Blogging, the new ‘it’ term of the 21st century.
But how do you start a blog? And is it a difficult thing to do?
This post will bring you through the general steps needed in starting up your own blog, and when I say general, I mean general.
Because if I had to write down each and every step, from getting your own domain, to hosting to installing Wordpress and installing a Wordpress theme – this post would be very long indeed.
Identify What You Want To Talk About
It’s all well and good to say, ‘I want to start blogging’ or ‘I’m going to become a blogger’ but what are you really blogging about?
I can tell you from first hand experience that blogging without a purpose will get you nowhere fast.
“I Hate Work and I Had Noodles For Lunch”
Most people start here – they have an opinion, they’d like to share that opinion, so they start a blog and tell people about their opinion.
Their first blog probably has a domain like xanydude.blogspot.com (this is the name of my first blog – seriously) and they share stories about what they had for dinner, why they’re angry at work, why they’re angry at the government and so on.
But truth be told, unless you are a really really interesting person, or you’re a model, politician or some sort of celebrity, this kind of blogging won’t get you anywhere.
After all, it’s your ramblings. Would you expect someone to enjoy reading your diary full of ramblings if you gave it to them?
Then why should they read about your ramblings on a blog?
Know Yourself
This blog aims to teach people how to make money online and if you blog without a purpose, then don’t hope to be able to do that.
Notice how I’ve not mentioned that you CAN’T make money online with a personal blog, it’s just it’s harder – but it can be done.
Firstly, identify why you’re writing on your blog in the first place. If you’re already popular, great – you’re halfway there as it is.
If you’re not, if you’re like everyone else, with a medium sized group of friends, working in a mid-level 9 to 5 job and are starting fresh, then identify what you’re good at.
Let’s face it, everyone is good at something or another.
Some people are good at making people laugh, some people are good at teaching finance, some people are good at drawing/ art. What are YOU good at?
For me? I’m good at writing about things, things like this for example, how to start a blog.
That’s why I started Online Business Malaysia (OBM) – that’s what I was good at. But note, this blog, is NOT a personal blog.
A true personal blog will be someone who blogs about:
- Day to day life
- The experiences they have encountered (such as travelling, holidays, studying etc.)
- Their like/ dislike for the government, work etc.
- Some people make up stories
- But most important of all, it is written with feeling, emotions and in a way that lets your audience relate with you at a personal level
(more…)
If you’re subscribed to my newsletter, you would have recently received an email telling you about the new blog installation service we’ve recently added to online business Malaysia.
If all things went well, you should see a message like this. Click ‘Activate Plugin’ and you’re done!
How To Add A Gravatar Image To Your Comments/ Blog
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009Adding your picture to your comments with the Gravatar service is a great was to feel more ‘connected’ with your readers, or as a reader yourself.
Well that’s because they’ve set up a Gravatar account which is linked to their email address. Whenever you leave a comment (with a Gravatr linked e-mail address) then your selected picture will appear in the box next to the comments section.
To setup a Gravatar account follow these steps:
1) Go to http://gravatar.com
2) Sign up for an account
3)Login to your new account
4) Click ‘Add an Email Address’
5) Type in your e-mail address that you use to leave comments (or the admin e-mail address you use for your blog) and click ‘add’
6) Click ‘add a new image’
7) Upload a picture from your hard disk, a website or straight from your webcam.
9) Select the image that you just uploaded
10) Click ‘confirm’ when it asks you to
It’s as simple as that! Leave a comment with your new Gravatar picture below to test it out.
But what if you don’t have the little box next to your comments on your blog? How do you install it?
This only works if you have a Wordpress blog.
1) You need to have access to the files on your server. For that, I’ll leave it up to you to figure out how to get them. I use Dreamweaver to get to my files.
2) Find http://yourdomain.com/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/comments.php (where yourdomain.com represents where you installed your blog and yourtheme is the theme you are using for your Wordpress blog)
3) Open comments.php in Dreamweaver or notepad if you don’t have it.
4) Find this line:
Anything under this line is for the comments section of your blog.
5) If you want to put your Gravatar icon above your name in the comment box (like my comment box below) then search for this line.
and ABOVE it paste this line:
where the number represents how big you want the Gravatar image to be. Default is 32 (i.e. 32×32 pixels big) but I put mine a little bit bigger.
6) Save your file and upload it back to your server.
7) Refresh your page and the box for Gravatar images should be there.
Please remember that not all themes are the same and this method may or may not work for you. But it should work for the default and more popular themes out there.
Share this article if you liked it!
Thanks,
-William Lee
Tags: comment box, gravatar
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