How to create, write and promote blog?

How to blog?
In my last post I wrote about why one should blog (its advantages) Lets see how you should begin writing your blog.

Before you begin

• Prepare a theme for your blog and have a few topics around that theme. It could be anything from your hobbies to day-to-day happenings in your city.
  
• Research and read about what others have written on the same topic before you begin.
  
• Take a look at few blogs to get an idea of different templates available.
  

How to create your blog

• Choose a good site where you want to blog. List of them with some reviews are listed at http://weblogs.about.com/od/weblogsoftwareandhosts/a/topfreeblogs.htm my personal recommendation is blogger offered by google and is free (You can be sure that it will not popup or add ugly advertisements).
  
• Register yourself to create an account and a blog.
  
• Choose the template that matches your tastes from list of available templates. Most of them also let you customize with your own html code (you can tweak it if you know else don’t bother default templates are good enough)
  
• Create your first post on the blog. Use html codes whenever necessary.

What to write.

• Have a theme of your blog and let the topics be around that theme, so that people come to your site repeatedly if they are interested in similar topics.
  
• Try to keep it brief and effective but there are really no rules.
  
• Although you are free to say whatever you want, remember that you are accountable for what you say.

How to write effective blog

• Add pictures as applicable. They speak out lot more than what words can describe.
  
• Enable comments in your blog to get feedback from users.
  
• Enable user verification - This helps lot of automated Spam comments getting added to your blog.
  
• Blogs are meant to be fun, so write with passion and everything else will fall into place.
  
• Use bold, italic and other text formatting to highlight the importance of certain contents.
  
• Blog regularly – ideally few times a month. More the content, more visitors, at the same time do not disappoint your visitors with contents available on other site/blogs.

Now created/have a blog. What Next?

• Add counters to keep track of visitors of your blog.
  
• Promote. Add link to your blog in your email signatures.
  
• You can add advertisements to your blog to earn residual money.

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What are you thinking? Jump start and make you presence felt. Happy blogging.