Starting a Blog

What is a “Blog Design” anyway? Blog design controls the entire presentation of your blog brand. Sure, you can start with a simple and free blog template for your design and you’ll find many locations offering free blog themes or templates. Your blog theme gives your blog character and the right level of professional or personal branding to make your blog unique to your blogging purpose.

Many people start their blog with a free blog theme or even the default blog design presentation. A “blog theme” or “blog skin” which is the same thing as a “blog template” are the files and graphics that make up the template page structure for the presentation of the blog. The blog is actually run dynamically from a database. So instead of making new pages on your site each time you post to your blog, the blog cms (content management system) utilizes the blog template to present your pages and data.

You can easily change the blog design anytime by installing a new theme or template. Most blogging platforms allow you to change your theme with a few clicks. For non-hosted blogs, you’ll just need to ftp your new blog theme files to your server and enter your blog administration to select and install the new theme and any additional options for presentation. Your blog design also accommodates your “blog widgets”, a more modern feature of the blog template that allows you to quickly add html and third party script to run the interesting elements of the blog sidebar like social tools, photo gallery links, advertising, and much more. Read the rest of this entry »

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While there are many positive aspects of writing a blog, it’s always good to consider how the blog might be seen by your employer. This event has received some significant attention due to the details of the action taken by CNN.

Even if you plan to create a blog that has little to do with your professional life, you might post something you’d prefer that your employer or a co-worker not read. If you use terms or any other reference that would gain attention to your blog post you should assume that people connected to you in any way will read or eventually see the blog post.

Unless your blog will never contain anything controversial or private about your life you might want to consult your boss about what the company guidelines are for creating a blog.

read more | digg story

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I’d like to share some tips from popular Digg pages related to resources for new bloggers. Hope you enjoy these tips and I’ll also post my comments when possible to try and give it the new blogger perspective.

The blogroll is your list of resource links and related blogs. I really like the tip about updating the organization and categories. After a few months you’ll begin to see a trend in your won blog posts and can better tag and organize these entries.

read more | digg story

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Are you the future great author of a book, magazine, or other literary work?  Perhaps you’re just like me and enjoy putting your thoughts and observations down in a place where others can see, enjoy, and comment on your creative writing.  A blog is a great tool for fine tuning your writing skills.  New bloggers often catch the attention of other creative writers and form a social network for constructive feedback and praise.  Social networking sites like FaceBook, MySpace, and StumbleUpon allow you to interact with other people with similar talents or interests and you can invite these people to read and comment on your blog.

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Are you looking for a method to get paid for posting to your blog? Blogs are a healthy advertising medium and there are services such as PayPerPost.com that have created a business model to compensate bloggers for making blog posts. The PayPerPost.com site is geared toward bloggers, advertisers, and affiliates that help promote the blog and advertisers to participate. Bloggers that sign-up to post original content via blog posts, podcasts, and video posts, that will be sponsored by advertisers. And advertisers can find a niche medium to sponsor.

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Many blog authors have various other online accounts where they interact online or even promote their own blog through these alternate social sites. In addition to the blog specific services (like MyBloglog.com) you might want to have some general social accounts with services like Facebook.

This service allows you to connect with other people and friends based on common schools, work, experiences, etc.

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