Blogs for earn­ing an online liv­ing is usu­ally the favorite solu­tions to make more money by way of the world wide web. This kind of busi­ness has really taken off in the last few years. Every­day you’ll find thou­sands of peo­ple who add writ­ten con­tent for their blog and there­fore make cash off of it. Read the rest of this entry

In my view, there is just one truly great piece of blog­ging plat­forms on the inter­net. But it is not always the best for all peo­ple, there are some­times alter­na­tives whilst not the best for the plenty, are bet­ter for dis­tinct niches?

So what attrib­utes make up the best blog­ging plat­form on the mar­ket? I believe that it has to:

* Be free to use — there are so lots of paid for blog­ging tools about, why pay for programs?

* Be flex­i­ble and extendible — if you want to add a fea­ture to it, for exam­ple site maps, captcha checked con­tact forms, this must be straight­for­ward to do.

* Be easy to set-up and install.

* Be easy to make it look dif­fer­ent to other blogs — there is no point in run­ning a pro­fes­sional blog that looks like 3,000,000 other blogs.

* Have ready made (and free) off-the-shelf styles read­ily avail­able to install at the touch of a button.

* Be well search engine opti­mised and accepted by the search engines.

* Ide­ally, it should have a com­mu­nity of other blog­gers that could also drift over to your new web­site from related blogs.

Well, in my view WordPress.org ticks all but the last of the above boxes. There is just that last box left unticked. In fact, if you look into WordPress.com, that does have the com­mu­nity of blog­gers in the ver­sion of Word­Press that it hosts, but there is not the flex­i­bil­ity and if you are run­ning schemes such as paid post­ing, you are not allowed to run a site there.

Word­Press is also easy to install. If you are com­fort­able with down­load­ing, unzip­ping and FTPing to a server, then it is easy to set-up and cre­ate it onto nigh on any paid host­ing account. If you are not so tech­ni­cally com­pe­tent and are only set­ting up a weblog for tasks let’s say work from home, then the other remark­able news about Word­Press is that plenty of hosts have easy instal­la­tion sys­tems. With these, you buy the domain name and some host­ing and straight­for­wardly press a but­ton or two and the pack­age is installed for you.

But, what if you don’t want to, or could’t afford to, pay for host­ing? Well, there are still pieces of blog­ging pro­gram to use and in this case, take a look at Blog­ger, which is my sec­ond favourite for blog­ging. There are not so many avenues open to you, but it is still just a few clicks to install Google Adsense to earn a bit of cash and you are allowed to earn some extra cash through paid posting.

So, that is my rec­om­men­da­tions for the best blog­ging pack­age if you want to know how to start blog­ging. Ide­ally you should install Word­Press, but if you don’t want to pay a penny for the tool, then take a look at Blog­ger. Between them, they have every­thing cov­ered. Happy blog­ging and feel free to leave a com­ment as to how you got on with your new website.

Short­cut to help­ful knowl­edge about web traf­fic — make sure to go through the web site. The times have come when proper infor­ma­tion is truly within one click, use this opportunity.

Home Page
Obvi­ously, the first page that every site needs is a home page. But this might be one of two types of pages. Some sites pre­fer the sta­tic home page whereas oth­ers pre­fer a selec­tion of the most recent posts.

In my opin­ion, unless you have a good rea­son for not doing so, when you start blog­ging always make your home page the col­lec­tion of recent posts. This means that traf­fic could quickly find your lat­est posts and so can search engines. Whether you only dis­play snip­pets or the full posts and whether you dis­play the lat­est 5, 10 or how­ever numer­ous posts is up to you. It depends how much you are writ­ing and how involved you want the search engines to get. I always list the lat­est 5 or 10 posts in full.

About Me / Us Page
This is a page I do not think is needed, but peo­ple still include. Save the pages and valu­able link­ing for other pages! You could include a brief about me para­graph or two on the side bar of your theme rather than a page that is not really needed and gives lit­tle benefit.

Con­tact Me
Are you hop­ing to blog for profit? Do you want to dis­play some adverts? Well, how will adver­tis­ers con­tact you? Make a straight­for­ward con­tact page and include a plu­gin to dis­play a straight­for­ward con­tact form to pro­tect your email address. I always use one that includes a captcha form so that spam­mers can­not send me their auto­mated emails.

Newslet­ter / Fol­low Us
Do you make it easy for your read­ers to work out how to fol­low your RSS feeds? Do you offer one or more alter­na­tives? You should do!

Not every­one knows how sim­ple it is to use RSS feeds, so cre­ate a sim­ple page about how to use these. It does not need to be any­thing to com­pli­cated and can point to other ref­er­ences for find­ing out how to use RSS feeds. But if a reader is new to read­ing sites and you teach them a new trick, where are they impend­ing to use it?

But, what around those peo­ple not using RSS? Well, oper­ate a newslet­ter as well. There are plu­g­ins and free ser­vices for run­ning newslet­ters, so install one of these to the fol­low us page and explain how to sign up.

Web­site Dis­clo­sure
Are you con­sid­er­ing dis­play­ing affil­i­ate links, spon­sored reviews or other paid posts? Do you want to start blog­ging for a profit? Then, espe­cially if your site is hosted in the US, you should dis­close this and the neat­est way is through a stand alone page. Only explain that you will be being paid for post­ing, that your choice of sub­jects to post around might be influ­enced by adver­tis­ers but that you will keep the con­tent inde­pen­dent and honest.

These are the main pages that you will, and won’t, need on a web­site. Make sure that you have these and read­ers could fol­low you and adver­tis­ers might con­tact you!

Obtain help­ful infor­ma­tion about the topic of one way links — study the web­page. The times have come when con­cise infor­ma­tion is really only one click of your mouse, use this possibility.