sake, you must have your audience or potential readers at heart. Write what you think they will be willing to read. It is a total waste of time to write about pregnancy to an ICT audience.

4.Be Original.

.There are other blogs out there about the same thing you want to write about. So why is your blog different? Because of you. You are what makes your blog different. It’s about your perspective, your creativity, the value that you add. 

5. Be Interesting.

Write epic, awesome content. Especially if you want people to share it with others. Not just a long boring epistle. 

6. Be Honest.

 Your blog needs to be authentic—it needs to feel real—if you want people to read it. You can be your blog, or your blog can be you. That is, do you really embody the stuff you write about? If not, people will see through you. “Be the change you want to see in the world,” is the famous Gandhi quote. Bloggers should build the blog they want to write for the world.

7.Time.

Once you’ve learned how to start a blog, you’ll learn that blogging takes a lot of time, once you have your design set up, don’t tweak it too much. Instead, spend the time on your writing.

8. Vision

It’s hard to create a beautiful blog if you don’t know what you want it to look like. Your vision of the blog gives you direction and focus amidst several confusing choices

9. Find Your Voice

 Over time, good writers discover their voice and their writing tends to develop a certain aesthetic, one that is appealing to their readers. Finding your voice makes your writing feel more alive, more real, more urgent.

10. We Instead of You

 Use the first-person plural when possible. Statements of we and our are more powerful than you and your, especially when talking about negative behaviors or tendencies. The first person comes off as far less accusatory. Think of it this way: we’re writing peer-to-peer—we are not gods.

 11. When to Post

When is the best day and time to publish a blog post?

 Some weeks in Creative Arena  (CA,)  we post one essay; sometimes we post three. Yes, it is important to write consistently, but you needn’t get too bogged down in the details. Nevertheless, if you can, post consistently at a specific time every day you can to publish a post... There is a way it helps your ranking on search engines like bing and google

12. Social Media.

I recommend using Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram (and Whatsapp) to help connect with your audience and other bloggers. Focus on the writing first and share your content consistently on these platforms to expand your user base.... Especially Facebook, you can get thousands of visitors from that platform if you know how to optimize it

13. Keep It Simple

 Irrespective of its genre, no need to place superfluous widgets all over your site. Stick to the basics and remove anything you don’t need. Remove anything that doesn’t add value.

14. Make Money

You can't start making money the first day you start your blog and if money making is the sole reason you are contemplating starting a blog, you have missed it from the very beginning.... It doesn't work that way. Even Ad sense won't pay you the day you signed up... It takes averagely six month to start earning from your blog if it's really a fast growing one.... Turn blogging to passion, then your passion into profit... That is the way it works not the other way round...

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Introduction to Blog Design (Lesson 1)

What is a Blog?

 

The word blog is not new.  However, the extensive meaning is that one I came across recently.

A blog is a website that allows users to reflect, share opinions, and discuss various topics in the form of an online journal, sometimes letting readers comment on their posts

All blogs are websites, but not all websites are blogs. The only difference is that a blog is a website that looks like a journal or a diary where entries or any form of writings typically appear in reverse chronological order.

Type of Blogs

• Personal Blogs
• News Blogs
• Business Blogs
• Religious Blogs
• Educational Blogs
• Sport Blogs etc

Practically everyone reads blogs now, whether they’re “official” news blogs associated with traditional news media, topic-based blogs related to one’s work or hobbies, or blogs purely for entertainment, just about anyone you ask has at least one favorite blog.

But it wasn’t always so. Blogs have a relatively short history, even when compared with the history of the Internet itself.

And it’s only in the past five to ten years that they’ve really taken off and become an important part of the online landscape.

How Blogging Began

It’s generally recognized that the first blog was Links.net, created by Justin Hall, while he was a Swarthmore College student in 1994. Of course, at that time they weren’t called blogs, and he just referred to it as his personal homepage.

It wasn’t until 1997 that the term “weblog” was coined. The word’s creation has been attributed to Jorn Barger, of the influential early blog Robot Wisdom. The term was created to reflect the process of “logging the web” as he browsed.

1998 marks the first known instance of a blog on a traditional news site, when Jonathan Dube blogged Hurricane Bonnie for The Charlotte Observer.

Weblog” was shortened to “blog” in 1999 by programmer Peter Merholz. It’s not until five years later that Merriam-Webster declares the word their word of the year.

The original blogs were updated manually, often linked from a central home page or archive. This wasn’t very efficient, but unless you were a programmer who could create your own custom blogging platform, there weren’t any other options to begin with.

During these early years, a few different “blogging” platforms cropped up. LiveJournal is probably the most recognizable of the early sites.

And then, in 1999, the platform that would later become Blogger was started by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan at Pyra Labs. Blogger is largely responsible for bringing blogging to the mainstream.

The early 2000s were a period of growth for blogs. In 1999, according to a list compiled by Jesse James Garrett, there were 23 blogs on the internet. By the middle of 2006, there were 50 million blogs according to Technorati‘s State of the Blogosphere report. To say that blogs experienced exponential growth is a bit of an understatement.

By 2001, there was enough interest in blogging that some how-to articles and guides started cropping up. Now, “meta blogs” (blogs about blogging) make up a sizable portion of the most popular and successful blogs out there.

A number of popular blogs got their start in the early 2000s, including Boing Boing, Dooce, Gizmodo, Gawker (the first major gossip blog to launch), Wonkette, and the Huffington Post. Weblogs, Inc. was started by Jason Calacanis in 2003, and was then sold to AOL for $25 million. It was that sale that helped to cement blogs as a force to be reckoned with rather than just a passing fad.

WordPress was started in 2003, though parts of its development date back to 2001. TypePad was also released in 2003, based on Movable Type.

Some peripheral services to the blogosphere also started in the early 2000s. Technorati, the first major blog search engine, was launched in 2002. Audioblogger, the first major podcasting service, was founded in 2003. The first video blogs started in 2004, more than a year before YouTube was founded.

Also launched in 2003 was the AdSense advertising platform, which was the first ad network to match ads to the content on a blog. AdSense also made it possible for bloggers without huge platforms to start making money from when they first started blogging (though payments to low-traffic blogs weren’t very large).

By the mid-2000s, blogs were reaching the mainstream. In January of 2005, a study was released saying that 32 million Americans read blogs. At the time, it’s more than ten percent of the entire population. The same year, Garrett M. Graff was granted White House press credentials, the first blogger ever to do so.

During this time, the number of blogs grew even more, with more than 152 million blogs active by the end of 2010. Virtually every mainstream news source now has at least one blog, as do many corporations and individuals.

If you read the messages I sent, you will discover that blogging might be relatively young (it started when we were in primary schools lol) but it is growing so rapidly that we have millions of them on the internet already... I think I have about 15 blogs..... Not all are functioning though... I created so many by experimenting for fun actually

Done with the first lecture which is expected to be informative.... By now you are familiar with the meaning, types, purpose and history of blogs..

Stay Connected for our next lesson

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TechlinkNig ICT Training

Training Scheme and Schedule

1. Resumption and Registration

2. Introduction of Resource Persons

Session Begins

1. Introduction to ICT and Blogging

A. What is a blog?

B. How blogging began (WordPress and Blogger)

C. Uniqueness of a blog site

D. Types of Blogs

E. Importance of having a blog

2. To be blogger

A. Who is a blogger

B. Processes of a successful blogger

C. Ethics of a blogger

D. Basics of blog optimization for effectiveness

3. Introduction to Content Management System

A. What is CMS

B. Free CMS platforms recommended by TechlinkNig

C. Why Blogger or WordPress

D. WordPress Vs Blogger

4. Pre-Practical Class

A. Materials Needed

B. Recommended Browsers

C. Recommended tools

Practical Session Begins


A. Creating your blog

B. Title and Sub-domain

6. Content Development

A. All Post

B. Publish Post

C. New Post

D. Revert to Draft and Delete_

7. Blog Stats and Analysis*

A. Post Traffic_

B. Audience attacking_

C. Traffic Sources_

8. Pages*

A. What is a Page_

B. Different between page and post_

C. Page creation

9. Layout (WYSIWYG)*

. Edit Favicon

B. Add Widget

C. Arrangement of Layout

10. Theme*

A. Theme Customization and Design

11. Setting*

A. Basic

B. Post, Comment and Sharing

C. Email Language and Formatting

D. Search Preference

E. Other

12. Reading list and Help*

13. Other CMS platform*

14. Basic Knowledge and Introduction to HTML*

15. Simple Hacks and Codes*

16. Advance Class on Web Design*

17. Blogging Apps and Tools*

18-20. Conclusion*

21. Session Break and Practice*

22. Resumption and Registration*

23. Helpful Tools and Apps*

24-26 App Development*

27. EBook Publication*

A. What is EBook

B. Content Development

C. Typesetting Tools, Arrangement and Conversion

D. EBook platforms

E. Kindle and Paperback Publishing (Amazon)

F. Self hosted EBook

28. Bulk SMS*

Session Break_

Resumption and Registration*

Advance Class on ICT_

29. Advance Class on Web Design*

30. Advance Class on Telecommunication Business*

A. Data bundle Reselling

B. Airtime VTU

C. Airtime Printing

D. Cable TV Subscription (Gotv, Dstv and Star times)

E. Bulk SMS

F. E pin Generation

G. Airtime Conversion to Cash

31. Advance Class on Social Media Marketing*

A. Facebook Marketing

B. Instagram Marketing

C. Email Marketing

D. Whatsapp Marketing

32. General Conclusion and Graduation*

33. TechlinkNig partnership*

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