Blogging is very popular today. The two main blogging platforms are blogger.com and WordPress. The platform that will work best for you depends on many factors. Learning the advantages and disadvantages of each will help you make that decision.

Blogger allows you to put up a blog quickly and easily. There is no need for you to have a website or a domain name. Blogger hosts the blog for you.

Registration is free and takes only minutes. Once you are registered, you can immediately begin to set up your blog. Templates are provided for you to use and can be easily changed at any time to give your blog a new look.

When you add a post, you simply name it and, if you have a website, link it to your site so visitors can easily visit your site by clicking on the title.

Type in your text and preview it to be certain it looks good. Then publish it. Your blog is now live.

If it’s this easy, why would you not simply choose Blogger and be done with it?

When you get done posting, you need to ping your blog. Let blogging networks know you have just updated your blog. You can do so by going to Pingomatic.com and entering the name of your blog and the URL address of your blog. Click on the websites you want to ping and you’re done.

If you don’t take time to ping, there’s a good chance no one will find your blog. This pinging is not hard, but it is an extra step you need to take when you post, unless you are posting for just family and/or friends.

The fact that Blogger is hosted at Blogger also means they can delete your blog at any time. You don’t have total control over your blog. Chances are this will not happen, but it does tend to make many marketers worry a bit.

WordPress, on the other hand, is hosted on your hosting service. You use your domain name and the WordPress blog is in it’s own folder. You have total control over your blog.

Once setup, it is very easy for you to post to it. You go into the administration area and write a post. When you are finished, you click to publish it. If you have setup WordPress properly and have listed auto posting at Pingomatic, your post will automatically be pinged to the blogging networks. You do not have an additional step.

There are also many templates for you to use and it is possible to configure these templates to fit your needs. Once again, you have more control.

However, WordPress can be a little complicated to install and, to take full advantage of it, there are many different plugins you will need to install as well. This can be a bit of a daunting task and something you might not want to be bothered with.

You do have to have a domain name and you have to have web hosting set up. These costs may limit the number of different blogs you might want to publish, whereas Blogger allows you to make as many blogs as you want on different subjects and you never pay anything.

Some people have blogs using both platforms. You need to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each and make your decision accordingly. The best way is to dive in and give it your best shot.

The best type of advertising has three characteristics. It is free, impactful and viral. What kind of advertising fulfills all three characteristics? Word of mouth! It is free because it is spontaneous, unsolicited and natural. It is impactful because the persons spreading it were impacted and they spread the news out of their own impacted emotions. And it is extremely viral because it spreads exponentially. Imagine if your blog posts could be passed around this way.

What kind of blog post can achieve such a viral nature? A viral blog can be one of several kinds:

1. A HOW TO blog post

The HOW TO blog post shows the reader how to do something that many people want to know. If you know how to do something that most people do not, you could post a step-by-step guide on how to do it to your blog. Once the right people discover your blog post, they will naturally and spontaneously spread your blog post to others. You could write about how to speak in public, how to write HTML, how to play the piano by ear, how to take great photos etc. There are literally thousands of ‘how to’ things you could post about.

2. A UNIQUE TWIST blog post

This type of blog post is closely related to the first HOW TO type. This is where you blog about something that is common knowledge but you put your own unique twist to it, something that most people have never thought of. It may well be totally contrary to conventional practice. One example is article marketing. The conventional practice in article marketing is where you write articles and submit them to article directories. But if you have a better and more effective way of article marketing, post about it in your blog. For example, instead of submitting articles to directories, you could offer your articles to blog owners or newsletter owners in your niche. Tell them they can make your article available to their readers for free as long as no changes are made to any of the content. This way you get much more targeted readers reading your article and more powerful link juice back to your blog because it comes from another blog that is related to your own instead of from a general article directory.

3. A HOT REVIEW blog post

This type of post follows the principle of the early bird catching the worm. This is where you blog about the latest hot topic in your niche and give an honest appraisal of what is good and what is bad about whatever is happening. Since the topic is new, virtually no one has much knowledge, much less a view about it. This works tremendously well for political blogs. But the review can also be about the hottest gadget or the latest book or the newest trend in your niche. One great place where you can find out the latest happenings is Google Trends. If you are the first to blog about whatever is happening, you can capture the initial interest of the public and people will start passing your blog post around like wildfire. When that wave dies down, simply find the next sizzling development and review it and the process repeats itself.

These are just three ways you can make your blog viral. Obviously, you will not succeed every time, but if you keep at it, you will hit the jackpot sooner or later. And as a result, the readership of your blog experiences an exponential spurt of growth.

How many blogs do you suppose there are on the Internet? Whoops another one was just started, and another, and another and..

There are millions of blogs online today and everyone is practically tripping over each other to start their own. My question is why?

You can answer that in word. Money! People think blogging is the magic bullet they have been missing to make money for the first time in their life. The other thing is blogs are so simple to start that a child of 10 could do it.

Of course after a few days the new blogger begins to realize that the money is not flowing in and this is going to become work. They sure are spending a lot of time working on their new blog and they have not made one penny off of it yet.

This is the bad side of blogging. It takes a lot of work to get traffic to your blog and it takes even more work to convert some of that into a paying customer.

If you value your time you lose money every time you set down and post in your blog. Let’s say you spend 30 minutes writing a 400-word blog post and you do that everyday for 1 month. You have just spent 15 hours and you may not have even made any money yet.

That’s the rub right there. First of all most people will never write 30 posts in the first month or maybe ever. The Internet is cluttered with blogs that were started with good intentions and abandoned like an orphan.

Someone should start a blog orphanage for abandoned blogs that we could adopt and offer tender loving care to. The bad side of blogging is you may be the next victim of “blogging is work” syndrome. Another blog started and abandoned because blogging is work and is not the easy road to riches you hoped it was.

A really good blog is one that is started by someone who would keep it up if they never made any money at it. The reasons for this are that the topic of the blog is a passion for the blogger. They have an interest in the subject matter. They may even be an expert in what they write about and their expertise shows.

The reader comes back over and over to see what the blogger will say next. They pull out their credit card to buy a product the blogger recommends. They click on a Google ad or subscribe to a newsletter. It is all so easy when the blog is kept up to date with useful information. The blogger has avoided the bad side of blogging.

There are three key areas that you can enhance on your WordPress blog that will help you optimize it. The areas are adding additional ping service websites, using Feedburner, and using keyword-rich categories.

Ping Services

The first thing that you should do is add additional ping services to your WordPress blog. You must have administrative rights to your blog and be logged in to gain access the ping service option.

Once logged into your WordPress blog’s backend, click on the “Option” tab and then click on the “Writing” tab and scroll down to the bottom of the page. You will see “Update Services” and a box under this title. There are a couple of ping services listed but you can add the following list by copying and pasting in the ping service list box. To complete the process, click on “Update Options”.

http://api.feedster.com/ping http://api.moreover.com/RPC2 http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2 http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/ http://ping.blo.gs/ http://ping.feedburner.com http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/ http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/ http://rpc.newsgator.com/ http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2 http://topicexchange.com/RPC2 http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud http://ping.weblogs.se/ http://blogmatcher.com/u.php http://coreblog.org/ping/ http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUdates http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php http://ping.myblog.jp http://ping.bitacoras.com http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc http://xmlrpc.blogg.de http://1470.net/api/ping http://bblog.com/ping.php http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

Feedburner

As a blog owner, being able to capture your blog traffic and generate reports is very important to knowing what you need to do to optimize your blog. One blog tool that works to help optimize your blog is Feedburner. Feedburner allows you to redirect your blog RSS feed through their service so that it can reach targeted blog visitors better.

This helps with optimization by allowing your RSS feed to have built-in options for bloggers to use as they read your blog’s RSS feed. This brings in a stickiness factor which is always good for optimizing your blog. Some of the blog tools that Feedburner allows you to use so that you can increase the effectiveness of your blog are:

Analyze: you will be able to see real-time and accumulated statistics about your blog’s visitor information. This will help you understand the traffic that is going in and out of your blog. This allows you to better target your optimization efforts to specific areas of your blog.

Optimize: allows you to make your blog “browser friendly” so that subscribing to your blog is easy. SmartFeed(R) is an option that you can use to make sure that your blog is compatible for most blog readers. You can even build interactivity into each individual post by using FeedFlare(R) which allows you to add links at the end of each post such as “Email Post” or “Subscribe to Feed.”

Publicize: is another way for you to make sure that your blog attracts web visitors. A couple of the tools that you may use is “Email Subscriptions” and “BuzzBoost”. Email Subscriptions will give your web visitors the opportunity to receive an email once a day alerting them that you have updated your blog. Then BuzzBoost(R) allows you to republish your feed as HTML so that you can add it as a Page on any of your other websites or WordPress blogs.

Using Categories as Keywords

The easiest way to optimize your blog with keywords is to use categories that not only define each post but also relate to other posts on your blog. WordPress blog software uses categories as a way to “tag” search engines so they can be alerted that a new post has been added to your blog for a specific topic area.

Categories are also another way to easily organize the content on your blog. When you list the categories on the sidebar of your blog, it gives your blog visitors the opportunity to see all the content of your blog for a particular topic.

Almost everyone who uses the internet knows Wordpress as the best blogging platform. It is estimated that almost 65% of bloggers use Wordpress for blogging. With such a large community, you will find thousands of plug-ins to use with your blog. Though Plug-ins provide added functionality for your blog, not all plug-ins are helpful.

Here is a list of “Must have” Wordpress plug-ins that will help you get the maximum benefits from your blog.

Spam Karma

Google Page rank has started a new race among website owners to spam blogs for a back link. If you have a high page rank for your blog you will end spending most of your time deleting the spam comments. Spam Karma is an anti spam plug-in to help you stop all automated blog spam without any effort. This helps you concentrate on your blog rather than on the spam comments. You can download Spam Karma from the site http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/

“All in one SEO” Pack

All of us have heard about search engine optimization for getting organic traffic from the search engines. You must also be aware of the fact that getting your site optimized for a search engine is a tedious task. All in one SEO pack is an useful plug-in meant to help you minimize your efforts in search engine optimization. This plug-in allows you to post unique META tags, META description, keywords and page titles optimized for the search engines. It also allows you to post common META tags and descriptions if you are too lazy to update each page.

Wordpress Database Backup

Do you spend a lot of time optimizing your blog, trying to get traffic and advertising your blog? What if you wake up one day and find your blog lost due to some server failure. Are you prepared for such disasters? If the answer is no, you must get Wordpress database backup plug-in. This plug-in helps you in on demand backup of your Wordpress database thus ensuring that you are prepared for any disasters on your blog. You can download this plug-in at http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade

Have you always wanted to have the latest version of Wordpress installed on your blog but always wondered if you could do it painlessly. The Wordpress automatic upgrade plug-in allows is developed to allow easy & effortless upgrade of your Wordpress installation to the latest version. This plug-in automatically backups your database, downloads the latest Wordpress version, installs the files and reactivates your previously active plug-ins. This plug-in can be downloaded from http://techie-buzz.com/wordpress-plugins/wordpress-automatic-upgrade-plugin.html

Permalink Migration Plugin

Permalink is the permanent link to the blog post after it moves to the blog archives. Such links are indexed by the search engines and any changes to these links normally result in a “Page not found” error and hence loss of traffic. The Permalink migration plug-in automates the entire migration process. This plug-in is a must have if you are not satisfied with your blog’s Permalink structure and would like to change it. This plug-in can be downloaded from http://www.deanlee.cn/wordpress/permalinks-migration-plugin/

Google Sitemaps plug-in

Sitemap is considered as an excellent navigation aid for your site visitor. XML sitemap are also known to provide search engines the necessary information for quick indexing of your blog. The Google sitemap plug-in automatically creates a XML sitemap for your blog and pings search engines informing them about the changes on your blog. This plug-in can be downloaded from http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final

Related Posts

Visitors coming to your blog post through search engines usually leave the blog immediately after reading the post. The related posts plug-in helps you retain the visitor by providing him related posts and thus ensuring that the visitor has enough relevant content to stay on your blog. This plug-in can be downloaded from http://wasabi.pbwiki.com/Related%20Entries

EasyTube

Have you always wanted to have a video site but lacked the programming knowledge for it. The Easytube plug-in makes it easy for you to incorporate Youtube videos on your blog without a single line of any code. You can download this plug-in from http://www.ejump.co.uk/wordpress/easytube-plugin-for-wordpress/

GotBanners

This plug-in provides an easy and convenient way of monetizing from your blog. It displays all banners on your blog in a random manner thus avoiding banner blindness for your regular visitors.

Blogging used to be just a method for stating your opinion, but now blogs are used to opine, to review, and to sell. In fact, many Internet marketers base their entire business around blogging.

Here’s why.

Blogging is really just basic communication. All it takes is a computer and an internet connection and you can set up a free blog on one of the many blogging services.

Its flexibility is also one of its outstanding features. There are numerous platforms to blog from, from Wordpress to Joomla to Drupal, and dozens more in between. And even if you don’t want to host your blog, you can set one up at one of the many free blog services like Blogger or Wordpress.com. And even if you use the free services, you can always take your blog to your own server at a later date.

Many people also feel that blogs create an intimate atmosphere for learning and research. A blog can create a simple credibility that can help sell your products because it helps create an “Everyman” aura, that is, a stripped down, hype-free way to talk about products.

If your opinions get read and respected, you might find that your credibility will begin to increase around a particular subject. People will begin to look to you to offer your opinions on forthcoming issues. And once you are established and considered an expert in a niche, your ability to sell from your blog will increase dramatically.

Once you are established, don’t be afraid to ask people to sign up to your list. This will be a list where you can reach your readers at a moment’s notice. A great way to utilize this list is to send a message to it when you have made a new post to your blog, and encourage your readers to not only read your new article but comment on it.

By using your list in this manner, your subscribers won’t feel that you are using your list merely to sell to them. Of course, you can sell to them from your blog, and if your readers begin to comment on your posts, you are helping to enhance your blog’s stickiness.

Blogging is a terrific tool for any Internet marketing business. Done in the correct manner (meaning that if you intend to build your credibility, you should blog in the most personal manner possible), you’ll be blogging your way to success in no time.

Twitter is a micro blogging platform that has caught the attention of the main stream media. You share your thoughts, insights, knowledge, tips, and interesting article sources using 140 characters or less with your followers in Twitter.

It is not a marketing platform but you can effectively use it to establish your brand and promote your products and services indirectly.

If you are planning to spam your Twitter followers with your blog post URLs and affiliate links, you will not go anywhere. Your followers will un-follow you quickly. You will not get new followers.

Twitter is like any other social media site. If you share information and insights about your niche by filtering them from hundreds of blog posts published every day, you will provide value to your followers.

If you find valuable information in your niche, share them with your followers and their number will increase.

You can also use Twitter to post latest news, hot trends in your niche, links to funny pictures, humorous video links, and other interesting things.

You have to post almost every day, preferably couple of times a day, to keep the number of followers growing rapidly.

If you are using WordPress blog platform for your blog, there are few tools you can use to automate your Twitter activities. These tools will help you use Twitter for promoting your brand.

First, you need to integrate the Twitter feed into your blog and encourage your blog readers to tweet your blog posts in their accounts.

Use TweetThis WordPress plug-in to encourage your visitors to tweet your blog post. TweetThis adds a Twitter link in every blog post you create. If needed, this plug-in will also shorten your blog post URL to fit the 140-character limit.

WPTwitp-ID plug-in adds a Twitter field to your WordPress blog comment form. When users posts comments, they can enter their Twitter user ids and the plug-in will create links to follow them in Twitter. You will be providing a service to increase the number of Twitter followers of people who leave comments in your blog.

Another WordPress plug-in called Twitter Tools integrates your blog with Twitter by pulling all your tweets into the side bar of your blog. You can also post new tweets from inside your WordPress blog.

TweetMeme Button helps retweet your post through out the Tweeter network. It also shows a count of how many times your blog post has been retweeted.

Tweeter Updater tool will send a Twitter status update to your account when you publish a post in WordPress.

You can find the web sites for these WordPress plug-ins by doing a search in Google. If you’re not using Twiteer as a brand building platform, you should sign up for a Twiteer account immediately.

First of all, what is a blog trackback? A trackback is a type of blog feature that is used to associate blog posts on different blogs – or a way to notify a website or another blog that you have published an entry that references it. The result of this is that two or more different blogs are able to share readers.

The description above is a little hard to fathom so here is an example. Say you just posted an article to your blog about Pit Bull dog training. Now, as you are surfing the internet, you run across a similar or related post on another blog. So, you could use the trackback feature to notify the person who posted the other post about Pit Bulls that there is a similar post on your blog.

When your trackback, which is the permalink to your post, appears on the other blog’s post, that blog’s readers find out that you have something to say about Pit Bulls and may even pay your blog a visit to find out more.

In order to create a trackback, you have to get the trackback URL from the post where you want to send your trackback notification. It will be shown on the blog as a Trackback URL or possibly a Permalink. Once you have found it, copy the URL into the correct place in your blog’s post. Your blog software will have some notation like Trackback URL identified for where the Trackback URL would go.

Once you have done this, save and republish your blog. Your blog software will automatically send the Trackback ping to the target blog’s post. So now your trackback, which is the permalink to your post, will be listed on the other blog’s post after that blog owner has approved it.

The trackback feature works by actually sending a ping from your blog to the blog you are trackbacking to notify them of your post. This also causes your post to be listed on the other blog, after it has been approved of course.

Trackbacks should be used to elaborate on or add to a related post. So if your post is on Pit Bulls, your trackback on another blog should also be about that related subject and not one like pet care in general or something like that. Blog comments can be used for posting non specific comments on blogs where trackbacks are topic related specific posts.

You may have noticed that by trackbacking you are essentially placing your link (permalink) on another blog, which creates a backlink to your blog. For this reason, when you set up your blog, modify the permalink structure to be more search engine friendly. This can be done a few different ways, but you want a structure that ends up having keywords in it as opposed to having more dynamic looking links.

By having the backlinks to your blog and by having them relevant to the content of your blog, you now have the ability of improving your blog’s page rank. Those backlinks will strengthen both your link popularity and your link relevancy which will bring your blog more organic search engine traffic.

It should be noted that trackbacks should be used with care and not used as methods for spamming other people’s blogs.

A blog is nothing without its readers. Readers won’t keep coming back to a blog that is not interesting to them, so if you want to have the best blog in your niche then you will need to make sure that the content you post is always top quality interesting information that makes your readers want to come back to see the latest update.

Now, it seems that everyone is into blogging these days – moms and dads, teenagers, writers, musicians, artists and pretty much anybody else you can think of which means that literally anyone who wants to share something with others can simply write a blog.

However, not everyone can have the “best blog” though. Only those who are willing to put some time and effort into researching what their readers are hungry for and then finding ways to give it to them will reach the top.

The good news is that finding out what topics the readers in your niche are interested in and the way they like that information served up is really rather easy, and the answers you need are at the tips of your fingers.

All you need to do is type your “main niche keyword” followed by the word “blogs” into one or more of the search engines and you will see some of the most popular blogs in your niche. Your job then is to spend some time checking out what is being posted and commented about and what questions people are asking that perhaps you could provide the answers to.

Other things to look at are the way the blogs are laid out are they 1, 2, or 3 columns, how much color is being used and what colors are they, what is their header like, how are the links laid out, do they have short posts or long, how often do they post, and how are they using pictures, banners, and ad’s?

It is also a good idea to keep up to date with the latest developments, stories, events and products in your market as this will ensure that you always have interesting informative content to post to your blog which will entice your readers bag again and again on a regular basis.

If you put to use the insights you gained from researching your competition plus giving your readers a constant stream of fresh interesting posts to read they will come back time and again which will build a loyal following for you plus this will naturally grow as time goes on and people recommend your blog to friends family or colleagues.

It is good to remember that blog posts do not have to simply consist of text, you can use audios if appropriate and of course these days video is rapidly becoming more and more popular and by using these other forms of media in your posts these may help to give you an edge over your competitors blogs that are just using text, plus the videos and audios themselves may help to bring you more traffic.

At the end of the day if you put in the effort to find out what it is that your readers want and if you deliver it to them in the way they want it, they in turn will reward you by returning to your blog over and over and telling others about it which in turn will make sure that you have the best blog in your niche.

For as many people who have started a blog or 2 of their own, for their internet business, there are still ten times as many who have not. That is somewhat amazing when you consider how many benefits blogging can offer your business.

I could write all day on why you should start a blog, but let’s boil it down to 4 really good reasons!

1. Everyone else is doing it so why not you. Maybe a better way to put that is your competition has a blog so you better get with it or be left behind eating their dust.

If you compare two similar businesses online today you will find the one that has a blog is beating the pants off of the one who does not. Is that a risk worth taking?

2. Blogs are a great way to interact with your visitors. In fact you can do so many cool things with a blog today that the really good ones make the visit so enjoyable people actually want to come back again.

You can interact with your visitors by adding a place for them to post comments on your blog articles. You can run polls and make it fun to see what people are voting on.

You can add videos on various things relating to the theme of your blog. If you do not know how to create a video you can go to You Tube and copy some simple code and place it in your blog. Presto, you now have made your blog more fun.

3. You can sell products on your blog. This is so easy that anyone can do it as well. Start by placing a banner for your favorite affiliate program on the sidebar. Then add text link ads for more products you sell in the content of the blog articles themselves.

Another huge revenue stream for top bloggers is selling advertising. Did you know you could earn several thousands dollars a month for one banner ad if you have a high traffic blog.

You can even place Google Adsense ads on your blog and get paid every month by Google. They sell the advertising for you which makes it real nice!

4. Search engines love blogs because they are looking for fresh content everyday. If you work at adding new content on a consistent basis Google and other search engines will reward you with free traffic.

So there you have it. 4 really good reasons to start a blog. What are you waiting for? Go do it!