Start to Creating your Blog

Once you have decided on your topic and niche and identified your keywords, it is time to begin to actually create your blog. Do you know how to begin setting up your blog?

You will need to make some decisions about your blog, whether you want a free or paid blog, what your domain name will be, etc. There are many advantages to a free blog and there is less financial pressure from using a free one but there are also some things you can’t do or won’t get when you are using a free blog. For this reason, you might choose a paid one to get more options.

Paid blogs are sometimes harder to set up but it depends on what company you are using and what knowledge you have already. If you choose your own domain, you are going to have to choose a domain name as well. You can search online databases to see if the domain name you want is already in use.

1. Choose a name that is easy to spell.
2. Choose a name that is easy to remember.
3. You will probably want to choose a name that pertains to the topic of your blog.
4. If not, go with something catchy (i.e. Google, Yahoo, etc)

Once you have chosen your domain name and found a host, you are ready to begin building your blog.

How to use Blogger

1. Go to Blogger.com and set up a new account with a username, password, display name and email address.
2. Create a blog for each keyword you have chosen, using the keywords in the title and the web address
3. Choose templates and design for your blog.
4. Start posting on your blog (using keywords you have chosen)
5. Enable comments from registered users and backlinks on your blog (if you want them.)

Collecting information

When you have your blog set up and people start visiting, you are going to want to collect some information from them. This information will help you encourage and motivate them to return to your site and buy your product, use your service, etc.

Building an email list that your visitors can opt in to is one good way to start building and collecting information. You want people to return to your blog so that they will click on affiliate links or ads, buy your products, etc so that you make money. To do this, you are going to have to know what they are interested in reading so you can put it in your blog.

The email list is also a great way to keep them informed of new items, updates and more on your site to bring them back again and again. Be sure you put your subscription box in a great location on your blog so that people can easily see it and subscribe.

Other ways of collecting information is by allowing people to post comments on your blogs and have discussion. You can also post surveys and setup voting polls to find out what people think.

Managing your email list with autoresponders

You can send your emails and newsletters by hand but I think you will find that this is not very efficient. It is very time consuming and if you miss someone or take too long getting back to them, they may forget about your site and you will have lost business.

A great way to remedy this is to use autorepsonders to make sure you get all your emails and newsletters back to people in an appropriate time. If you have a domain that you have paid for, there is probably a type of autoresponder script on the server that you can use but if not, there are also companies that offer autoresponder services that can help you set this up.


Why use an autoresponder?

An autorepsonder can really be helpful to you by saving you time and benefiting the people who visit your site. What are some ways that an autoresponder can help you?

They can:

* send an automatic thank you when someone subscribes to your newsletter
* address the subscriber by name
* send out a specified number of follow up emails
* send follow up emails at prescribed intervals (daily, every two days, weekly, monthly and so on)