Building a Blog

Blog Explosion

2006-02-14T20:11:00.000+02:00

I'm sure you have all heard of Blog Explosion (I have resisted the tempting urge to include my account in that link to my account).

What it offers is, provide a mostly untargetted and uncaring traffic (of other bloggers) to your blog.

Is it useful? No, not exactly.

Is it useless? No, not exactly.

First of all, Blog Explosion forces visitors to stay at your blog for 30 seconds. We are all acquittanced with that certain face of the human psyche. If we are forced to do something, we will exploit every opportunity to overcome our own feeling of being exploited.

I don't know if there are any stats on this, but I'm pretty much sure (and not just opinion, but also based on my SiteMeter records) that 90% of visitors through Blog Explosion just count down the 30 seconds and click the number - without even reading a word of the blog.

Is this favorable? Not much, unless you want to exaggerate your visitor count, knowing that some (or most) of them haven't even read the title of your blog.

I am a bit exaggerating, actually. In fact (again no stats to back up my opinion, but just out of experience), Blog Explosion surfers do read your title. And they do glance quickly at your overall design.

Not for 30 seconds, though. I think for about 3 seconds.

If your blog "seems" as an interesting one, in that 3 second frame, they will read further.

If not, it's just a countdown.

So how can you make the most out of that 3 seconds?

First of all, make sure you title says it all. There are too many "[insert name here]'s Blog"'s out there.

Then, make sure your site looks different - and hopefully interesting. We humans are very dependent on our visual sense. If your blog looks as dull and plain as it can ever be, make sure your title and content makes up for it. If you're not too sure, do take the time to throw in a few eye-catchers.

And lastly, if you are not confident about your blog yet, don't bother joining in with Blog Explosion. If you can't convince yourself, you will probably fail to do so to a stranger in 3 seconds. Work on your blog, and differentiate it from the others. You can use Blog Explosion to review various blogs and learn from them (for better or worse). If you sign up, you will as well get credits for your surfing. Don't put your blog up instantly, and don't aim for credits. Study and learn from each random blog you meet. Don't worry, your credits are accumulating.

And when you are confident that your blog deserves readers, do put it up.

That's how Blog Explosion can help you.

Blog directories and search engines

2006-02-12T19:24:00.000+02:00

Ok, so now you have submitted some decent posts to your blog. You are more or less sure that a casual visitor will have at least some stuff to view, and not just take a glance and surf on.

When you checked up on your counter/tracker (yeah I know you did, we all do when we launch a new site), you probably noticed some visitors already came to your blog. They may be from the weblogs.com ping (that you turned on in Blogger settings), or merely arrived at your blog by hitting the "Next Blog" button on the Blogger Navbar. Blogger also provides links to recently updated blogs on its homepage, so you might have noticed a visitor or two arrive right after you make a post.

But that was just the beginning. Now if you're confident with your blog so far, it's time to submit to some blog directories.

Normal search engines, especially human moderated ones like Google or Yahoo, are more conservative in accepting sites to their directory. So I'd still advise you wait a bit more before submitting your blog to such engines. Also, the robots of such engines do crawl the net all the time, so perhaps they could even list you before you even apply.

Anyway, the time has come to submit to some blog-only directories and search sites.

Technorati
Has a wide variety of options. Gives you an account.

Blog Pulse
Has some nice features like trend stats.

Daypop

Blog Search Engine

PopDex
Optional linkback.

Blogarama
Optional linkback.

Globe of Blogs
Optional linkback.

BlogWise

There are of course hundreds of others, but these are in my opinion the major ones. So go ahead and submit your blog to all.

Required field cannot be left blank

2006-02-12T00:20:00.000+02:00

You've spent much time working on a post draft at your Blogger blog, and when you're all satisfied with it, you click "Publish Post".

Error:
Required field cannot be left blank.

What field? You haven't left anything blank?

Well, it happens. I'm not sure why it happens, but sometimes, one of the radio buttons in the "Post and Comment Options" section gets unticked. Since these are required fields, Blogger won't let you publish your post until you tick an appropriate radio button.

So if you face that error message, the solution is simple. Open the "Post and Comment Options" section (below the post area on the left), and find out which radio button selection is blank. Tick "Yes" or "No" as you wish, and publish.

Checklist for launching a new blog

2006-02-11T18:49:00.000+02:00

Ok, so in my previous posts, I have written about 4 very vital initial steps for your new blog. I'll just go over them to provide a checklist:

adjust Blogger settings to provide the best possible publicity for your blog (details)
install RSS site feed which helps readers to subscribe to your blog (details)
install a tracker so you can analyze and learn from your visitors' actions (details)
tweak the default template a bit to ensure a personal touch to your blog (details)

Don't rush for submitting your blog to search engines yet. It's a weak chance that they will accept an empty blog (especially human moderated ones like Google). Even if you are listed, a visitor who comes to your blog to find nothing but emptiness will probably never come back. So take things slow, we'll come to search engines later on.

Also, I know it's hard to resist, but quit checking up on the visitor stats every half hour! You are still very much in the beginning, so most probably you'll get no visitors just yet. Unless you are counting your own visits, or those of your friends' who you have told about your blog, of course.

For the next few days, you have a much more important task at hand:

Post like crazy!

Content is indeed king, and if you are wishing to cumulate a reader base other than your friends and family, you must provide valuable content.

So once you've completed the initial steps in the above list, take the next few days to post on your blog. Have fun!

Personalizing your blog's face

2006-02-11T17:37:00.000+02:00

Your blog is your blog.

It is very true indeed that content is king. Even if a blog is as plain as can be, if it has valuable content, people will read it.

However, in our modern times, visuality is vital. If your blog uses one of the Blogger templates as it is out of the box, your visual score is not very high.

I don't mean that those templates don't look good. Actually, some of them are very well designed. But if your blog looks exactly like some other thousand blogs, visitors will be more inclined to just skim through quickly, and hit the "Next Blog" button.

But if you personalize at least some items in the template, change a few colors, add some pictures, tweak things around a bit, then the visitor will probably spend more time before taking off. This is because your blog promises by its looks, that it is different.

So, I'd really advise you to examine the code for your chose template, and take the time to make some customizations. If you have some HTML experience, this shouldn't be hard at all. All the default templates are very well commented.

In addition to usual HTML, Blogger uses some "Template Tags" in the code. These are basically variables substituting for things like your blog's name, or different parts of a post like the timestamp header, or your profile box, etc.

These are all summarized in Blogger Help - Template Walkthrough, and even if you don't know HTML, the Blogger system is very simple and highly customizable. So do read those pages in the Blogger Help section. And play with a few settings in your template, and watch the result by hitting the "Preview" button. If you don't like the changes, or if you mess things up, you can always return to your previous state by using the "Clear Edits" button.

When you are confident that your previewed changes looks good and everything is working as it should be, you can "Save Template Changes", and "Republish" so your changes are applied to your blog.

I am not going to details here, or give shortcut hacks like "change this code here to do this" or "insert this code here to do that". That is because I am a huge believer of trial and error learning. If I gave several such quick-hacks, first of all your blog would not be personalized, because anyone reading this post could also do the same changes. Also, you would not be learning anything, you would be just copying and pasting.

Believe me, it's simple to do basic changes to your template. Just read the help files, and experiment.

Keeping track of your readers

2006-02-11T14:45:00.000+02:00

Another wise move to make, is installing a counter or tracker to your blog. This way, you can examine stats about who is reading your blog. It's especially useful as a base point for further marketing efforts on your blog.

I like and use SiteMeter as a tracker. It's free, and has some quite nice features. Some of these include:

being able to not track and count your own visits
sending reports your email
keeping track of visit durations and navigation in your site
keeping track of where your visitors found out about your blog

The registering process is quite easy. Make sure you provide your real email, for that's where they will be sending your password.

Once you've signed up, you can choose an image style for SiteMeter, and then copy and paste the HTML code into your template. If you're not sure how to do so, SiteMeter also extensive help for Blogger users.

You might also want to change the privacy level of your stats (whether anyone can see your stats or not) in the "Manager" section. I find it useful to set the "ignore own visits" too, but remember to allow cookies in your browser, otherwise this won't work.

Installing RSS feed with FeedBurner

2006-02-11T14:20:00.000+02:00

FeedBurner is a free and easy way to install RSS feed to your blog. They also provide some basic stats about your subscribers.

The process is very straight forward, you first register for an account, then enter the URL of your blog's main page (like http://building-a-blog.blogspot.com).

After your feed is created, go to the "Publicize" tab, and click "Chicklet Chooser" on the sidebar. Here you can choose from different buttons for your feed link.

After you choose one, copy the HTML code given below the page, and paste it into your Blogger template, preferably somewhere on your sidebar.

That's it! Make sure to come back and check your feed readership stats once in a while!

Customizing Blogger settings

2006-02-11T13:52:00.000+02:00

First things first.

Blogger presents a variety of settings for your blog, available under Settings tab. It is a good idea to go over all these options when you first launch your blog. I'll list several essentials:

Basic

Description

Add your blog to our listings?

Show email post links?

Publishing

Notify weblogs.com

weblogs.com

Archiving

Enable post pages?

Site Feed

Publish Site Feed?

Ok, these are the most vital settings for your blog. Make sure you click "save settings" after each change you make, and after all is done, don't forget to republish your blog!

Building a Blog - for fun and profit

2006-02-11T12:44:00.000+02:00

Hello!

I have just launched my new blog at Blogger, Home Based Business Ideas. And since I am building it from scratch, I thought publishing this side blog (the one you are reading now!) could prove to be useful.

The main focus of this experimental side blog will be documenting the steps I will be going through during developing Home Based Business Ideas. I will cover everything from customizing templates and installing features, to promotion and marketing.

So I guess this will be a useful source for beginners, as well as veterans who'd like to improve their blogging experience.

Enough for an introduction!