For Newbs: How to Blog-Tools

While you could go your whole blogging career without using any of these tools, you will soon find that these tools will make life a little easier (and maybe a little more interesting) for you.

Traffic Counters

Traffic counters keep track who visits your blog. These counters range in complexity and usefulness. The simple ones only count the number of people who visit your blog while the more comprehensive ones will tell you how they found your site, how long they hung around and even what pages they looked at. This information allows you to see what content on your blog is drawing in the traffic and tailor your blog accordingly.

Most bloggers use Sitemeter, Statcounter or Google Analytics. All three are free, easy to use and offer detailed information about your website’s traffic.
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For Newbs: How to Blog-Types and Topics

Blogging Motivations

As mentioned several times before, it is important to understand your motivations for blogging because those motivations will influence your decisions on how to best position your blog for success. Blogging for money requires a different strategy than using a blog as a medium for socializing.
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For Newbs: How to Blog-Getting Started

The only things you absolutely need to start blogging are time, inspiration and a blog. In this article, I will discuss the pros and cons of two options for getting your blog online.

Blog Providers vs. Self-Hosting

The fastest, easiest and cheapest way to get a blog is to sign up with a blog provider such as Blogger.com, WordPress.com or Vox. With these types of providers, everything is done for you. The software is installed, the blog is set up and many have a variety of themes to choose from so you can personalize your blog a bit. The only thing you need to do is start writing.

While this may seem like an ideal option, there are several drawbacks to third party blog hosting:
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For Newbs: How to Blog-Overview

The official definition of a blog is that it is an interactive Internet journal in which entries are published in reverse chronological order. The term “blog” is the short version of the word “weblog” which was first coined by Jorn Barger in December 1997 and was soon after shortened to the well known version by Peter Merholz of peterme.com.

Brian E. Redman created the first blog when he started up his Usenet group mod.ber. In this group, Brian and his friends wrote about the interesting things they found while surfing the Internet. It wasn’t long before the novelty of this new media format caught on and people, like Justin Hall, began using it to share their daily lives with others in the web world. Like a small country town suddenly exploding into a metropolitan city, blogging has since evolved from being a hobby of the uber geeks into a public megaphone for anyone with access to a computer and an Internet connection.
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