I put off starting a blog for a long time because I thought it would be hard. I thought it would be technical. I thought I’d have to install scripts and tear my hair out getting them to work. At that point, most of what I’d read about blogs and RSS was just so much geek-speak.

Was I ever wrong!

When I finally got the courage to give it a go, I went to blogger.com and signed up for an account. To my amazement, I had a blog set up in about 5 minutes. My first post was uploaded to my site about 10 minutes later.

The only thing even remotely technical I was required to do was enter the FTP settings for the website my blog would be published on. But even that wasn’t a requirement. With Blogger, you can set up a blog on their site, Blogspot, and not even worry about FTP settings.

Since then, I’ve started 3 Blogger blogs on different sites. Blogger remains one of the most popular blog applications in the world simply because it is so simple to use and set up. If you’re a technophobe or don’t have the time to learn something completely new, I would urge you to drop by Blogger.com and take a look. You could be blogging - and enjoying the benefits - almost immediately.

Another very simple blogging tool is Wordpress. This blog is my first Wordpress blog, and I’m very impressed with how powerful it is - as well as simple.

Wordpress is installed on your own website, but don’t let that stop you. Most hosts that have Cpanel already have Wordpress ready for you to install. Look in your Cpanel for the Fantastico application, click it open, and then choose Wordpress to install. It will automatically install it on your site for you, and you can start blogging right away.

If your host doesn’t already include Wordpress in the scripts on your server, you can still pick it up at:

http://wordpress.org/

Then go to the Wordpress Wiki for instructions on how to install it in 5 minutes:

http://wiki.wordpress.org/?pagename=5MinuteInstallation

Wordpress is free, open-source software. It is very simple to install, even for technophobes, and has a lot of online documentation. There are also many sites with free Wordpress add-ons and templates. I’m using a template for this blog that I picked up at Alex King’s site:

http://www.alexking.org/index.php?content=software/wordpress/styles.php

The Wordpress Wiki is a wealth of information on all things Wordpress, including installation instructions, help files, a long list of template sites, and all kinds of hacks and extras you can use to modify your blog and make it original.

If you’re a Wordpress user, another place to visit is the Wordpress discussion forum:

http://wordpress.org/support/

If you’re a new blogger, both Wordpress and Blogger are very user friendly. There isn’t a long learning curve. And you won’t have to learn any new technical tricks. Why not give one of them a try?

For more tips and ideas on how to make money blogging, be sure to
visit my “Why Marketers Should Blog” weblog at (what else)
http://www.WhyMarketersShouldBlog.com

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Well we have all heard about Blogs by now and if you are serious about developing your business you should have set up several in different niches, not because the more Blogs you have the more you will earn, although that could be a possibility given time.

Quite the contrary; it is a lot of hard work maintaining the flow of content to your Blogs but who said Life (or Blogging )was going to be an easy ride? It is however, probably the least costly way of creating an image for yourself as an expert in your field and is guaranteed to bring results in the way of increased traffic to your web site in a few months. O.K that’s a pretty bold statement coming from a newbie blogger, incidentally when does one cease to be a Newbie? Now there’s an interesting thought! Here’s another thoughtwhat if you don’t have a web site yet? Phew that’s another day’s work did I actually say a day? I really meant a year!

The message is coming through loud and clearand that is get Blogging right away because the sooner you start, the sooner you will see some results and the quicker you will leave Newbie status firmly in the past. The first faltering steps on the blog road can be interesting to say the least. You spend so much time creating your content aka posts, that you tend to forget that even when you have been at it for a week or two, posting every day, nobody probably has even seen your work at this stage! Or have they?

That’s the next hurdle which is very reminiscent of the New Web Site owner who sits back with great sighs of relief at having the creation on-line until he or she realises that what has just been achieved is actually the easy part and the real work now has to begin in earnest. What is the real work? Well first of all you must set up a routine to collate material to provide your inspiration for your posts and then you gotta keep up the posting momentum. Some experts say that you should post three times a day in the first few weeks or even months and some say you should post at least three times a week. Either way you should decide on a number and stick to it. Easier said than done!

One statement that I came across in the first couple of weeks, and bear in mind the euphoria still had a long life ahead of it yet, was on the lines of “don’t expect to see any real traffic for six months”. Now with all the publicity and mass hysteria surrounding Blogs you could perhaps have been forgiven for thinking that you would become celebrated overnight. Six months Wow that’s a lifetime on the Internet with things changing so rapidly. Why isn’t it all going to happen tomorrow?

Well, just like most things in life, time plays a major role in events and even with all the technology at our disposal we have to put a great deal of effort in before we see a return. No such thing as a free Blog, sorry Lunch! That’s a topic that deserves some separate comments outside of this article.
We left the first of all, several paragraphs back, so it’s time for second of all which is finding some, or rather many as many as possible, Directories to list your Blog. What a chore but necessary. Here is where I reward the reader for getting this far and not switching off long ago.

Wait for itare you surfing/reading/ snoozing comfortably? Just discovered a wonderful resource that will save hours and hours of research but will require hours and hours of submissions and it’s the incredibly named RSS Top 55 which actually boasts 160 RSS sites and Blog Directories. The author is none other than Robin Good not to be confused with the Outlaw of Sherwood Forest Fame, in those heady pre Internet days when life really was simple (but still not easy!)By the way what on earth is RSS? Come back next week and with a bit of Luck something else will be flavour of the month and you won’t have to worry about it any more!

Actually the authors real name is Luigi Canali de Rossi who must I guess be of Motorcycle or Formula One extraction. Hence the confusion between the numbers. I have still to work out how 55 makes 160! Though on reflection, if you add a couple of noughts to each of these you are probably close enough to first and sixth gears! So he must have been working on his RPM stats at the time!

Why he should want to change his name is beyond me since this must be the best resource going for a Directory non stop shop. Want the link? Go to the end of the article like all good freebie- hunters and beg!

The listing is on Luigi’s Blog at Master…New…Media; wow I nearly slipped in a “Bie” there by mistake since it is now the most frequented word in my vocabulary. This listing does everything but make the coffee for you…get to it and get Blogging. Don’t you just love it when Bloggers play dirty? Here is the url w w w.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55

Robin Piggott is about to leave his Newbie status behind although that could be open to conjecture! In his spare time(which is zero) he operates a Professional Driving School in Limerick Ireland and provides current insider, under the radar help, tips and information for would- be Drivers through his Web site and would be Bloggers through his…yes you’ve guessed it… Blogs!
http://www.astralmotoring.ie
http://NetNewbieProfits.blogspot.com

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A few months back, at the ITEA conference I saw this guy sitting next to me typing constantly into his wireless laptop. He was making notes on what the speakers had to say, was finding relevant links and then hitting the send key - instantly updating his Web site. No sooner the site was updated; he would get responses back from readers around the globe. He was a Blogger.

About Blogs

Several years ago, surfers started collecting information and interesting links they encountered in their travels through webspace. As the time passed they started creating logs of the information they collected and soon they started creating their own web logs. The web logs enabled them to update the information and links as often as possible. This was what the guy in the conference was doing. Improvements in Web design tools have certainly made uploading and updating easier for them.

Blogs are more permanent than posts to an online discussion list, more dynamic than older-style home pages. They are more personal than traditional journalism, and definitely more public than diaries. A blog is often a mixture of what is happening in a person’s life and what is happening on the Web, a kind of hybrid diary site. So, there are as many unique types of blogs as there are people.

These are a few common characteristics of a blog, but blog types may slightly vary. Some blogs provide succinct description of judiciously selected links. Some others contain commentary and links to the news of the day. Few are endless stream of blurts about the writers day. Few others are - political blogs, intellectual blogs, some are hilarious and some topic driven. They are all - Weblogs.

More than a list of links and less than a full-blown zine, weblogs may be hard to describe but easy to recognize. A blog can be recognized by its format: a webpage with new entries placed at the top, updated frequently. Often at the side of the page is a list of links pointing to similar sites. Some sites consist only of a weblog. Others include the weblog as a part of a larger site. Even though there are so many different blogs, there is one thing common about all the bloggers: most are noncommercial and are impassioned about their subjects.
Defining Blogs

A frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and Web links.

Blogs are alternatively called Web Logs or Weblogs. However, “blog” is used unanimously because it seems less likely to cause confusion, as “web log” can also mean a server’s log files.

Blogs & The Worldwide Web

Both personal sites and lists of links have existed since the web was born. Indeed, the ability to link one document to the other that existed on the global network drew early enthusiasts to the Web. They published pages and eagerly perused the pages published by others. That was the time when the accessibility to the pages from any computer with a modem and a browser was more important than the content of that page. For a while, webpages became an interesting addition to the cyberspace. Then the space got crowded. As a result the web grew at an exponential rate and search for the required information became difficult and simultaneously more time consuming.

Until, a few of these enthusiasts decided to put the links they collected daily onto a single webpage. These people placed their stuff descriptive text and link/s, for example: their travel records, on the web. The text enabled the reader to know why they should click the link and wait for the page to download. And so a particular type of website was born.

The New York Times article about a website named LemonYellow, published in July 1999, didnt say a word about weblogs, but affirmed the notion that webloggers were onto something.

Most of the early weblog editors designed or maintained websites for a living. Few of these editors just knew HTML - the simple coding language used to create webpages.

With Weblogs becoming popular, the personal websites became extensions of their day-to-day lives. Webloggers started rolling personal journals ongoing links-laden riffs on a favorite subject. Soon they linked to general interest articles to online games, and often to Web-related news.

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