Saturday, June 11, 2016

Blogging Starting Tips

Hello welcome back in my previous post I discussed: 

How to add your blog to Tapatalk

Today i am Here with some good tips for  new bloggers. How to start and from what to start.

1. "Hello World!" post
This should normally be the blog site's first-ever post. It is most usually generated automatically by the site's software setup. In the world of blogging, this is often taken as the practical point of the birth of the blog. Some people consider this corny or useless and irrelevant, and in a sense they are right. In reality, it doesn't hurt the blog, and it's a very good way to indicate when the blog was born.

2. Your first 'real' post
Introduce yourself and your blog. You've just hit the parade ground, so to speak. It's like in real life -- we don't come up to someone at the go-get and start blabbing about our favourite topic. We introduce ourselves, so that the other person (the reader) gets a fair idea of what the blog is about, its mission (if any), and the person behind the words and pictures.

For Point 2, there is no set way of doing this. There is no 'best' way either. Introduce yourself in the most natural way that comes to you. In any case, it should at least have these three basic things:-

- What you do
- Who you are
- Your basic reasons for blogging about the stuff that you write about

Once you publish that introductory post, you can re-enter the same information into your blog's About page (preferably with some rewording here and there to avoid complete duplication of text).

3. Your second post
Now you can get into the meat of things. Now you write about the stuff that you made your blog for. If you don't know what to write about, then unfortunately the real question has to be asked -- What did you create your blog for in the first place?

Good blogging practices

In the early days of your blogging and as you gain more experience, be less ambitious. First get into the train of producing copy in a more efficient way, even if your copy may not necessarily be 'original.' It isn't realistic to produce good, solid, original content when the physical acts of producing copy efficiently are still weak and underdeveloped. Blogging is a skill that needs time to nurture and develop with actual practice.

The need to know how to produce copy efficiently first then plays into idea of stop quantifying your blogging efforts. Many people new or inexperienced in the blogging racket make the mistake of quantifying everything too early in the game, like focusing on the number of clicks, shares, wordage, SEO backlinks, etc. I have been 'interrogated' in the past by newbie bloggers as to how many hours to put into the copy preparation, monetisation, backlinks, ramp up clicks and shares, you name it, with just two or three published posts. These and other questions are unanswerable mainly because much depends on the person's working habits and routine -- as well as having a reasonable amount of content in the first place.

Whatever your working and/or writing habits, each blog post of yours should have these characteristics as the minimum requirements:-

(1) At least one picture per post.
Don't write a sea of grey text (a mistake many, many bloggers make). In an ideal world, consider using one image for every 200 to 250 words if your post is a long one.

(2) Consider splitting a long post into several smaller 'takes.'
Make it easy on the eyes. Make it easy for your readers. Make it easy for yourself. The general rule of thumb since the dawn of blogging is to think about starting a second instalment once your first instalment hits 500 to 700 words. Your subject matter determines when to split into another take, but your mileage shouldn't vary too much from that rule of thumb.

(3) Use a new post to update an already published post.
In short, DON'T "perfectionalise" a post that's already gone out. Big mistake many novice bloggers make. Write a new post with a link back to the original and the updated information. Go to the original and insert a link to the new post ("Update: See this post"). You get the general idea. If we perfectionalise a past post, we'd all still be reading the same newspaper article from 1888.

Everything else is just a detail.

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