I’m taking two online classes right now, and a large part of the required work for them is to participate in message board discussions. In one class, Decision Making, most of our discussion topics are about things discussed in the book, with fairly clear cut answers. The other class, Public Relations, offers more opinion-based topics for discussion. Guess which one has more involved, and spirited discussions!

I was aware of this difference for the last six weeks of class now, but it wasn’t until this weeks discussion that it really sunk in. I immediately saw a correlation to blogging.

So, you’re looking for more comments on your blog. The best way to do this is to give your readers something to talk about. Opinions and controversial topics are a great way to strike up a conversation on your blog. Go against the commonly accepted opinion and suggest your own. Or even question the status-quo directly. Get your readers to think.

In my Decision Making class, our discussion topics only require us to scan through the book and find the answers. My Public Relations class, on the other hand, asks us what we think should be done in different situations. This immediately gets our brains working, and our opinions voiced. Not everyone agrees with what you say, so there are much deeper discussions.

So in the end it boils down to this: If you want to inspire your readers to comment on your blog, give them something to talk about!

The header image is one of the most important pieces in the design of a blog. It can draw people in, or it can drive them away. It can be crucial in developing the brand of your blog; it becomes a part of you in the mind of your readers.

Over time, however, it can become stale. Returning readers will ignore it, until it virtually becomes part of the background. So how can you keep it fresh and eye-catching? Have them rotate randomly between page loads.

In place of your simple <img src="http://..."> tag for your header image, paste this code:

<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/header_<?php echo(rand(1,7)); ?>.jpg" width="900" height="150">

What you’ll need to do is gather all of the header images you want to use, and upload them to the “images” folder in your theme’s directory. Name them header_1.jpg, header_2.jpg, header_3.jpg, and so on.

And that should be it…. Now, every time a visitor loads your page, the code will generate a random number and use the corresponding image.

I mentioned branding, and I want to touch on that a little bit. The key to branding is consistency. Whether it’s a logo, a name, a color scheme, or a combination of factors, it’s crucial to be consistent with how you present your brand. You want to ingrain it into the minds of your readers.

If you’re going to use this rotating header image, be sure to maintain the consistency of your brand in the images. Try to keep the logo in the same position and use the same description in all of the images. If done well, the rotating header images can help focus the reader’s attention to your brand and solidify it in their minds.

If you use a rotating header image on your site, share a link with us so we can see how it looks!

I played baseball for most of my youth. I started playing softball in Cub Scouts when I was 8, I think, then moved on to Little League (including Pony League and Colt League as I got a little older), and finally high school. My dad coached several of my teams when I was younger, and one of his favorite sayings was “Practice Makes Perfect.” It was true then, and it’s true now. It was true about baseball, and it’s true about anything and everything. Even blogging.

Learning the Fundamentals

In my first few years of my baseball career, all of our practices were about teaching us The Fundamentals of the game: throwing, hitting, catching, running the bases. There were a lot of drills and repetition. We’d play catch for a while, then take grounders, all the while learning how to stay down on the ball and watch it all the way into our glove. Step with your opposite foot, and follow through with the throw. Our coaches pounded this into us day after day after day until it was second nature.

I’m quickly finding that the same coaching principles hold true for blogging. Before you get yourself overwhelmed with everything it takes to keep a blog running, just focus on the basics at the beginning. Get your blog set up with a theme (doesn’t have to be anything fancy,) start posting on a regular basis, and respond to your commenters.

Get yourself into the habit of writing and creating content. In a recent post at ProBlogger.net, Darren Rowse wrote about planning the next steps for your blog. He set up a calendar detailing what he would do and when. You could use a similar approach to get yourself into the habit of posting on a regular basis. It’s crucial for you to be consistent with your content if you expect your readers to be consistent visitors.

If you find yourself struggling for content, you could try using Theme Days as a sort of safety net for generating content. These could easily be incorporated into your blogging calendar.

Learn From The Professionals

As I started getting into junior high and high school baseball, our coaches spent less and less time on The Fundamentals. At that age, everyone on the team already had well over five years of experience and practice; if we didn’t have mastery over The Fundamentals by then, we wouldn’t be on the team. So instead of spending all of our time fielding grounders, we’d work on the more subtle aspects of the game. We’d learn how to steal bases. Pitchers would learn how to pick people off of first base. We’d spend a half hour or an hour watching professional players; how they swing the bat, how they throw, how they adjust their position on the field for different batters… things like that.

Once you feel comfortable with The Fundamentals of blogging, you can move on to more advanced aspects. Once you’ve found your blog’s voice and are comfortable with the direction of the content you’re generating, then you can spend more time on things like fancifying your theme and experimenting with video, audio, etc.

At this point, you should start paying closer attention to the professionals in your niche/topic. Just as we watched video of Tony Gwynn to learn how a Hall of Famer swings a bat, you can watch the professional bloggers in your niche to see how they run their blog. Take notes, stalk them on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, or wherever else you can find them.

The old adage may say that practice makes perfect, but you’ll never truly be perfect. You’ll make mistakes, you’ll do things that won’t be as successful as you’d like them, and you might tick people off. Anything less than success is just a lesson in disguise.

Generating content is undoubtedly one of the most difficult aspects of maintaining a blog. It’s also, I imagine, the biggest reasons why people give up on their blog; they simply run out of things to say. So it should go without saying that if you can come up with a way to keep ideas coming fresh and regular, you’d be in great shape.

Ideas for stories can come from anywhere. Just like any other form of writing, you have to provide fertile soil for inspiration to take root. Any writer worth his salt will find inspiration in the littlest things. I’ve gotten short story ideas from nothing more than the way the sunlight fell on the grass.

Inspiration is a fickle thing, however. You could go stretches where every tiny thing enamors you with countless ideas. But there will also be times when it feels like all your creativity has vanished in a puff of smoke.

As a blogger, encountering a drought of content will result in dropping traffic, which may result in reduced revenue. So what can you do to better position yourself to continue creating content, even when inspiration is hard to come by?

“What Should I Blog About Today?”

Just like Homecoming Week back in high school dictated the way you should dress for each day of that week, Theme Days for your blog will set up a particular posting protocol for each day of the week. What you choose will depend greatly on what your blog is about. I’ll use a technology blog as an example.

Mondays could be Microsoft Day. This means that on Mondays you’ll choose a topic relating to Microsoft or any of its products. Tuesday might be Apple Day, Wednesday could be Linux Day, maybe Thursday is Tutorial Day, and then rounding out the week, Friday could be Free Download Day.

This helps you focus your attention on a particular facet of your niche. It gets your mind moving in one direction, instead of wandering about aimlessly. If it’s Microsoft Monday, you already know you’re going to write about Microsoft, so you can search news sites and other blogs for Microsoft stories or information.

Theme days answer the question “What should I blog about today?”

Your Mileage May Vary

Don’t think of these Theme Days as a rigid posting regimen. This is meant to be more of a safety net for when you’re wracking your brain, but just can’t come up with a post idea. You don’t even need to alert your readers to the pattern of your posts; just keep the Themes on a sticky note.

As I mentioned before, what you come up with for your Themes will depend heavily on what your blog is about. Some topics will be better suited than others. Take a look at some of your major categories; can they be used as Themes?

One thing to keep in mind when choosing your Themes is try not to be too general, but don’t be too specific, either. If you’re too general, you’re defeating the purpose of establishing Theme Days. In our tech blog example, using “Computers” as a Theme might be too vague, and you might find yourself struggling to come up with something. However, if you choose “Graphics Cards,” you might find yourself running out of material. It will be important to find that happy medium.

Good luck, and good blogging!

Over the last month or so, I’ve been reading just about any “How To Blog” articles I could find. While I’ve been “blogging” for years, up until recently it wasn’t much more than vomiting words into a text field. I wasn’t all that concerned with getting traffic, which is good because I wouldn’t have known how to generate it if I’d wanted to.

As I’m reading this advice about how to increase traffic, one theme that keeps popping up is Social Networking – going out and making contact with other bloggers that cover the same (or similar) topics. This includes commenting on other blogs, following people on Twitter, and befriending people on social media sites like Digg and StumbleUpon.

Most people probably don’t have a problem doing this. But I’m a bit on the shy side. Whenever I try to reach out to connect with other bloggers, there’s a nagging voice in the back of my mind whispering derisively, “Why would they want to visit your crappy blog?”

Now, I don’t want to get into my own personal social shortcomings, but I don’t think I’m the only blogger out there that has these thoughts and trepidations. So what’s an unsocial person like me to do, when socializing is such an important part of raising awareness of a blog?

I had to remind myself that I’m not the only person in the world trying to reach out. Every other blogger in the world (unless they’re a massive A-hole) wants to meet other bloggers and network with others in their niche.

After all, the worse that could happen is the other person doesn’t respond. If that happens, just move on.

No one will find your blog if you don’t put it out there.

What’s the Purpose of a Title?

The title might very well be the most important part of a blog post, aside from the content itself. The title is what people see first, whether they’re coming across the post from an RSS feed reader, someone’s tweet, a note on Facebook, or anywhere else on the internet.

The title of a blog post is the bait that will lure readers to your blog. It has to grab their attention, and be as informative as possible. In short, it has to tell readers exactly what they’ll find in the following text.

Not only that, but the title of a blog post is very important in search engine optimization (SEO). When a search engine like Google crawls your site, the titles of your posts are big factors in your indexing. What this means, basically, is that what you choose to title your posts will weigh heavily on how easily and frequently your blog will be found.

They key word here is keywords.

These two points that I’ve made, about grabbing the reader’s attention and being easy for search engines to find your content, go hand in hand. If you’re doing one properly, chances are the other will fall in line.

Cold, Hard Evidence

Early on in my blogging “career” (and I use that term very loosely) I knew what SEO was, but didn’t really have an idea of how it could impact a blog. I knew that it could increase traffic by making your site visible in search engines, but without any first-hand experience of how this happened, it was just some fanciful creature lurking behind a veil of mystery. Like elves, gremlins, and eskimos.

Then one day, almost three years ago now, I just happened to make a post on a personal blog about how one might go about setting up two different iTunes installations to use the same library. (You can read the instructional article over at Astro-Geek:3000.) I titled the post “Share Your iTunes Library Between Multiple Computers.” I didn’t really put much thought into this title; it just kind of wrote itself. After all, that’s what the post was about.

Over the course of a month or so, I started to see people visiting my blog from search engines. More specifically, they were visiting that iTunes post. Now just for the record, prior to all this, the only traffic I ever got on any of my blogs was from friends; search engine traffic was non-existent.

People were finding the post by searching Google for phrases like “share itunes on two computers,” “itunes on multiple computers,” “use itunes library on multiple computers,” and the like. Now at the time, I didn’t really think much of this. I just passed it off as a fluke, more or less. After a few more posts, I got bored with the blog and stopped posting.

Staying Power

About a year after I stopped posting to that particular blog, it flitted into my mind again, so I decided (just for grins and giggles) to see how it was doing. I expected the Stats graph to be flatlined at zero. What I found, however, was that an average of about twenty people were visiting the blog every day. More specifically, they were finding that iTunes post through search engines.

After a year of inactivity, of not even logging in to the blog, the strength of that post’s title was still bringing in twenty people a day. How do I know it was the title and not just the content? Well, I’m sure it was a combination of the two, but most of the search terms that led people to the post were very similar to the title of the blog post.

Lesson Learned

So what did all of this teach me about post titles and SEO? When considering a title for your post, take into consideration how readers might go looking for the content you’re presenting. Don’t get all snarky and cute with your titles; just cut to the chase and don’t waste your reader’s time. Using my iTunes post as an example, people who were looking for the information I presented in that post were looking for a way to share their iTunes library between multiple computers.

The title satisfied the two points made at the beginning of this post: it grabbed the reader’s attention (those that were looking for that solution, anyway) and it tells them exactly what they’ll find in the post. And in doing so, the title was effortlessly optimized for indexing by search engines.

There are many guides on the web that detail just how to install Wordpress on your own custom domain and hosting service. Here are just a few:

• Wordpress.org – The official guide
• How To Make My Blog – Marko Saric provides very detailed instructions for installing Wordpress on GoDaddy.com
• Nice2All – details how to install a local copy of Wordpress to use as a sandbox for testing new themes, upgrades, and anything else you might not want on your live site.

While Wordpress makes it just about as easy as possible to manually install it, there are some hosting services that offer “One-Click” or automated installations. Fantastico is a popular installer script for many web hosts that use the cPanel interface. These automatic installers take care of setting up your database, uploading the files to your web space, and just about everything else.

If you’re shopping around for web hosting, and you know that Wordpress is going to be a big part of your online presence, you might want to consider going with a host that provides this One-Click service.

My own hosting service, Dreamhost, provides its own One-Click installer for Wordpress. I like it a little better than Fantastico, but that’s just personal preference.

If you already have your own web space, does your host provide One-Click installations? How much weight did it carry in your decision to go with that host?

Wordpress is more than just a blogging platform. With the ability to make static pages, and thousands of plugins to choose from, Wordpress goes above and beyond simple blogging software.

One thing that sets Wordpress apart from other platforms is its ability to integrate static pages into your blog. Static pages sit outside the normal flow of content. As you post blog entries, they get listed in chronological order; older entries get pushed down as new posts are added. Pages exist outside this continuum so that the information is always accessible.

There are a few common (almost ubiquitous) uses for pages, but there are also very unique applications as well. The most common uses include “About Me” and “Contact” pages. The About Me pages list information about the author of the blog, especially as it pertains to the blog itself; why they’re qualified to write the blog. Darren Rowse over at Problogger.net has a short, informative post about writing an “About Me” page.

Some blogs choose to include contact information in their About Me page, but some choose to use a separate page. There are several plugins that will put a contact form on your page for you. You can see an example on my own Contact Page.

Plugins provide added functionality to more than just contact forms. There are thousands of plugins that can extend your Wordpress installation far beyond being just a blog. Many plugins run behind the scenes, like Akismet, which filters spam from your comments. Others can enrich the reader’s experience. The NextGen Gallery plugin provides an attractive environment for displaying images. There’s very little plugins can’t do.

All this versatility and expandability wouldn’t amount to much, however, without an easy-to-use interface. Wordpress excels in this regard. The developers continue to optimize the administration area, making it more organized and easier to find what you’re looking for. This user-friendly interface, as well as the huge support community and extensive versatility, allows Wordpress to bridge the gap between Powerful and Easy-to-Use.

On the surface, the concepts behind making money blogging are fairly straightforward and simple:

1. Get Traffic
2. Sell Stuff (either yours or someone else’s)
3. ????
4. Profit!

People hear “Make Money Blogging!” and think all it involves is throwing up a blog and putting some ads on it, then VOILA! the checks start rolling in!

Well, it won’t take long to realize that this is not true. At all.

Getting Traffic

Simply having a blog isn’t enough to get traffic. Sure, you might eventually get a trickling of visitors from search engines if it’s been online long enough, but if you want to get serious about increasing the traffic on your blog, you need to take action.

You need to make people come to your blog. Comment on other blogs in the same field, participate in message boards, and don’t be afraid to talk yourself up. If you’re commenting on someone’s blog, and you have a post of your own that’s related to it or provides another point of view, mention your post in your comment and invite people to check it out.

Use social media to your advantage. Twitter has become a huge tool for internet marketing. It provides a way to interact on another level with the people that might read your blog. Facebook, Friendfeed, and just about any other social media site can be used to help boost your traffic.

This takes time. There’s really no way around it. You have to put in the effort if you want to reap the rewards. Different sources will tell you different things, but marketing your blog will take up a large portion of your overall blogging time. And it’s not something you do once and then coast the rest of the way. You have to be consistent and persistent.

Selling Stuff

So you have the traffic, and now you want to start turning those clicks into cash. There are different ways to go about monetizing your blog, and it will take more than this little summary to tackle them all, so we’ll just mention a few of the more traditional methods.

Probably the first method that most new bloggers are familiar with is Google’s Adsense. These are the banners and boxes with the text links that you see almost everywhere. They’re ubiquitous, but don’t really make that much.

Direct ad sales are affiliate programs are a little more lucrative. With direct ad sales, you’re directly selling space on your blog to someone. You might see a blog with a couple squares with “Advertise Here” in them; this is what direct ad sales are. Advertisers will pay depending on how many times their ad is seen or clicked on. With affiliate programs, you basically try to sell someone else’s product. Any product that you sell for them will result in a commission.

If you hadn’t noticed, these methods require you to sell someone else’s stuff. When you do that, you can’t maximize your profits.

Where the real money starts to come in is with your own products that you sell directly through your blog. Depending on what your blog is about, you might have physical objects that you can sell. For example, if you’re blogging about jewelry making, you could sell your necklaces, earrings, and anything else you make. If you blog about something less tangible, you can sell information products in the form of ebooks, videos, guides, or some such. This could even include your blog itself, in the form of “Premium” versus “Free” content.

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[Content redacted by International Society of Blogger Gnomes]

Profit!

If you’ve been vigilant, you should start seeing some cash start to trickle in. It won’t be the “Get Rich Quick” level of income, but it’s a start. Keep at it!

I know you’ve got a lot on your mind when you decide to start a blog. I don’t blame you one bit. You’re going to have to come up with topics to write about, a theme and layout, even what to name it.

Before you can get to any of that, though, you’re going to have to decide what platform you want to use. What do I mean by blogging platform? Basically, the service you use, whether it be Wordpress, Blogspot, Livejournal, etc. It can be overwhelming, so let’s take a look at some of the more popular ones.

Wordpress.org

Wordpress is the downloadable blogging software that you install and run on your own hosting space. It’s robust, powerful, extensible, and very customizable. Wordpress is the de-facto standard for anyone serious about blogging. It’s what I use here and for Astro-Geek:3000, and what I will be talking about the most on this blog.

Wordpress.com

Wordpress.com is a flavor of Wordpress that doesn’t require you to install it on your own web space. It’s free to use, but some options (like CSS editing, mapping the blog to your own domain, and extra storage space) are available as paid services. This is a great way to get familiar with the Wordpress platform if you’re not sure if you want to buy a domain and web space yet.

Blogger

Blogger, now owned by Google, is a fairly simple, straight-forward platform. Strangely, blogs published using Blogger are hosted as a subdomain of blogspot.com – e.g. username.blogspot.com. While not quite as robust as Wordpress.com, Blogger does allow users to modify CSS and HTML, and allows customized domains at no extra charge.

LiveJournal

LiveJournal (LJ) is a blog publishing site similar to Blogger in terms of functionality and customizability. Where LJ differs, however, is that it provides a much more social environment for users. Users are able to create a profile page listing biographical information about themselves, as well as interests, favorite movies, music, etc. Another feature of LJ is the ability to “friend” other users, who will then show up on their “Friends List” – a chronological stream of the latest posts by those in the user’s Friends List. LJ also allows the creation of communities, where users can post articles or entries about specific shared interests – e.g. Astronomy, American Idol, Cupcakes, etc. Because of these social aspects, LiveJournals tend to be of a more personal nature.

Tumblr

Tumblr is a fairly new blogging platform that emphasizes ease of use and customizability. Tumblelogs, as they’re called, allow users to make posts that are specifically designed for images, video, audio, text, links, quotes, or chat. The format of the post will vary depending on this medium. Users can follow others; doing so will show their posts on your dashboard. Tumblelogs tend to be simple, favoring short, quick posts – micro-blogging as it’s sometimes called. If you don’t want to have to worry about administration and just want a simple interface to share your thoughts, Tumblr is worth a look.

So there’s a very brief overview of the five major blogging platforms that are available. Each one has its advantages and disadvantages, so you’ll have to decide which one is best for you depending on your needs and preferences.