Rob Moshe

Part of growing a business is, reviewing the process, seeing what you are doing right, and what needs to be corrected. It’s OK to make a mistake; it’s not OK to repeat it.
In building a blog ultimately we are concerned with three things.
1.   Are we getting traffic/readers?
2.   Are they interested in what we have to say?
3.   Are they coming back for more?
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Though these things are important, one has to be careful of that they don’t begin to obsess about these areas while sacrificing many other areas of blog growth.
When you begin to build your blog you have to have a sense of the reader (market) you want to attract, the feedback system you will use to determine if they are interested in your blog, and the measuring system that will let you know if you are succeeding.
Once you have your strategy set you have to work on building that blog. You need to focus on content, layout, and awareness. If you don’t then you wont have a blog. This may seem like an obvious statement, but many beginning bloggers focus on areas that are ultimately causing their blog to stall from the get go.
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3 tips to help you blog grow.
1.   Define your neiche.
·       Know what you want to write about. If it is going to be a personal blog, or a topic related blog.
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2.   Post, Post, Post.
·       A blog without content is a waste of server space. Most of your energy should be dedicating to uploading you brain onto your blog.
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3.   Create awareness.
·       Advertise your posts, on Blog Carnivals , and Digg. Comment on Blogs that you feel have the same readership you desire (make sure your comments have value. Comments that say “Nice Post” and a link back to your blog get deleted)
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3 Things that will slow you down.
1.   Constantly checking you site stats.
2.   Constantly checking your technorati ranking.
3.   Constantly checking your email for comments.
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As you will notice above the danger is in “Constantly” checking these things. If you do these things dozens of times each day, you are taking away time that should be used on creating content and spreading awareness.
I recommend that until you have a minimum of 50 posts you shouldn’t check stats or Technorati at all. Your Comments you can check once a day. After the 50 posts you should limit yourself to once a day for all three.

“If you build it. They will come”

The two commodities of business are TIME and MONEY, and to succeed we strive to get the most money out of our TIME. One of the reasons that people will go into business for them selves, is that they see the opportunity to get greater financial rewards for their effort. If you work at Second Cup as an employee, you get an hourly rate. If you are the owner, your earnings can grow based on how well you grow the business.

When we begin the journey of “Self Employed” , we dream of our great financial success. We see ourselves sitting on the sandy beaches of Bora Bora, sipping margaritas, while the business that we envisioned is being managed by highly dedicated staff, who are so excited that they are building our empire so we can have the time to bask in the sun.

(pretend you hear record scratching sound)

If this is what you are visioning, then I recommend either getting a salaried or hourly paying job or changing your vision.

Success takes sustained and dedicated effort. If you speak to anyone you will see that for the first three to five years, they ate, slept, and breathed their business. Every waking moment was dedicated to its growth. Yes you will meet or read about some of those people that made millions in a month, but they are few and far between. You will also find that the people that make it instantly spend it instantly too. If you didn’t earn it you won’t value it.

For those that are getting into blogging for money making purposes, again, keep in mind that just because there are financially successful bloggers out there, it does not mean that you can go to Blogger or MySpace, set up a blog, write one post saying “Hi my name is Farley” , and suddenly make a million dollars. It takes hard work.

A few tips when you begin your journey to success.

* Realize that success is a long journey. For most businesses it takes 3-5 years to realize a profit. Successful Bloggers have said that it took at least six months before they started getting solid awareness of their blog, and another year and a half until they were able to really monetize it.
* Have a game plan. You don’t need a 10 page business plan, but you will benefit from a one page strategy, so you can constantly review where you are and where you are going.
* Especially in the beginning treat this as a job. Set hours and stick to them. You can’t succeed on “an hour here, an hour there attitude” .
* Let supportive friends know what your goals are. They will hold you to it and push you on.
* Reward the steps. It will be a while until you reach your goal, but recognizing the steps along the way will make it easier, to continue. If you are going to build a blog, then once you have set it up and put in your first post, celebrate. Pour yourself a glass of wine and toast to you effort.

If all you visualize is drinking on the beach you will spend your life as an employee.
If you visualize an unstoppable drive towards success you will end up sipping margaritas on the sandy beaches of Bora Bora.

There is an ongoing debate on post length. Some like Steve Pavlina, feel that you shouldn’t get caught up with post length. He prefers to develop an idea in totality and post it, whether it ends up being a half a page or three pages. Darren Rowse recommends keeping your posts to around 400 words. This is the amount of words the average person reads in one minute.

I would like to recommend an approach that blends both opinions and improves your search-ability.

When you have a long post see if it can be broken down into smaller concepts. Then create separate posts for each concept, and within that post link to the other posts that make up the whole topic. Your first post is like the Intro, so in the following post, begin the body of you post with “this post is part of the # part series yada yada”, and at the end identify the next post on the topic followed by other posts in the series.
You can see and example of this with my post  20. I Wanted to Make My Own Mistakes, Until I realized that It Was Much Easier to Let Others Screw Up.
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Keep in mind that you should title each post according to its own concept. It should not be “How I found my dog (part one)” , “How I found my dog (part two)”, etc. Using the previous example your first post could be “How I found my dog”, your second post would be “Getting the word out on my lost dog”, or just “Getting the word out”.
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The purpose with this post style is not to post each part on a separate day – which is sometimes done when a blogger is developing an idea over a period of time and want to post his progress – but to post all at once.
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The benefit of this style is that, when people are searching for information they are inclined to pick the post that has the information that they are searching for in the title. If you did a search for “strategy implementation”, you might get a list of post that have those words in the body of the text, but that doesn’t mean that strategy implementation is discussed there. It might only be in one sentence. If it is in the title, then you know that it will be discussed in detail. By giving each separate concept its own post and title you improve your chances of being found, clicked and linked.
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Please share your results after trying this method.

Why another blogging how to? Aren’t there enough on of them already in the blogosphere?

My general feeling is there are so many ways to present ideas, and you will enjoy one persons style more than another, so I am just another style. I also figure that you don’t want to jump all over the place, so if you’re here why not get some added value.

I am not a techie, so I will be able to show you that anyone can set up a blog quickly.

Why Blog?

There are so many reasons for blogging. You might be a business that wants to have more open communications with your customers, a research group that wants to have a forum to discuss your current project, a small business that wants to sell a product or service, a budding writer who wants to get feed back on you upcoming masterpiece, or you might just want a place to journal and share thoughts and pictures with family and friends. Whatever your desire the simplicity of blogging makes it a snap.

Where To Begin.

There are two main ways to host your blog.

1. On a blogging network like Myspace or Blogger .

This is definitely the easiest way to start blogging fast, and if you are only interested in sharing thoughts, pictures and videos with family and friends this is the perfect place to start. It’s free, fast and easy to use.

2. Set up your blog under your own domain and upload blog software onto your site.

Though a little more technical, this is definitely the route for a business that want to have control over the complete blogging experience. It is also a must if you want to generate awareness about your blog. Myspace and Blogger to not optimize you for search-ability on the various search engines.

There are a number of blog software out there, most of them free. I use Wordpress and I am very pleased with it. Wordpress is very user friendly, their user forums are very thorough and they are constantly improving their product.

If you are going to set up your own personal make sure your hosting is on a Linux server (as opposed to a Microsoft Server), as many blogs need to use MySQL databases (which are Linux based).

If you don’t have a host I recommend 1and1 . Their beginner Linux hosting package is $2.99 a month and it comes with Wordpress already installed.

If you are already hosting your domain elsewhere or you plan on going with a different host. Then just follow the instructions on the software you choose to upload.
If you have trouble finding your MySQL database names and passwords just email your host and they will show you how to find it (every system is different).

Customizing Your Blog.

I thing the real beauty of blogging is the ease of customization. The blog Admin panel has simple tables where you can enter the text for your titles and categories, select your layout and colors, and upload and activate various plug-ins (I’ll discuss plug-ins later).

One thing that is really cool about personalizing your blog is that you can search through thousands of themes (this is how your site looks) and then quickly upload it onto your blog. You can check our some great wordpress themes at http://themes.wordpress.net/ .

Posting

Again blogging makes it very simple to write a post on your blog. Just go to the admin panel, select write post, write your post and insert pictures and press publish. That simple.