Content is King

Content is king, even in blogging. Visitors of your blog will keep coming back if you keep your content fresh and engaging. I recommend posting new entries at least once a week, more whenever you can. Nothing will turn off blog readers than finding stale blog posts in your site, and that would guarantee them not coming back again. Encourage your readers to post comments and discuss your posts. That way you will be able to keep them engaged to check on your posts and visit your blog often.

Starting a Blog, continued...

Starting a blog is easy enough. There are several sites on the Internet that offer free tools and hosting for blogs. I use Blogger.com as my host, but a budding blogger can also use other sites such as TypePad and LiveJournal. Social networking sites, such as Multiply, Friendster and MySpace, alsohas blogging features that their members can use. If you are going to do a photoblog, you may use Flickr, PhotoBucket or Picasa to host your images for free. A site called Twitter (twitter.com) is great if you want to do microblogging, in which your posts are limited to about 160 characters or less.

One of the most critical things you should remember about blogging is that you should blog about things or topics that you know about. For example, I blog about astronomy because amateur astronomy has been a passion of mine since college days, and it's something that I feel confident writing about. Discussing topics that you know and feel comfortable with can make keeping your blog easy, and your audience will appreciate it too if you can show some credibility about the topic of your blog. You don't have to have expert level knowledge about what you're blogging about but you should be able to post intelligent things about them.

Starting a Blog

Blogs, short of web logs, are web sites that discuss topics just about anything under the sun - there are blogs about travel, pets, personal experiences, finance, technology, photography, and even about mundane things in life such as politics. Corporations and businesses have started using blogs as part of their branding and public relations effort, and celebrities and people of note from all over the world got into the fray too. Even over-the-hill rapper MC Hammer has his own blog.

Based on the last survey, there are now about 120 million blogs on the Internet, so there's plenty for everyone.

I started blogging in 2005. The first one that I started is a personal one - a venue where I can post my thoughts and experiences, bitch about what's unfair about life and make fun of things I find ridiculous. In fact, it's one nasty experience during a drinking session with my buddies that got me into blogging and writing entries for it became some sort of catharsis for my experiences. Needless to say, I first posted my entries anonymously, under a pen name.

I now maintain several blogs as a hobby and as my contribution to the information overload. I also follow several ones to keep me abreast with what's been happening around, and I spend many waking hours reading them - in my home PC, in my office PC, even on my iPod Touch.

The blog that I am starting now is about how it can become a second job.