Blog is a short term of a "Weblog". Weblog (Blog) is your web diary. With blog you can share your thoughts and experiences with other people and they can interact with you by leaving comments. You can write almost about anything. You can even publish articles written by other people (as long as you follow their guidelines for reprinting and republishing rights).
The advantage of a blog is in its popularity and because search engines love them. If you post regularly and often, search engine spiders will crawl it and therefore find any links you place on your blog. You get the idea that you can use your blog to advertise your site. Besides search engines, people reading your blog will also have an opportunity to visit your site.
I won't write details about blogging here, only the most important things you need to do with your blog.
First, you can create a blog on your own site, or you can visit http://www.blogger.com and create there one for free which is a lot easier. When you open an account at Blogger and choose your blog template and blog URL, you are ready to start posting. You can write almost about anything, but for commercial purposes stick to a relevant content to your site.
Before you start posting, there are some things you should do first. Go to your Blogger account and choose Settings option. In Basic settings enable "Add your Blog to our listing" and enable "Show E-Mail post link". This will generate traffic for your blog directly from Blogger and E-mail post will allow your readers to send your posts to their friends. In Comments settings enable new comments and state that anyone can make a comment. You can always delete an inappropriate comment. And finally in your Site Feed settings notify your Site Feed URL. You'll need it later. You don't need to enable "Notify Weblogs" since you'll do it manually.
Your first post should be used as an introduction. Write about yourself and a topics you are going to write about in your blog. Next posts should be written as you would write a diary. If you ever had a diary, you should have an idea on what should your blog look like. You can also check other blogs and see what are people writing about. If you write articles, you can publish them on your blog, or you may publish other's people's articles as I mentioned earlier. Just stick to a relevant content.
When you publish your post, go to http://pingomatic.com or http://pinger.blogflux.com enter your information, select services to ping and then submit pings. Choose appropriate services since you'll have no use for specialized services if your blog doesn't belong to some of them. Each time you post, visit pingomatic.com or pinger.blogflux.com and ping services.
Next go to http://feedburner.com and open a free account. You will need here your Site Feed URL (your atom page). In your account go to Chicklet Chooser and select a few buttons. They will display you HTML code for each button. You need to copy&paste code into your blog template. Choose code for My Yahoo, My MSN, My Google, NewsGator and XML. You may add some other buttons if you wish.
When you add these buttons to your blog, visit Yahoo, Google, MSN and NewGator. Open accounts if you don't have them already and in My Yahoo, My MSN, Google account and NewsGator add your blog feed. You should see your posts in their News section.
Next step is to add your blog to as much blog directories as you can find on the internet. Go to Google, Yahoo, or MSN and type in "blog directories", or "free blog directories". Visit each of them and submit your blog. Most of them will require a link back to them. This can take you a lot of time, so you should at least try to add your blog to one directory each day.
Now all you should do is to post as often as you can and each time ping blog services. You'll see the results pretty soon.
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