How to start a family blog: Quick steps to creating your first blog

Setting up the perfect family blog is simple. Whether you are a stay at home mom or a busy Grandparent you can easily set up a blog to share special moments with families and friends. Starting a blog is free and it can be done in a few minutes. Sharing your blog with friends and family is a snap. Blogs can be shared via Facebook, Twitter, and email.  You can design your blog to share stories, pictures, and videos of your family.

The two main sites used to create blogs are WordPress and Blogger. Both sites are Internet driven and require only basic computer skills. WordPress is the latest standard for blogging. The platform provides the blog creator with various cool add-ons that are called widgets. Widgets are added to the blog through the user interface. The widgets are what make WordPress the winner and most popular of the two main blogging platforms. Therefore, I will explain the basics of setting up the blog in WordPress.

Quick 4-Step Blog Set Up:

1. Visit WordPress.com and create an account.
Once you go to the WordPress site, just click on the “Get Started Here” button and start filling out the one-step form. The first thing you’ll have to do is come up with a cleaver name for your blog. As I mentioned before, it is completely free to start a basic WordPress blog.

2. Come up with a creative name and start thinking about your content.
You can name the blog whatever you want. I suggest using something simple and easy to type. Try to avoid making the blog address too long or complex. Make it easy for your friends and family to find. Then start thinking about what type of content you want to share. You can write a simple paragraph describing your blog and include it in an “About” page. That way your readers will know where you are coming from.

3. Get started and add your first post.
Now you are moving! Once you familiarize yourself with your blog’s “dashboard,” which is basically where you, the author, will do all the behind the scenes work, it is time to write your first post. On the WordPress dashboard page, simply click the “New Post” tab to start adding content. You can add the title of the post and whatever content you choose, include text, pictures, and audio/video. When you are satisfied with your post, click the “Publish Post” button and your text will publish to your blog. It’s that simple!  Now let your friends, family, and followers know by sharing the link.

4. Let your friends and family know about the blog.
You can share your post through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Go to the blog post and click the share buttons at the bottom of the post. Another way you can share the blog post is by copying the web address and pasting the address into an email.

Doing these quick 4-steps will allow you to create your blog, add content, and share the post.

Adding content to the blog may come easy at first, but over time you may find it difficult to come up with ideas. As your blog progresses, you will need fresh ideas. Writer’s block is common so don’t worry. We have a solution. Join our weekly blog writing prompts list and get creative content ideas for your blog. The weekly prompts will be emailed to you so you can stay motivated and inspired. To sign up for the weekly blogging prompt enter your email below the green box on our homepage.

Still have questions? Check back frequently to continue learning more about family blogging.

Upcoming topics:

- Ad-ons and widgets

- Exploring the dashboard

- Adding photos and videos

- Creating and defining the focus of your blog

- Advanced ways to integrate and share your blog using social media

Home Based Work To Make Money Online

These days you will find a lot of buzz about the opportunities to work from home online. It is indeed possible to make lots of money online and there are plenty of ways to do that. The best thing is that you have the opportunities to make money now online for free. Yes, there is no investment, which means you do not have to pay anything to get into the options of earning good money.

Good Ways To Make Money Online:

The age-old of concept of rushing to offices at morning or engaging into headaches of arranging money for running a business has taken a new turn. Now, you have the opportunities to explore the power of the internet and make money in an alternative manner. People are talking about the opportunities to make money by working from home online, but is there any real potential for such opportunities? Not ‘any’, there are many potentials of online businesses. Take a look at some of the major benefits of working from home online.

You Can Call the Shots and Make Your Own Rules:

Many people considers this one of the best benefits to make money online from home for free. In the traditional jobs, they need to report to their superiors and work amid several restrictions and barriers. When you are working online then you are your own boss. There is no one to scold you or keep a tab on you if you are late at work or any other aspects. However, you have to be sure that you maintain seriousness in your work when you are working online. Remember, no work without dedication can bring desired results.

You Can Create Own Work Schedule:

This goes in the same line of the advantage mentioned above. You gain the flexibility to work according to your preferred time. It means you can take out time for your other work and commitments that you have been missing consistently because of your 9 to 5 job.
No Fixed Destination:
When you are connected to the internet, then you can work from anywhere in the world. Whether it is your home, your fiend’s home, cyber café, or even if you are out of station. It means your work will not suffer if you are not present in a certain destination. It is also good because it provides relief from being at monotonous state of working at one place every time.

Relief From Worry Of Termination From Job Unexpectedly:

When you are involved in a job, you constantly worry to maintain high standard or else it may cause the loss of your job. In fact, many employers create such environment for the employees that they always bother about termination. When you work from home online, there is no such worry. You definitely have to stay focused on your work and you will get benefit of it or at least you will get time to get better gradually without any fear of getting terminated.

Take Break Whenever You Want:

With home based jobs, you can not just make money now online for free, but also can take break from work whenever you want. There is no one to question you why you want break or restrict the period of break. As you are your own boss, it is up to you decide when to take a break. It is definitely not a problem if you are serious enough to compensate for that ‘break’ period smartly.

Take Break Whenever You Want

It is true that by opting for home based work can help your make lots of money online. However, you have to make proper research to find the right platform.

Choose a Domain Name Wisely

Choosing a domain name can be tough to do. You want a memorable name that the search engines can find, yet domains are being purchased at lightening speed, so it can be really difficult to find one you like.While at my WordPress Meetup last month, I believe I heard that domains are being bought to be resold at a much higher price and that has become a big business.

Word of warning here, if you think of a name that is perfect, purchase it the first time you check to see if it is available, do not click away from the site to compare prices somewhere else. Domains are pretty comparably priced and even if one site offers a couple of dollar discount, it is not worth shopping around to get a great deal on the domain name. I know I got sidetracked here, but at my age, I have to tell you while I am thinking of something or I may have a “senior moment” and it will be lost. I can’t believe I just admited that, oh well, it is what it is.

Back to choosing your domain name.

There are some must do’s, so here they are
The golden rule is to purchase .com. I know that if you have found a name you love and then discover that someone else owns the .com of that name, but the .net, .org, or .biz is available, you might consider purchasing one of those. Do yourself a favor, find another domain name. By far, people use .com and if you are using one of the others, you will be sending traffic to your competitor. Conversely, if you purchase the .com domain, you may want purchase the.net as well if it is available. That way you own both and don’t have to worry about a competitor sharing your traffic.
Choose a name with one of the keywords you intend to optimize your site for. It helps bring traffic to your site when the search engins crawl your site, and it makes it easier for people to remember your url.
Be sure to make it easy to spell. A lot of us aren’t too good at spelling, and you don’t want to miss that potential traffic
Limit the lenth to four words max, and don’t make them long words, the shorter your url the better.
Make sure that you don’t use the brand of another company in your domain name. For instance, although I want to help others figure out how to use WordPress, I could not use WordPress in my domain name.
Purchasing a domain follows keyword research

Remember that you don’t want to go to all the hard work to build a website for your online business if there is not much potential to make money. Doing the research first to detemine if there is an interested market is key to your success. I have information talking about keyword research that you might want to check out.

One thing that is good to know is that there are companies that sell domains solely, there are companies whose business is hosting and they sell domains. If you purchase your domain from a company that does both you can purchase the domain and start working on your website immediately. Otherwise, you have to go through a process to transfer the domain to your webhost and it takes a few days for that to happen depending on the companies you are dealing with.

I did not realize how much difference there can be between hosting companies. I recently was working with a lady who signed up for a hosting company I had never heard of. We had a terrible time installing WordPress which is a pretty straight forward process. When we contacted them for help, they were extremely unresponsive. Finally, she transfered her domain to another hosting company with a good track record, and even then, the transfer process took a long time.

Choose a company that uses a Cpanel.

When choosing a hosting company,  you want to pick one that uses what is called Cpanel. That is techie I know, but it will make your life easier. My favorite hosting company is Bluehost I have promised you that I will tell you what I am doing as I do it, so that is an affiliate link. They will pay me a commission if you decide to use them for hosting. This is an example you want to follow if your plan is to take your site from idea to profit. To be sure, there are other good companies out there, but I want to be sure I know from experience that the products I promote are good.

Just today I had to call their help desk with a question, and the service rep was really patient and helpful. Compared to the experience I had with the other company I was talking about, I have to say I am a satisfied customer. I learned  about a benefit they offer that I had not been aware of. If  you get your domain from them, the first one is free with hosting, and you never have to pay for it, that is pretty cool.

What is a Blog?

following my interactions with different levels of bloggers ( newbie bloggers, intermediate bloggers, and pro bloggers), I thought to myself...

People just need an excellent guide that's simple to understand, yet adds real value.

So... let's get started!

Blogging, simply put, is a way of making an entry on a blog.  The word blog is derived from weblog, which means an online journal - a record or an entry on the web.  The term weblog was coined by Jorn Barger in 1997, while blog was coined by Peter Merholz in 1999.

Today, both noun and verb forms of the word blog are in usage.  As a verb, to blog means to make a post or edit your weblog.

The person who makes the entry on the blog is known as a blogger.  Weblogs also called blogs can be written by one or more bloggers, and the entries are basically in reverse chronological order - from the most recent to the oldest.

Blogs are updated multiple times a day, a week or a month, while others are rarely.

What makes blog different from other forms of web publishing are the personalities behind them.  They (blogs) are written by individuals (bloggers) who are perceived as 'unedited' personal voices.

Bloggers have different goals, uses, or writing styles.  Often, a blog reflects the author's personalities and values.

Writing a blog offers the author (web blogger) immediate access to readers, who are allowed to make their own comments or links to topics and other websites relevant to the entry.  This interaction allows bloggers to create a community of bloggers or blogs called blogosheres, that is, groups centered around specific niches or interests or location .  For example, medblogs (weblogs about health and medicine), edulogs (educational weblogs), blawgs (law-related weblogs),  indian bloggers, malaysian bloggers, nigerian bloggers, etc.  These uses indicate that blogs could be useful in supporting ones work.

Make Money Blogging for Beginners – The Challenges to Overcome

Let’s take a look at the different approaches in terms of Make Money Blogging for Beginners. There are 2 ways for you to basically start your blogging business. Get a domain name, find a reliable hosting, install a WordPress blog (that platform is the most recommended by the way), then start setting it up, which is – to be honest – lots of pain when you are getting started… I am aware of that myself because I’m not your typical techie guy in any way.

So at this time, you have a blog, which can be cool, however, you don’t have anything to sell as that’s the only way you are going to make money blogging… if you sell something. Now you can choose Affiliate Marketing or Network Marketing to have something to market, but again choosing the best deals takes some experience trust me! It took so long for us as well to find a Commission Loophole to get 100% Commissions, rather than getting 30-50% like in typical Affiliate and Network Marketing.

The next thing you want to have is a sales funnel to make sales and follow up with your potential customer on complete autopilot so you can start earning income on the Internet independent of your time while you sipping Pina Colada on the beach somewhere! Isn’t this what you want?

So a sales funnel that’s essential to make money blogging should contain: a Free offer (something valuable for the people that are considering the product you’re selling, and you want to give this away for Free in exchange for their contact details – this is how you create a list of subscribers that can be converted into buyers later), than what you want is a HIGH CONVERTING sales page or video which is what many people just don’t get right; this thing, CONVERSIONS will determine how many percentage of your visitors will actually buy. Obviously you want this percentage the highest possible and therefore let me kindly suggest something: you don’t want to put this together yourself when you are a beginner in the blogging arena! Instead, rely on people who have this skill.

And this will bring us to another step… the life blood of your Online Business: TRAFFIC! Traffic is everything, my friend. You may have the very best looking shiny object or product to provide, but if NO ONE sees it you won’t make a single dime, PERIOD! So have to learn how you can drive massive visitors to your blog, meaning you want to learn cutting-edge Internet Marketing strategies that are proven to work.

Let’s say you have done all this that was mentioned in this Make Money Blogging for Beginners report – let’s assume you had the time and money and the resources to put this all together as a beginner. And let’s say you are getting massive traffic to your blog and you convert them to sales like crazy.

BUT…

You are still getting this tiny, itsy, bitsy commissions for selling other people’s products rather than selling your own products. What’s the difference? Well, selling other people’s stuff is equal to a maximum of 50% commissions and selling your own product pays 100%. But you don’t have your own product, right? And to be honest as a beginner you don’t want to start creating it, because that usually happens after you achieved real results in the game (it’s like you cannot teach Muay Thai – even though I train – without achieving something and being a student myself).

You may be thinking: “is this why I was searching Make Money Blogging for Beginners information, to find this disappointing post”?

Obviously this challenging info is NOT what you were looking for when searching for “Make Money Blogging for Beginners”!

Search Engine Optimization

Blogging platforms offer many handy services but there’s no such SEO thing included. SEO is actually the key to get free organic traffic, and the more you know how to do it, the more readers end up in your blog, and because a great content can never be appreciated unless you get those readers to it. SEO is not that hard task if you know exactly what you’re doing.
.So in this article I’ll go through things that you as Blogger should look after in order to optimize your search engine rank:

1.       Content Quality: The more you write the better it is. Google will never lead it’s users to some empty blogs with a line or two in each post and leave them to seek for information! What are they going to be looking for?? The more you write the better it is, write daily, weekly you will need tons of articles. I’ll actually be recommending this, if you are about to launch a new blog, prepare like a 10 or 20 articles before, this way whenever  you’ll be lunching the blog Google will know that you’re serious about what you’re doing here. Another major point I’d like to talk about is that Google only recognize text, so if you are adding some cool videos or images or whatever it is to the blog, this may help you to get the visitors attention, maybe to be your subscribers or followers, but in SEO it does not help at all. Whenever Google is indexing your blog he does not give any value to these stuff, so do not make your post a video or some gathered images. That was content and for quality just be original and write good stuff that answers someone’s question.
2.       Tags/Keywords: Any article you may post on your blog can be associated with some keywords on the bottom called tags, which are mainly related to the most important topics discussed in the article; this is something that you may actually know. Now these tags helps search engines to identify the article/blog post whenever a user is searching for something that got a these common keywords. Do not use like 10 or 20 tags for a post, Google hates that just put 4 or 5 at the maximum. Also it would help if you use these keywords in the page name, like yourwebsite.com/how_to_blog.html is better than yourwebsite.com/page1234.html.
3.       Back-links: Having links that points to your blog in multiple websites or other blogs matters, because usually it’s a kind of a recommendation. Google recognize that and gives more rank to your blog. Note that this method works only if someone is pointing to your blog and you’re not like doing the same to his, not kind of a link exchanging! Also if you’re going to spam all others blogs with your links then Google recognize that as well, so be careful!
4.       Social Media: Social networks are taking over these days, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ all this are great places to user-targeting and SEO in the same time. It’s a must to get you a page/account on these websites. But your information there, logo...etc And you can spend some time sharing stuff that you’re producing, making your community bigger and Google will notice that.