Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Three Essential Blog Basics

Blogs and blogging can be many different things to many different people. By uncomplicated use of a free website builder, anyone can write about any subject they wish to choose and have a portal to the world. If you want to get your blog seen by as many people as possible and generate the traffic levels you want then you have to get the basics right and the three blog basics everyone should get right, regardless of writing ability and subject matter, are:

The Design
So the decision has been made and you start to use a free online website builder to enter yourself into the blogging sphere. Choosing the design is like choosing a frame for a piece of artwork; it has to suit and compliment your blog and add value if it can. Go for clean crisp backgrounds to have behind your content which will help the reading of the work and make the work the focus. For areas in the web pages that do not feature writing; try to make it interesting but not steal or distort the focus of their attention which should always be the writing.
When it comes to the actual design of the writing, do not use a font which is unusual. The reasons for this are two fold; firstly, your visitors expect a nice familiar font which they can easily read. Secondly, not all fonts are compatible in the many different operating systems in use around the world, so if in doubt play safe with fonts like Ariel, Verdana and Times New Roman, these are from a family of fonts which are the most commonly used.

Know Your Audience
Knowing who you are writing for will have an influence on the subject matters you choose to write about and the style in which it is written. The choice of subject matter will obviously be your final decision and it has to something you are interested in and comfortable to write about but identifying who are target audience will help you form a strategy with important decisions like how to get it seen.
Inviting feedback and discussion by adding a comments section is a surefire winner to get to know your visitors likes and dislikes as people love to express their opinion just as much as you do, but often the difference is you have decided to create a blog and they haven't. It is also good to get people to subscribe to your blog and as well as having the obvious effect of increasing returning visitors, you can also obtain some basic information like sex and location in the subscription process.
A technical way of knowing a bit more about your audience is use of free analytical tools like that of Google tools to find out who is searching for you, your subject matter and where the searches are coming from. It all helps to increase your knowledge of whom and how to target your audience.

Get It Seen
Once you have used a website builder to display your musings or your art portfolio you then have to get it seen. Forming a strategy to get it seen is the hardest part because it involves work and research as well producing the best content you possibly can.
Look at ways to get back links and people to link to you. This can be achieved by finding areas that would be of similar interest and physically asking them to link to you. It might be that you have to reciprocate the link so be choosy who to get links from and who you link to. Never link to something or be associated with something that would be of detriment to your own blog.
Learning how to make your blog Search Engine Optimized will help with the search engine rankings and will increase the amount of traffic coming to you. There are plenty of resources on the internet which will give you the basics on how to use keywords in your titles and your content which will help you improve your rankings.

Anyone can use a simple free website builder to build a blog and the quality of the writings can vary dramatically but if you have a good style and can write well then by paying good heed to the three essential basics to creating a blog you will be giving yourself and your blog the best chance of success


Maria Wixman can show you How To Use Free Website Maker with WIX.com I have been in the online marketing industry for over two years and love all things related to e-marketing, writing for the web, SEO and SEM. I've been working for a large company that specializes in web design,
and love how dynamic this field is.



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