Are you aware of the new way to keep your friends updated of the things happening in your life? This is a revolutionary way in the internet that can let you keep a personal diary that can be viewed by many people. This is called the weblog or more popularly known as the blog or blogging.

A blog is like a journal where you can write or post your daily activities on a regular basis. The term blog is the short term for web log. Blogging is the act of adding, writing and maintaining a blog.

There are several types of blogs. These are the following:

• Personal blog – this is the most famous type of blog used in some of the friendly hub in the net. This is defined as the online diary or journal, where you can post your poem and other literature piece.

• Cultural blog – it discusses all about music, arts, theater and other popular culture.

• Topic blog – it focuses on the function like some of the search engines present now. Some writers who want to write about something unknown can use it.

• Business blog – this talk about the stock market and other business related topics. It is also use to promote businesses, to talk about economics in forum type and manage information.

• Science blog – it is the mode used to disseminate information and data. However, scientists only use this mode for simple scientific data and information because they believe that it could damage the credibility of their science as many people can read it.

• Moblog – it contains all the information from a mobile phone.

• Collaborative blog – this kind of blog is written by two or more writers. Particular site is open for all the writers to write together with others.

• Eclectic blog – it focuses on niches individually or collaboratively made.

• Educational blog – this is used by students to record the things they learned from their teacher including the activities done in a day.

• Directory blog – this blog gives a regular update of all the visited links. It focuses on particular news and happenings.

• Forum blog – it functions as an internet forum. It allows two or more bloggers to post discussion on the net.

• Spam blog – this is a form of persuasive advertising. Commonly known for the name splogs. It is characterized by the use of bold letters and self-claim advertisements.

There are many web-based blog journals available online. You can post your own blog, too. Anyone can start writing a blog. In many cases, it is free. How do you start making a blog?

Here is how, follow the following steps in writing a blog.

1. There are many blog sites available online that offers free blog posting. They also offer free accounts with many features.

2. You can blog in private and in public. Many blog site offer a blog that contains a password, only a few can read your blog. You can also post a blog that can be read by anyone.

3. You will be given an option to choose the scheme of your blog site. You can edit your own color, layouts and schemes according to your taste and personality.

4. You can write your own blog and post it afterwards.

5. Many offer more schemes for you to personalize your own blog site. You can even post a picture and testimonials from friends like most of the friendly hub do today.

6. By sending the URL to your friends, you can now publish your own blog.

You should keep your writings interesting as it can be. Do not focus on topics that readers do not find interesting. Remember to post only writings that are not offensive so readers will become more interested in your writings. You should also check your spellings and other relevant mistakes that can ruin your credibility as a writer.

Use words that can be easily understood by readers. Proofread your writings before posting. Never copy others blog, you can be issued a case called plagiarism.

With this, you are able to let the people know about what you want to speak. Information will be easier to deliver this time. Visit some blog sites and start writing your emotions.

You should treat your website as an extension of your home. You would clean your home weekly so you should clean your website weekly. Make sure all your links are working, get rid of any old links that no longer work. You can use a link checker plugin from wordpress to ensure you do not have any broken links in your posts. If you do you will be able to easily access them and repair the links.

As you would open your mail daily when it arrives in the post. Check your emails daily and keep on top of them.

Keep your website clean and fresh looking. Update your theme from time to time to show people that you like what you site looks like and you grow with the times. Just as you would ad a new coat of paint to your home you should color up your website homepage after all it is like the entrance to your home. It is (your home page ) the first thing people see when they enter your site.

Just as you would change your cushions on your lounge to add different colors to your home. Change your images to create a fresh new feel for your site.

Think of your site as an extension of your home, spring clean once a year and do some major changes and then weekly do all the minor jobs that need to be done to keep things running smoothly. If you use wordpress then make sure you upgrade whenever there is a newer version. Update your wordpress plugins throughout the year as a newer version is available.

Answer your comments as you would chat to a friend who rings your door bell. Invite comments as you would invite people over to visit your home for dinner. Ask for feedback on your site as you would ask your friends.

Feel comfortable with the look and feel of your website. If you have outgrown your website then you can sell it just as easy as you can sell your home. If you passion has changed then move with it and start a new website. you wont enjoy posting new material on your website if you no longer have an interest in that niche.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, website design

I have been working hard over the past 3 days customizing my new theme which I got a free blank 3 column theme and totally customized it. You can check out the blank themes on my how to create a wordpress theme post.

Basically I created a header image and have put heaps of links into the left sidebar. I tried to maximize the use of the space.

Customizing this type of theme will not lose valuable link juice.

I really like this theme, especially because you can have your own credits in the footer. So there is no link back to the creators draining on your site.

What do you think of my new site? this is the first one I have customized this much and I must say I am pretty happy with it.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress, Blogging

I have been toying with the idea of creating my own wordpress theme for some time now but I have found it a bit tedious to say the least.

I have found sites that offer to teach you how to make your own wordpress theme by using the default theme as your starting point and then customising the header.php, sidebar.php and footer.php to make it your own theme. But the default template is rather average to say the least.

You could if you know code create your own files from scratch but that is a little bit hard for beginners or intermediates for that matter.

Do Not Fear I Have Found The Answer To How To Create Your Own Wordpress Theme.

There is a site where you can get a blank wordpress theme and customize that accordingly and you do not have to leave credits in the footer. One of the worst things about using free templates for your blog is the links back to the creator in the footer. This pulls on your SEO juice for your site. It is much better to have your own links in the footer and you can do this with either of these blank themes.

There are 3 types of blank themes that you can download they are from refueled.net

2 column left sidebar: Live Preview - Download
2 column right sidebar: Live Preview - Download
3 column: Live Preview - Download

I personally like the 2 column right sidebar and the 3 column one. I am playing around with customizing the 3 column one now.

If you know a little bit about how to customize your header.php, footer.php & sidebar.php you will be able to create your own personal site with your own links in the credits.

Give it a go and let me know how you go.

Keep Your Eyes On Your Competition

No matter what niche you are in you need to always keep your eyes on your competition or niche rivals. Especially if you are making money in your niche. It is particularly important to watch your competition as they may be steeling your customers from under your nose.

When we first setup our websites we do all the right things, we check out the competition in our chosen niche and keywords, we fully optimize our site for the search engines so as to get the maximum traffic from the search engines. We see our traffic increase and we see our readers grow and our email lists expand and we keep on with the content side of things and then all of a sudden wham! you are no longer on page 1 for your chosen keyword or keyword phrase.

What has happened?

Why have I lost my spot on page 1 for my keyword or keyword phrase?

OUCH! It hurts to lose all that traffic the search engines were sending you doesn’t it?

Before you know it your competition will discover what you are doing and do it better so you need to keep abreast of your competition and keep on updating and growing your website. Always check your statistics build it into your list of goals for the week so as to ensure you do not overlook it.

Check out the competition for your main keyword or keyword phrase and what are they doing that is different from what you are doing? why are they number 1 for your keyword and you are on page 3, 4, 10 or 100. You need to be able to look at a website and see what they are doing that you are not.

Do some changes and watch your site increase in rank in the search engines. Search engine optimization is whole new post to write about. But seriously look at your competition on all the different top search engines and see what you can easily do to increase your rankings and do this religiously.

Technorati Tags: niche, search engines, search engine optimization

I have been toying with the idea of adding either mp3 audio podcasts or video posts to my blog. At this stage I am unsure which way to go, whether to do video posts or a mixture of video and audio.

What do you use on your blog audio, video or both?

What do you prefer, do you prefer to watch a video or just listen to it while your working. I know quite often I will have a video file running in the background while I’m working on something and listen to it and go back to it when I hear something of interest.

I am interested in hearing what people prefer.

Technorati Tags: Audio, Video, Podcasts, Mp3

I have been busy over the past 2 days adding twitters from Darren over at problogger.com social media love-in.

There are 538 twitters to add just like you and me. If you ad them then they will ad you and you might be able to strike up some valuable contacts. In the future these contacts may be used for joint ventures or just become great friends.

I would like to just say welcome to all my new contacts on twitter. If you do not already follow me on twitter you can do so http://twitter.com/moneyhomebiz I look forward to seeing you online.

If you are using blogger.com for your free blog then you do not have to just settle for the 15 or so design templates that blogger offer. These templates are a bit out dated and do not really cater for today’s blogger.

You can visit Blogger Buster

Check it out they have over 101 XML templates. Just download to your computer and then open save and paste into html on blogger its easy.

They also have links to html versions as well. There are also plenty of links to other sites with blogger templates.

Technorati Tags: blogger, blogging, templates

Administering CPR

Does Your blog Need CPR?

Is your blog dying a slow death?

Have a look at your blog, is it interesting? does it encourage visitors to view more pages or does it just look boring and not have updated content for awhile as you have been too busy working on other projects?

When you start a blog you usually go at it full bore until you reach a point where you either run out of ideas for posts or you have started more blogs in different niches and you are now stuck in a rut and you don’t seem to have enough hours in the day to achieve what you want to achieve.

So what is CPR for your blog well C stands for Content. Which of course is the heartbeat of your blog without unique content often you wont get repeat visitors to your site. The number 1 thing you can do for your blog once it has been fully search engine optimized is to have unique fresh content daily. Whether you decide to post once a day or several times a day it is up to you. In saying that the more you post the better off you are as the continual fresh content is liked by the search engines and the social media sites.

P is for Promote, Once you have fresh content you need to promote the fact and make sure you have an extensive ping list if you have wordpress. You should also sign up to technorati.com and list your blog with them. There are just thousands of ways to promote your new content. You can use twitter to let people know you have updated your blog or mybloglog etc. I am on twitter and you can follow me on twitter.

There are many ways to drive traffic to your site, the best free way is to continually update your site and show the search engines that you are a happening site and continually being updated with great fresh content Google loves this.

R is for Repeat & Review

You need to repeat the first 2 steps over and over in a daily routine. There are ways to do it all at the press of the publish button. You can use plugins to help you out.there is a wordpress twitter plugin that will ping twitter about your new post and place a link to the post so that people from twitter will be able to follow you. You can build up your ping list in your wordpress settings to ensure that you notify as many sites as possible of your updated fresh unique content.

No matter how many blogs or sites you have you need to follow this method for each one it is important to write fresh content, you need to tell people about it so promote your site well and then review your statistics. If you find you are not increasing in traffic then look at your site and make a diagnosis what do i need to do to increase traffic to my site? Do I need to optimize my site more? am I writing fully optimized posts? Approach all your sites with a fresh mind. Look at them and see what visitors to your site see for the first time. Is your site appealing?could you change the color?

CPR for your blog is important without it your blog will die. There is no doubt that if you do not post content your blog will cease to be visited by the search engines and you will lose your readers. There are millions of dormant blogs on the internet where people have started a blog and just left it. The search engines will think your blog is one of these if you do not write fresh content for a length of time.

Have a look at your blog and perform CPR today. You are the only one who can save your blog.

Technorati Tags: blogging, content, make money online, blogs, home business

Do not underestimate the power of articles to drive targeted traffic to your website. Article writing has been used for years by some of the top internet guru’s sure they probably outsource all their article writing and have someone else do the article submissions for them but never the less they still submit articles.

How Do Articles Bring Targeted Traffic to Your Site?

Well that part is easy. you see when you write articles about products or services that you promote on your website you are actually placing individual ads all over the internet. When someone reads your article and likes what they see they will generally delve further and visit your site. They may even like your article and re post it on their site syndication of your article can bring you thousands of backlinks from just one article. As long as you hyperlink your resource box back to your website with your major keywords. Something like this:

Lyn Leckie Matassa owns and operates MoneyHomeBiz . com where she helps people to make money online teaching tips and tactics to help you turn your website into a money making machine.

The above is just to give you an example, now you can have up to 3 hyperlinks back to your website in your resource box generally. the example above only has 2 hyperlinks, but you get the idea. By placing this resource box on my articles and using a submission service like article marketer i could potentially have thousands of backlinks back to my website which means thousands of little ads advertising my website.

How do I increase my chances of people clicking my resource box and visiting my website?

The answer to this is quite simple what you need to do is give something away, offer a free ebook or a free gift of some sort to get them to subscribe to your email list. This usually works wonders as you have probably heard the money is in the list. you need to steadily build your email list and it is a great opportunity to have a subscription offer tagged in your resource box. Like signup to recieve this free gift and hyperlink that to a splash page which signs people up to your email service and gives away free offers something like this one

The more articles you can write and have submitted the more chances of people seeing your ad for your website in your resource box. So if you have not yet started to write articles and submit them then get started. If you can write the articles yourself then hire someone to do it for you. You can actually get articles written for you quite cheap and then get a subsciption service to send them out for you like article marketer.

Here is a list of my most popular posts for the month of June.

100% My New Pool

99% Your Adsense Earnings Could Be Stolen Right From Under Your Nose!

98% Save Your Tags When Upgrading Wordpress To 2.5.1

94% What’s New At MoneyHomeBiz Dot Com

92% Bum Marketing- Do You Want To Be A Bum!

88% 125×125 Block Ad Wordpress Plugin

87% YouTube will soon feature moneyhomebiz.com

87% Over 400 Blog Posts!

84% How To Start An Online Business

84% 60 Twitter Tools

78% Wordpress Pingbacks and Trackbacks

77% Scribefire A Mozilla Add On

77% Ive Ordered It Have You?

75% 8 Amazing Tips To Get Traffic To Your Website

70% A Good Read

68% Mobile Blogging Our New Future

67% Best Blogger Tips

Let’s face it there is no point in having a blog if no one knows it exists. There are thousands of new blogs created daily.

What would make people go to your blog?

How would they find you?

There are certain steps you can take to make your blog stand out from the rest and be noticed and get the traffic it deserves.

1. Search Engine optimization (SEO) This is a must your website must be fully optimized if you are to get any free traffic from the many search engines.

2. Submit your blog to the search engines.

3. Write unique fresh content and update your blog often. In fact I believe you need to update your blog as a minimum 2-3 times a day. not so much on weekends as the traffic dips on weekends.

4. Forums Join forums in your chosen niche and develop a reputation as a leader in your field, this will result in people coming to your blog and building your community.

5. Comment on other blogs. Especially blogs in your field and those with the do follow rule so that your link does count and people who visit the blog will be able to go to your blog.

6. Social Bookmarking. Using website such as DIgg, Twitter, Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon to name a few will help you to get traffic to your site as well as create some valuable links.

7. Host Your Own Blog. It is very important if you want to stand out from the rest to have a self hosted blog. It helps to give your blog and you credibility.

There are many more things you can do to tweak your blog to gain better positions in the search engines. If you use these points as a starting guide then you are well on your way to gaining an increase in traffic to your blog and also developing your reputation in your field of expertise.

If you are a blogger and find you are not making enough money just blogging on your own blogs why not apply for a job blogging.

You can check out Darren’s job board over at problogger. where you will find jobs for different niches.

Or

You can check out the job board at CopyBlogger.

If you have an interest in a few subjects then there is no reason that you can’t make a living online writing for other blogs.

Bookmark these pages and if you do not find a job that suits check back because they are updated often.

Blogging is fast becoming the job of choice for many of us who want to setup a home business online.

you can now blog from anywhere, with the internet facilities on some mobile phones and the ability to have a wireless laptop you are not tied down to just working from your desk or office you can literally take your work anywhere and everywhere.

You can blog from the airport

You can blog from the local cafe

You can blog while waiting to pick up the kids from school

You can blog in a restaurant

You can blog while traveling the world

You can blog while waiting for an appointment

The places you can blog from are only limited by your imagination.

What are some of the most interesting places you have blogged from?

There is no reason why you cannot blog apart from writer’s block of course. today’s technological world is made for bloggers it is so easy now to update your blogs as often as required with good quality content. There is no reason what so ever that you should visit a blog and subscribe to it’s rss feed only to find no posts for a few months.

A blogging career is an easy one to do with the right tools. A Laptop, a mobile, a flip camera, a broadband connection. Your blogs and you are off. You just need to be able to write.

There are different types of blogging you can be either a pro-active blogger or a reactive blogger.

Which one are you?

Let me explain…

I consider myself to be a bit of both but I would hope I fit into the Pro Active category more than the reactive.

A Pro Active Blogger is one who is out in front of the other bloggers, one who is not afraid to write about things not yet written about, one who has ground breaking information and is one of the first to break the news. A pro active blogger will go out of there way to find a subject to write about. Will lead by example and be prolific in their field.

A Reactive Blogger is one who just reacts to content they read online and writes posts about that. Kind of like a copy cat. Doesn’t always come up with their own ideas often relies upon other sites to give them ideas on what to write about. quite often they trackback to other posts on other blogs. Usually they have a list of RSS subscriptions of top ranking bloggers in their fields to keep up with what the competition is writing about. You will see their posts follow along the same kind of topics as leaders in their fields or niche.

It doesn’t really matter which one you are as long as you can come up with unique content for your blog. Some people find that they can get ideas by reading other peoples blogs while others find they don’t have the time to read other peoples blogs and are only interested in their own blog and keeping up their own unique content.

Tags: Blogger, RSS