Blogging 101

This is not a post about how to become an expert blogger or how to generate traffic to your blog but just a list of the things I've done to set-up the tools I think I need for this blog.

See, I've been busy the whole day signing up on different websites that my dear friend and pro-blogger, Ria, had taught me would supplement my blog and also based on what I've shored up from Google.

After putting this one out in Blogspot (my other option is Wordpress but I heard they don't support AdSense which I am planning to put up later), I immediately subscribed my blog feeds to Feedburner. Supposedly, it will allow me to "see where your content goes once you publish it and generally add a lot more value to your feed." I don't really understand how it does that but let's see.

After Feedburder, I signed up for Technorati which indexes and searches blogs. Basically, it helps to put out your contect out there. I was required to put in tags and keywords for my blog. Admittedly, this got me a bit stumped because after all, this is a personal blog and does not limit to a certain topic or a niche. Anyway, I entered in the categories that I will be using to sort out the entries in this blog (hmmm... I find being organized a bit unfamiliar as I'm usually not).

After Technorati, I signed for a couple of networking sites that will help me expand the network I have. These would also supplement the advertising that I would need to attract visitors to my site. I already have Friendster and Multiply, and I suppose I should sign up for MySpace but didn't really think about it (or maybe I already have one? dunno...) Anyway, I made an account at Plurk and Facebook as recommended by Ria.

Facebook is the same old style as Friendster and MySpace but I had a bit trouble navigating the site as it has a slightly different layout that the others. Now with Plurk, I was surprised and somehow excited about their take on social networking. Their main page is actually a timeline, which is more like the bulletin boards in Friendster but in here are posted real time like a chat system and is now the main focus of the site. Hopefully, I'll be able to add more friends and acquaintances in those sites but for now, I have to settle on having Ria. Of course, the first thing I did was announce I now have a blog. I even posted my newly-made logo which was uploaded at Photobucket.

According to Ria, there are also lots of other networking opportunities to be found at microblogging websites but I have yet to clarify what they are and which ones are populated by the most number of people (of course, it makes sense to go to the more popular sites and have more number of people to advertise to).

Last but the least, I went to sign up for Google Analytics. This Google tool actually allows the user to track where visitors come from, gives the statistics and generally enables you to increase your traffic based on the reports. After I signed in, it gives a code to paste in your blog template (normally, the code is inserted in every page but since this is a blog and it is very dynamic, one has to put it in the template instead). To do that, I had to edit the template options in my Blogspot dashboard, clicked on the 'edit html' tab and inserted the code directly before the '/body' tag. I went back to search for my report but last I checked, it was able to see that I've added the code but is still awaiting for the report.

Since I'm planning to put AdSense inside my blog and to know more about how it works, I actually already signed up for it but as advised, it would be a lot better to put it up once I can see traffic coming by my blog, even if it's just a trickle, which will be probably a week from now or two.

So that's it. It's a bit of work but it was generally easy and everytime I get confused, there's always Google for some explanations (don't we just ALL love Google and the internet?!). So there you go, Blogging 101 as experienced by me today. This is just the start and I'm not sure where it goes but at least now I can say, I know HOW to START a blog. :)