Welcome to The Blog Works
Friday, October 13th, 2006Welcome to The Blog Works!
The Blog Works is all about building a successful blog. Success is measured in different ways for different people:
You might just want to share your personal thought and discoveries as you journey through life, in which case you want a blog that is quick and easy to use, but which expresses your personality in its appearance. You may or may not be concerned with who or how many see it – it just needs to be there, with your thoughts, photos, music, whatever!
Or, perhaps you have a message that just must be heard. There are many blogs on the web that support some cause, or help to propagate an idea, whether it is political, philosophical or religious. They need as many readers as they can get, and the blog must communicate well and appear professional and convincing.
Maybe your blog is to support a business. Perhaps it is the business! Not only must it clearly display the product, but it must entice the reader to come back time and time again. Traffic is king, as the saying goes.
Then, some blogs are just for fun. They are like the huge laughing mouth at the entrance to St Kilda’s Luna Park – inviting everyone to come in and spend some time relaxing.
Whichever type of blog you wish to build, at The Blog Works we plan to point you at the best tools to acheive it.
- We’ll look at ready to go free blog hosting systems, as well as how to host a blog on your own domain.
- We’ll explore ways of enhancing the appearance and functionality of your blog with code templates, code tweaks, widgets, gadgets, adding images, favourite links, blogrolls, etc.
- A blog is primarily about content. We’ll look at how to write in ways that communicate effectively, and where you might find ideas.
- A successful blog needs traffic, so we’ll investigate how to get a good position in the search engines, which directories you can submit your blog to, and other communities of bloggers that might be interested in your writing. There are a host of online tools to help you in this.
- If you are interested in making money through your blog, we will look at the various affiliate and advertising systems that can easily enable this to happen. It is one thing to have ads on a site, but how do you get people to click on them? We’ll look at such things as ad selection, ad relevance, ad design and ad position. And how do you stop your blog from looking like a highway billboard?
- After all of this is in place you will want to know how your blog is doing, which is where analysis comes in. We’ll look at not only effective ways of measuring how many readers your pages have, but where they come from, what they are doing while they are there, and how they leave.
If you have a suggestion, a comment, or just want to talk about these issues, feel free to post a comment. And, since blogging is all about shared communication, we are happy for you to put your link in a comment, but please make it a comment and a link that is definitely relevant to the post and helpful to other readers.
While we are talking about sharing, if you have a blog which you think is helpful to other blog developers, post its URL in a comment. If I like it I’ll mention it and put it in a blogroll. This will give you another link to help you gain visitors. A return link on your blog would be appreciated.
We hope you enjoy your use of The Blog Works, and find something of value to help you in your own blogging.
