Blogmaster Tips

Whether you blog about the Internet, the web, or blogging, you are still working within the Internet industry by being a blogger. No matter what your blog topic is, it helps to understand your Internet audience, where they are coming from, how they blog, and how they search. If you have advertising on your blog, then it is important to understand what is going on in the blog business in order to help you blog better and make more money. It also helps to keep an eye on the top web hosts and traffic in general so you know what is going on around you in the Internet world.

By watching which blogs or websites are top of the charts for traffic, you can pretty much guage which topics are popular with most Internet users. Here are some resources for lists of the most popular websites and blogs online, as well as tracking web trends and traffic.

Search Engines, Search Blogs and Search Feeds

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There are times when the most popular, highest traffic, or top stories just don’t give you the material you need for creative composition, or you need more collaborating evidence and research for the topic you are working on. That’s when you turn to searching.

Sometimes just putting in a few words that sum up your industry or a topic that interests you can bring up interesting story angles and perspectives that you haven’t thought of before. Sometimes, just typing in a word and hitting the “Surprise Me” button that some search engines have will take you to new places you never thought to look before. Either way, search engines offer tremendous information, resources, and inspiration if you just start looking.

Everyone has their favorite search engines, but this list also includes a variety of search services that might get you more specialized results on your topic. Among these more specialized searches, you can also search just blogs, feeds, or specific topics.

Reading What Other People Wrote

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There is so much being written on the web, it can be overwhelming. Yet, one of the most important ways of finding something to write about is to find out what other people are writing about. This goes beyond news or most popular stories. It is the monitoring and reading of what other people are writing about to help inspire you to write.

Inspiration comes in many ways from reading. It begins by reading about what people are writing about in your industry. If they wrote it wonderfully, then you can cite them on your blog with a comment or two to encourage your readers to visit their site and read the article. If you want to talk about what they wrote, you can cite their post and include a blockquote or two from the article, and then say what you want to say. If you like what they wrote, but you think you can write it better, use their article as inspiration to write your own. Reading what other people also write helps you to keep up with what is going on around you, the trends and the news.

You never know where a bit of inspiration will come from, so keep your mind open to all possiblities. The following includes a wide range of resources for finding articles and archived articles. I’ve also included a list of some aggregators, sites that display content from other sites to help you keep track of what is going on through blog feeds. Some of these you can personalize and customize, while others are just lists to read through.

Most Popular / High Traffic

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There are many lists online that list the “most popular” websites, blogs, topics, news, products, services, and more. By monitoring these sites, you can stay on top of what is attracting the most attention.

Most popular lists are based upon a variety of criteria. For a few, it is just what is most popular to them, the individual or group, as they see it, often with their own criteria. For most “most popular lists”, though, popularity is solely based upon measurable data such as actual purchases or highest visitor traffic.

For high traffic sites or blogs, there is a lot to learn as well as be inspired by. What are they talking about? How are they talking about the subjects? Where are they getting their information and resources? Should you be following their lead? Use high traffic and most popular sites and blogs as resources for possible content and ideas.

If you don’t see a specific “most popular” topic of interest to you, in a search engine type in “most popular” with a keyword for your interest, like WordPress, and the search results will include the most popular WordPress Themes, plugins, tips, techniques, blogs, and other WordPress related most popular items. From here, you can find sites to monitor for the “most popular” topics for your blog.

Tag and Social Bookmarking Services

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Tags and social bookmarking services are similar but different. Social bookmarking actually is the term that refers to users recommending which topics are most popular with them. This is done through votes and by tags.

A site or software tool that collects and stores your recommended or “bookmarked” sites is called a Social Bookmarking Manager. Some Social Bookmarking Managers are private, but the ones that will usually serve you better are the public ones, which show the world what you think is important information, and asks others to “vote” for your recommendations as you vote on theirs, and the winners rise to the top.

Tags are mini-categories for blog content, tagged by the blog owner or visitor. Used in combination with social bookmarking, you can search through tag services for the most popular posts within a specific tag category based upon traffic, voting, or other recommendations.

Tags and social bookmarking help Internet users talk to each other, sharing favorite posts and articles. They also help let you, the blogger, get a feel for what topics are popular at the moment. If it is popular enough, you may want to blog about it. By monitoring these “most popular” lists, whether by overall category or tags specific to your interests, you can keep a finger on the pulse of public opinion.

Hundreds of Resources for Finding Content for Your Blog

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Blogging is great fun. It’s exciting. You start out with great ideas, full of motivation and inspiration. After a while, though, you run out of steam. The muse isn’t so amused any more and you start hunting for content, things to write about.

There are two aspects of finding content for your blog. First, it is to find the inspiration that generates original content on your blog. This can come from a variety of sources. Basically, it can be a news story, fellow blogger’s post, an interesting web page you stumbled across, something a friend said, or anything that interests you enough to research and write about it.

The second aspect is to find links. A lot of bloggers seem to specialize in finding interesting content and providing a link and maybe a few words to recommend to their readers that they check out the original content on someone else’s blog or site. While this isn’t so much about finding original content for your blog, it is about finding information and resources that is helpful to your readers.

Either way, when the well runs dry, where do you go to find more content to keep the river of babble flowing on your blog?

I’ve put together a huge list of content resources for you to peruse and investigate for possible blog content. It certainly isn’t a list of all the content, resources, and information out there, but it is designed to get you thinking about all the content, resources, and information out there for you to blog about. And there is a lot out there. If I have missed a favorite resource of yours, please add it below in the comments. I love looking up new avenues of inspiration.

What is Google Blogger?

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Blogger is Google’s free tool for creating blogs. It can be found on the web at http://www.blogger.com.
Blogs, short for web-logs, are a form of online journal.

Getting Started With Blogger

You can use blogs for everything from updating your friends and family about your life, giving your own advice column, discussing your political views, or relating your experience in a topic of interest. You can host blogs with multiple contributors, or you can run your own solo show. You can even use Blogger to make your own podcast feeds.
Although there are fancier blog tools out there, the mixture of cost (free) and flexibility makes Blogger one of the best deals around.

Setting Up Your Blog

Setting up a Blogger account takes three easy steps. Create an account, name your blog, and choose a template. You can host multiple blogs with the same account name, so you only need to do that part once. This way you could separate your professional blog about your business from your personal blog about dogs, for instance.

Hosting Your Blog

Screen Capture by Marziah KarchBlogger will host your blog for free on blogspot.com. You can also use Blogger to automatically ftp your blog posts to your own web space. Make sure you have the correct server settings from your internet service provider, otherwise you may have unpredictable results.
Posting
Once your blog is set up, Blogger has a basic WYSIWYG editor. (What you see is what you get) This is not necessarily a bad thing. Most blogging tools do not have robust html editors, and the ones that do often require java or other plug-ins.
If you need more formatting options and a larger window, you can use Google Docs to post to your Blogger blog. You could also do advanced editing with HTML. Blogger has an HTML tab to let you do this directly, although it does not allow JavaScript.

Email Your Posts

You can optionally configure Blogger with a secret email address, so you can email your posts to your blog. This is handy for making updates on the fly or updating from your cell phone or other mobile device.

Pictures

Blogger will let you upload pictures from your desktop and post them to your blog. You can choose the basic layout and size of your images, and they’ll be uploaded to Bloggers’s server space, so you don’t have to host the pictures on a different website.
That doesn't mean you can't post with pictures that you've hosted elsewhere on the Web. You can also use Picasa Web Albums to post pictures to your blog.

Personal Blogs

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Few personal blogs rise to fame and the mainstream. That does not mean that authors of personal blogs do not take their blogging seriously. Personal bloggers take pride in their blog posts, even if their blog is never read by anyone but them. It is here that blogging becomes more than a way to communicate and becomes a way to reflect on life. Blogging can have a sentimental quality. Bloggers post about their day or their opinions on different matters. Personal blogs may not be important to readers, but for the people who write them, they are works of art

Blogging Consequences

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The emergence of blogging has brought a range of legal liabilities and other often unforeseen consequences. One area of concern is the issue of bloggers releasing proprietary or confidential information. Another area of concern is blogging and defamation. A third area of concern is employees who write about aspects of their place of employment or their personal lives, and then face loss of employment or other adverse consequences. A number of examples of blogging and its sometimes negative or unforeseen consequences are cited here.

What Is Blog?

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A blog (a portmanteau of web log) is a website where entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), audio (podcasting) are part of a wider network of social media. Micro-blogging is another type of blogging which consists of blogs with very short posts. As of December 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs

Blogmaster Tips

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Suggested Keyword for Business

Internet Traffic, Web Trends, and Page Rank