If you’ve been thinking about starting a blog, don’t let fear that you don’t know how to blog, or enough about technology, or that you might not be a good enough writer keep you from taking the plunge. Everything that you need to know about blogging and blog tools is available for free on resource sites like this guide to how to start a blog, and frankly all over the Internet. in recent years setting up a blog has become much easier, and many web hosts offer free installation software that is pretty much one-click. Once you’re set up, remember that you can move at your own pace; no one says that you absolutely must post every single day to have a successful blog of which you will be proud.

Maybe the expense of creating and maintaining a blog has put you off from getting started. Well, aside from hosting costs and registering your own domain name (if that’s something you desire) there is virtually no expense at all that you must necessarily undertake. The fact is that many bloggers have very large and very popular blogs that not only cost next to nothing to own and operate, but that bring in much, much more than hosting costs! In addition, if you’d like to start a blog and literally spend nothing, blogging platforms like blogger and WordPress offer free hosting, without having to register your own domain. Most people would prefer to spend the $10 or so per year to register their own imaginative personalized domain name, and the few dollars a month that it will cost to self host a site, but it’s really up to the blog owner.

As far as technological know-how goes, hosting companies like GoDaddy and hostgator offer the aforementioned one-click blog set up, and if you get stuck there as 24/7 customer support waiting to help walk you through. It really is quite simple though; you’ll most likely be very surprised. Once you’ve got your blog set up, almost all of your interaction with it will be through your own password-protected backdoor to the administrative control panel. Here you will create posts, add photos and video, manage comments that others leave on your blog, and make changes to your blogs functionality and appearance. If all this sounds very abstract, not to worry; dive in and you’ll see how easy it is. If you go with WordPress, you will have a lot of fun choosing the theme that you install on top of your basic WordPress installation. It’s incredible the range of looks for your blog that you can test out with a couple clicks and switch over to literally with one click. I want to emphasize that it is not necessary to spend any money for an excellent WordPress theme, however one that I use on several of my own blogs is The Thesis Theme for WordPress, and although it is not free, it has many features that make it easier for you as a new blogger to quickly change the look of your site with zero tech knowledge. Just something to think about.

If you’ve been wondering if you have what it takes to create posts on your blog, known generically as “content”, I cannot advise you strongly enough to put the doubts aside and get started! This is not school and no one is grading you on the quality of your production. Regardless of the theme, style and subject matter of your site, believe that the world will be a better place for your publication of your own thoughts, flights of fancy, political diatribes, tributes to children or spouses or automobiles, or whatever else inspires and drives you to either write about what you’re interested in, or take photos or video of it, or all of the above. Case in point: that was a ridiculous run-on sentence, but it didn’t hurt anyone!

Part of the beauty of the blog form is that there are very few rules. Most people approach their blog as a sort of public diary, less personal than a private daily journal, and hope that introducing themselves and their thoughts to the world will provoke responses from others, usually in the form of comments in the comments section of each post. Your blog will be found over time by people who either share your interests or who enjoy your attitude or writing style, and trust me they will leave comments for you. The amazing thing is that the geography that formerly separated people with common interests suddenly becomes less relevant when other people discover your blog, and you will be astounded at the places in the world from where you will gain readers, if you post regularly. People come together almost as if by magic, because of their genuine commonalities, despite traditional barriers.

Many people conceive of their blog as a commercial platform of one kind or another, whether it be as an online multimedia resume, or to sell specific services or products. Even if you don’t think you have anything to sell, at least right now, just creating a regular readership can indirectly become a source of income. You’ve probably heard of bloggers who make a full-time living from their blogs, and this is most certainly something that happens. Blogging has become a sort of informal journalism, a meritocracy of ideas where people who can regularly produce interesting or valuable content are rewarded by having enough regular traffic so that their blogs become online billboards for third-party advertising, or as platforms for a the blogger to sell his or her own products or services. There are a million places on the net that will help you learn how to blog for money, should you decide to purse it.

Asking how to communicate successfully is exactly the same as asking how to blog successfully: the answer is sincerely and thoughtfully. Regardless of your subject matter, this approach will serve you well. Don’t be too self-conscious and most definitely don’t allow any doubts regarding costs, the technical know-how required, or your own ability to communicate restrict you from getting started today with your own blog.

I wrote this a while ago as part of a suggestion to a friend who wanted to start a personal blog but was having mixed feelings about format. If the blog was meant to be personal should he include a lot of extra detail to give context as to what was happening in his day-to-day life? My opinion was that you could never fill people in entirely even if you wrote a autobiography so not become too concerned with the length or amount of detail in your “about me” page, or even in your posts, unless it’s pertinent to your point.

Why try and bring everyone up to date as you begin your blog? Let the details come out as you go and they will establish the setting entirely. Involve the reader in small interesting things that are of you and your life, that are enough in themselves to create interest in your site. Otherwise you risk getting to heavy-handed and pretentious over presentation. Trust that you and your take on things are interesting enough to carry your writing and your site.

This applies to the abstract thread that runs through blog posts as well as the “real life” elements that you include also.

As to style: should your imagined or intended audience to find your approach and your tone? You count too many different approaches and sensibilities in your friends and acquaintances to really write “for” anyone but yourself. You haven’t the slightest idea who will run across your blog anyway. To proceed in the most honest way possible, knowing that you will defy the interest of some people, is your only option.

What do I write when I’m not answering an e-mail? What do I think when I’m alone thinking? I suppose that’s what goes in a blog. Responses to no one. Other people and small incidents will draw you out as you share them, but in my opinion the best personal blogs and the best writing is that in which those things are secondary to your own small, honest, original musings.

Analytics–What Is It Good For?

As a blog tool, Google Analytics isn’t exactly something that makes your blog run better or gives you an easier time of adding content every day, but most bloggers would agree that installing analytics provides you with vital information about your readers.

It is valuable to know where your readership is coming from before they visit your site, what other sites on the Internet linked to you and in turn sent visitors. It’s also very valuable to be able to analyze the search engine traffic that comes to your site e.g. the keywords that people typed into a search engine that brought them to you. Google analytics allows you to check in detail statistics regarding these things and a whole lot more.

Analytics Installation

Installation is very simple. Simply create an account and add as many of your sites as you’d like to watch. You must have write access to a site’s files in order to add the analytics code to the site. (You cannot install Google analytics on any site you are interested in) when you finish the sign-up process you will be given a code snippet that you simply copy paste into the header or footer file of your blog or website. Is easier than it sounds; if you need help finding the files in which to paste the code, it’s easy enough to find on the Internet.

How to Read Google Analytics

Once the code is installed, you have a wealth of information at your fingertips. From the dashboard you can choose a given time period, from a single day to any date range you specify, and immediately drill down to see a lot information on your readership for that period. Interesting and useful stats include: how many unique visitors you had, overall page views, pages per visit, and visitors’ average time on your site. A fascinating feature is the map overlay area, which tells you where your visitors came from geographically, sorted by country and with the ability to drill down to have a look by state or province, right down to the individual city from which your visitors came, from any country in the world! You can also quickly check out what the most popular pages on your blog or website are.

What To Do With Analytics Information

So what value does all of this Google analytics information have to a blogger? It can be used in many ways.

What if you found out that half of the visitors on your recipes blog came because they want to find out more about barbecue recipes or techniques? Your visitors are telling you what they’d like to read about, and it’s very possible that you will see a real jump in readership if you will give it to them on a more regular basis. Without Google analytics you may never have known how well-appreciated your blog posts on barbecues were. Comments are one way to judge a blog post’s popularity, but they are very imprecise way of doing so. Conversely, you may have imagined that the world needs more salad recipes and that that would be a big source of interest and traffic for you; it’s possible that you are wrong in this notion, and with your analytics data you could redirect your energies into articles that your visitors appreciate more, if you want to.

What if you started a blog on car repair, thinking that you can help people who are interested in the fixing up old cars and turning them into hot rods? Google Analytics might inform you that a high percentage of your traffic actually comes from India, where people might be using your high-quality information to turn junk cars into basic transportation. Knowing that your readers are less interested in hot rods and more interested in just getting engines running might affect the subject matter of your blog.

The “new visits” statistic has value. If, over time, you’re seeing the percentage of new visitors slowly decline, it means that more people are bookmarking your site to revisit later. (Assuming the overall amount of visitors is not declining of course!) Certainly this would be an encouragement to you. Seeing that the duration of the average visits your site is increasing would also be encouraging; Google Analytics tells you this too. “Pages per visit” is another interesting stat: generally having the number rise is a good thing, although some experts point out that having people visit one or two pages on your blog and then leaving might be a sign that they found exactly what they were looking for, then quickly left. Statistics are always open to interpretation, and Google Analytics information is no exception.

Analytics offers a ton of information about how your site is being used by visitors. Seeing that visits are (hopefully) increasing over time is only the tip of the iceberg. If you use an analogy of your blog being a retail store, analytics tells you a lot about the reasons that people came to shop, what precisely they were searching for, and what they found. If you are interested in increasing visitors to your site over time and enhancing their experience while on your site, you really need information like this.

One more thing: the Google Analytics blog tool is free. When you think about it it’s easy to see that whatever other motivations the company has, Google wants your sites to become more popular and useful, and this is a great tool for that.

If you are a new blogger, or even if you’ve been blogging for a long time(!) it’s important to understand that just because you save and publish a post it doesn’t mean that it is reliably saved forever on your host. From time to time hosting companies have problems, and sometimes it happens that files are corrupted or lost irretrievably. It’s also possible that in tinkering with code you can make changes that you don’t intend to make, even if you’re quite sure that you know what you’re doing. Another source of problems for bloggers in the area of losing data or even entire websites is that the addition of add-ons or templates to your blogging software installation can sometimes result in myriad unintended problems. This happens especially when a template or add-on hasn’t been adequately tested against the latest version of the blogging software. It’s at times like this when you will wish there was something you could do about your loss. It happened to me once. But it won’t happen again!

The way to avoid problems of this sort is to proactively back up your files before you have a problem. You can manually create a zipped copy of your entire website and store it on your hard drive or some other media, or e-mail it to yourself. The problem is that if you’re an active blogger, to manually create backup files on a regular basis will become very time consuming, in addition to requiring a little bit of technical know-how.

Luckily, most blogging software packages have an add-on/plug-in that automates the process of backing up your site so that problems, regardless of whose fault they are, can be handled by reconstructing your entire blog from the backup if necessary. Wordpress in particular has many options when it comes to automatically backing up your blog files. One that I can recommend personally is the WordPress database backup plug-in by Austin Matzko. It is very easy to use, and lets you immediately back up your WordPress blog and e-mail the resulting file to an address you specify. You can also very easily select to have backups performed automatically on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, and again, have the backups sent to you.

Don’t wait until you really, really need it to become convinced of the value of having a reliable, automatic blogging tool that lets you backup your files. Pick one and install it today.