I recently received the following email from a new blogger, and I know that a lot of people often have the same questions when I talk to them about blogging. So I thought I would share my answers with you here. If you ever have questions about blogging you’d like me to answer, drop me an email (tiffany at whoistiffany.com) or leave a comment and I’ll answer you back as quickly as I can. And you can be certain there will be a lot of information about blogging pouring out of my head and into the pages of Who is Tiffany in the very near future as well. 


blogging basicsHi Tiffany,

I recently started a blog about our experiences living on a farm.

I was wondering how you inform other people about the blog? I only post about once a week, so I am not a big blogger. And I am not very savvy about blogging. I don’t have comments on my site since I am using Apple’s iWeb software. Do you have any advise, or can you point me to some sites that might help me?

Also, I notice that you spell out your email instead of providing a link. Do you get a lot of junk from automated emailers if you put a link to your email?

Thanks
S.

 

Hi S.,

Congrats on your new blog.

Regarding publicizing your blog, I would just start listing it in blog directories like blogcatalog.com. Do a search in google for blog directories — you’ll find quite a few. You can also find blog hops or memes to join which cover topics you write about. For example, I host a garden linky on Fridays at NOH, and join up for You Capture which is a photography linky every Thursday. You add a link to your own blog and then visit the sites of other participants in the link up.

SEO is really important for getting your pages found by google and subsequently being found by people searching for what you are writing about. So it’s wise to not only get your blog listed in popular directories, but also to make sure that people are searching for the things you want to write about. There’s more involved than what I will go into here, but look at something like SEO Book’s Keyword Tool and enter a few words about what you’re writing about (i.e. mincemeat pie recipe). It will let you know how many people search for that and if you might be better off using a different wording for your title, permalink & within the post.

You can also start visiting other sites often and leaving comments. The readers and blog owners will often pop back over to your blog to see who you are and what you are up to. It’s especially useful to start with blogs which are writing about similar topics to your own because you’ll have some common interests to share with those bloggers and their readers.

If you are really serious about making money from your blog, I’d have to recommend switching to a self-hosted WordPress blog. The SEO element is built in, commenting is built in and it’s rather easy to get started. I actually have a web design and low cost hosting company that works with a lot of small businesses and start-up bloggers. You can get a hosting package starting at 17 cents a month, which will allow you to grow a bit before you need to make any serious investments. And by then, you know whether your blog is going to become something you love and want to be serious about or not.

At the very least you need to consider using a free platform like Blogger, WordPress.com or even Typepad to host your blog. Google and the other search engines favor these types of blogs much more (less than self-hosted of course) but if you want your blog to be read, you need for it to be found.

Regarding the email address needing to be edited, yes, a lot of spammers will use robots to comb pages for email addresses. So you will find a lot of websites only providing comment forms or showing their email address as an image. Or doing what I do and making it so that a human has to change it to be a functional address.