Well it seems that a lot of people are becoming interested in blogging and many want to join the bandwagon. I am not a master blogger, yet, but since starting this a week ago I have developed a small amount of RSS feed readers and getting about 50 – 100 unique visitors a day. Not bad for my 1st week in blogging. I am now hosting several other bloggers on my server of whom also want to start blogging so I have directed them to my blog to start learning. In this article I well let you know step by step on how to get started blogging and how to start getting a small stream of traffic the same way I have been able to do it.

Step 1 – Setup Your Website

  • Get your domain name – A unique domain name is very important for branding issues and it looks a lot more professional. I use godaddy.com for my domain name registrations. They are cheap and easy to setup.
  • Get a hosting account – Its best to host your own domain so that you have total control over your server, or at least most of it. In my situation I am hosted with godaddy and I have the ability to host an unlimited amount of domains under 1 hosting account. I am sure the bandwidth is not as strong as it could be, but I don’t expect any digg effects any time soon.
  • Upload wordpress to your domain -Download the wordpress zip file from their site and upload and install wordpress to your server folders. Putting it in the root directory is probably best, but you can also set it up under a folder /wordpress if you want. This is not a technical tutorial so I will leave it at that. If you need help with this process I recommend getting in touch with some tech savvy people as you will need to learn how to use and setup an FTP and MySql Database. Here is a helpfull article on setting up wordpress.
  • Wordpress Post Installation – Wordpress has many configurations to mess with so here are some posts on how to tackle post installation like a pro.
  • Wordpress Themes – Once you have your wordpress installed and configured be sure to give it a unique look, at least anything other than the default look. Checkout The Wordpress Themes page, download your favorite template and install.
  • Wordpress Plugins – Wordpress plugins lets you add more control over your wordpress front end and backend. There are thousands to choose from but the home page features some of the most popular. Also if you want to search for plugins by keyword, be sure to look towards the bottom of the page… haha took me forever to figure that out :-b
  • Tracking and Statistics – Before getting anyone to visit your site you will want to install some traffic and analytical software. Basically so that you will know that someone has just visited. Without it you will never know if you are just talking to yourself, or if you actually have people reading your nonsense. I wrote an article covering this subject.
    How To Track Your Blog Traffic Stats
  • RSS Feed – The final step in setting up your blog is getting an RSS feed. Wordpress comes with one pre-installed but I recommend removing it and using feedburner instead. It will provide you with some in depth stats about your RSS feed viewers and in the future it will allow you to monetize your feed, make money, through adsense. I wrote a great article that covers RSS.
    How To Rule The World Utilizing RSS Feeds To Your Benefit

Step 2 – Start Adding Content

Now your site should be up and running, it should have somewhat of a unique look and feel to it and it should be customized with all the advanced features that you like. Now it’s time to start adding content. Content are articles for people to read, basically something to look at. At this time there is no point to start getting traffic to your site because nobody will have anything to read or look at and they will leave and never come back again.

Start of with writing 5 – 10 interesting articles. They can really be about anything you want. I started blogging about my learning process on how to startup a blog. In the future I plan to share many articles about money, finance, business, PPC, SEO, affiliate marketing and etc… These are the topics that I am familiar with. Write articles that you can write with your own words. Do not steal content, paragraphs or even sentences from other sites. For one, it looks really bad and unoriginal and secondly Google knows when you have copy and pasted. If you copy and paste you will never get into the search rankings and site visitors will never come back because they probably read what you just copy and pasted before. Make every article your own.

So what happens when you get writers block? Write about anything. Read a news article and comment on it. Read a blog and write about your own thoughts about that blog. If you are really having trouble, try some of these articles for inspiration.

Step 3 – Commenting

Ok so you have read the recommended reading and you created your first five articles. No doubt if you have been reading the articles I just sent you to, it has brought up questions and probably made you read some additional articles on those publishers website and others. So the first step is to start commenting.

Most of my initial traffic came from comments and questions that I posted on other bloggers websites. Get to know the publishers and their readers. Comment on their articles, the publishers love comments and readers will usually read your comment and then visit your site. But here is the trick. Make your comment interesting and do not spam the publishers. Spamming the publishers articles and making short comments like “Good Article” will only reflect on yourself. Only comment on articles that are of real interest and post good comments. It might be time consuming but 10 real comments will get you a better quality of traffic then 100 “Good Article” comments.

Check out these articles on what other bloggers have to say about commenting

Make it a daily practice to comment on 10 articles per day of which at least half of them should be from new publishers. That way you are not commenting on the same site every single day and it will help you network and meet new bloggers and in essence develop a mini community of bloggers.
Step 4 – Social Bookmarking

Now that you have been commenting, on 10 articles per day, you might see a small trickle of traffic starting to come to your site. You may even have some RSS subscribers if your first 5 articles you wrote were interesting. Next step is to start developing your profiles on social bookmarking sites. Here is a list of 30 Social Bookmarking Sites You Need to Know. But in this article I will talk about the ones I have had some small success with.

Digg.com - Become familiar with Digg. Signup, create a profile and start making friends. Digg has the reputation for hitting bloggers with the “digg effect“. This happens when you hit the front page of Digg and you are on a slow server that cant handle the load. You get so much traffic, your site slows down to a halt. Meaning you lose a lot of valuable traffic. But since we are just starting to blog, we can expect no digg effect any time soon. It is well known that only Top Digg Users cause the digg effect, so you need to start becoming a top digger yourself and try to network your way to getting to know a top digger so he will visit your site. I have not mastered this yet so I can’t say how to do it but I recommend networking with digg users and submitting diggs of all your favorite articles. Since I have started to digg a couple days ago I am getting about 5 – 10 unique hits per day from 2 articles. Not to bad… Also DO NOT DIGG YOU OWN ARTICLES!!! I learned this the hard way, but it looks tacky and unprofessional.

StumbleUpon – This is the same theory as digg. Network and try to get top stumblers to hit your pages. If this happens you will get a slew of traffic. Just today I was stumbled by someone and got a nice little spike in traffic. about 20 unique hits in about 10 minutes.

Technorati – Same situation here. Network and add pages to the directory. I have not had much success with traffic from this site yet but I do get about 2 – 5 unique visitors per day. I really like the feature of blog monitoring and ranking. This lets you know how many other bloggers are pointing to your site and also ranks you amoung all the blogs on the net.

These are my main sources of traffic at the moment and I have developed this small amount of daily traffic in under a week. I am sure if I keep up this pace, this blog will grow fairly quick. I hope you all learn with me and we develop and grow together quickly so that we can all Rule The World.

-Rob

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