The Blogger Team has announced the Blogger Template Designer. The Blogger Template Designer will allow free bloggers greater customization of their blog templates (which dictate the presentation of the blogs) without knowing HTML or CSS.

The Blogger Team states:

The Blogger Template Designer allows you to create effectively infinite number of designs templates instead of being restricted to a limited number of rigid designs by making it easy to customize your blogs design, layout, background and much more. — The Blogger Team.

 

Features of The Blogger Template Designer:

• Beautiful new starting templates
• Choices of blog layouts with one, two and three columns
• You can now select from hundreds of background images
• Colors, fonts, and other parts of the free blog can be customized

Here is a video released by Blogger about the new Blogger Template Designer:

For too long the template choices at Blogger have been in need of updating. If you were capable with HTML and CSS, then Blogger did allow you to tweak your blog template as desired, and some were able to design their own unique Blogger templates. Overall though, most free Blogger bloggers stuck to the default and common template offerings. The end result was that for too long, too many free Blogger blogs looked like too many other free Blogger blogs. Free blogs with the same looks just kept getting stamped out one by one.

The new Blogger Template Designer is a step in the right direction for Blogger. However, if you want to have complete control over your blog the best solution is still to Own Your Own Blog by self-hosting a WordPress blog installed at your chosen web host and using your own registered Top Level Domain name as your blog’s URL.

Learn more about the Blogger Template Designer at Blogger in draft.

However, visiting all these Web sites can be very time consuming.

For example, if you have 10 Web sites you like to visit each day, then you’ll have to surf to each Web site and look around to see if any new content has been added that catches your fancy. The process of surfing and perusing these 10 Web sites can take up a big chunk of your time, and it can be frustrating too.

• Using RSS feeds to aggregate all of the most recent news or posts, from all of your favorite and regularly visited blogs and Web sites in one convenient reader can make your Internet surfing life a lot more enjoyable. With RSS, it will be easy for you to see what’s up and new at all of the Web sites you like to follow, and you can do this in just one place.

• RSS stands for Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication. It’s a way for Web sites and blogs to publish their content or posts in a Feed that can be read by another Web site or other software called a Reader. This means you can stay up-to-date with the content changes of the many blogs and Web sites you monitor by looking in just one place instead of actually visiting each one of the blogs and Web sites individually. You can quickly review and read all the new content from all of the blogs and Web sites you enjoy by following their RSS feeds in Reader. This saves you time and effort.

• A blog or Web site will most likely make available to its visitors an RSS feed. An RSS feed is in the form of a link. You Subscribe to these blogs and Web sites using the RSS feed so you can receive updates of their content, meaning new posts, in your chosen RSS Reader.

You will often see an RSS icon or button on the pages of the blog or Web site you want to subscribe to that looks similar to this example:
RSS Subscribe Icon/Button


Subscribe

These RSS icons/buttons provide the link you need to subscribe to the blog or Web site’s RSS feed. The RSS icons/buttons will often have a text link too. You will find the RSS icon/button for this blog located near the upper right-hand corner at the top of the page. There is another much smaller RSS icon along with the word "Subscribe" found in the right-hand sidebar.

If you click on this RSS icon, then one of two things will occur. You will either see a web page displayed with a dialog that allows you to Subscribe to the blog or Web site’s RSS feed in a Reader, or you will see a web page with a lot of code shown. If you see a web page with code, then you should copy that page’s URL (the URL will be displayed in the browser Address Bar) and then add that URL to your Reader. It’s really not as complicated as it might seem.

Here is a video that explains RSS and demonstrates the process of RSS subscription:

You will need an RSS Reader to take advantage of RSS feeds supplied by blogs and Web sites. One very popular RSS feed Reader is the free and online Google Reader.

Google Reader is my favorite RSS Reader, I currently follow over 120 blogs using Google Reader. I like to follow the RSS feeds of blogs with subjects such as; blogs and blogging, Web site design, running a small business, small business marketing, Civil War history, and some blogs about writing.

Having a place where I can check on all of these blogs and see what has been newly posted is a great time and work saver for me. I’ll check on my Google Reader account two or three times a day to see what’s up with the blogs I follow. I like Google Reader a lot, and recommend it as your RSS Reader.

A video to help you learn the basics of Google Reader:

So, if subscribing to RSS feeds is something new to you, and you like to keep track of multiple blogs or Web sites on a regular basis, then give RSS and Google Reader a try. I think you’ll appreciate the time you’ll save, and the convenience RSS provides.

The free-hosted WordPress.com version of WordPress is back online.

Here is information from WordPress.com:

WP.com Downtime Summary

Highlights (Lowlights?) of the WordPress.com information link:

• WordPress.com was down for approximately 110 minutes on February 18, 2010.

• This was WordPress.com’s worst downtime in four years. 10.2 million blogs were affected, 5.5 million pageviews were lost.

• An explanation by Matt of WordPress.com; "an unscheduled change to a core router by one of our datacenter providers messed up our network in a way we haven’t experienced before, and broke the site. It also broke all the mechanisms for failover between our locations in San Antonio and Chicago. All of your data was safe and secure, we just couldn’t serve it."

• Further explanation by Matt of WordPress.com; "We need to dig deeper and find out exactly what happened, why, and how to recover more gracefully next time and isolate problems like this so they don’t affect our other locations"

For now, the WordPress.com downtime crisis appears to be over.

This outage of free hosted WordPress.com blogs was serious, it negatively affected many, many blogs which are hosted for free at WordPress.com.

WordPress blogs that are self-hosted (WordPress.org kinds of blogs) were affected somewhat by this outage if they happen to use the WP Stats plugin. This plugin depends on, and ties in to WordPress.com for it to work successfully. Obviously, with WordPress.com down, this usually very reliable and useful plugin could not work as designed, and this caused problems for self-hosted WordPress blogs using the plugin. The solution for this self-hosted WordPress plugin problem was to delete the plugin during the time of the free hosted WordPress.com blogs outage.

Those WordPress blogs that are self-hosted and do not use the WP Stats plugin were not affected by the WordPress.com downtime.

It is important to self-host your WordPress blog so you…

Own Your Own Blog!

Here is a guest post about blogging by expert blogger Yaro Starak. Yaro is a guru on the subjects of blogging, and Internet marketing and promotion.

There are basically two types of bloggers in the world – reporters and experts – and some people perform both roles (usually the experts, it’s hard for reporters to become experts, but it’s easy for experts to report).

If you have ever taken an Internet marketing course or attended a seminar specifically for beginners, you have probably heard about the two different methodologies. Whenever the business model is based on content, and if you blog for money then the model is based on content, people are taught to either start as reporters, or if possible step up as experts.

I’ll be frank; you want to be the expert.

Reporters leverage the content of the experts and in most cases people start off as reporters because they haven’t established expertise. Experts enjoy the perks of preeminence, higher conversion rates because of perceived value, it’s easier to get publicity, people are more likely to seek you out rather than you having to seek others out, joint ventures come easier, etc. Experts in most cases simply make more money and attract more attention.

Most Bloggers Are Reporters

The thing with expertise is that it requires something – experience. No person becomes an expert without doing things and learning. Bloggers usually start out without expertise and as a result begin their blogging journey by talking about everything going on in their niche (reporting) and by interviewing and talking about other experts (reporting again).

There’s nothing wrong with reporting of course and for many people it’s a necessity at first until you build up some expertise. Unfortunately the ratios are pretty skewed when it comes to reporters and experts – there are a lot more reporters than there are experts, hence reporters tend to struggle to gain attention and when they do, they often just enhance the reputation of the expert they are reporting on.

Don’t Replicate Your Teacher

If you have ever spent some time browsing products in the “learn Internet marketing niche” you will notice a pattern. Many people first study Internet marketing from a “guru” (for lack of a better term). The guru teaches how he or she is able to make money online, and very often the view that the student gleams is that in order to make money online you have to teach others how to make money online.

The end result of this process is a huge army of amateurs attempting to replicate what their teacher does in the same industry – the Internet marketing industry – not realizing that without expert status based on a proven record and all the perks that come with it, it’s next to impossible to succeed.

Even people, who enjoy marginal success, say for example growing an email list of 1,000 people, then go out and launch a product about how to grow an email list of 1,000 people. Now I have no problems with that, I think it’s fine to teach beginners and leverage whatever achievements you have, the problem is that people gravitate to the same niche – Internet marketing – and rarely have any key points of differentiation.

How many products out there do you know of that all claim to teach the same things – email marketing, SEO, pay per click, affiliate marketing, and all the sub-niches that fall under the category of Internet marketing. It’s a saturated market, yet when you see your teachers and other gurus making money teaching others how to make money (and let’s face it – making money as a subject is one of the most compelling) – your natural inclination is to follow in their footsteps.

If the key is to become an expert and you haven’t spent the last 5-10 years making money online, I suggest you look for another niche to establish expertise in.

Report on Your Process, Not Others

The secret to progress from reporter to expert is not to focus on other experts and instead report on your own journey. When you are learning how to do something and implementing things day by day, or studying other people’s work, you need to take your process and what you do as a result of what you learn, and use it as content for your blog.

It’s okay to talk about experts when you learn something from them, but always relate it to what you are doing. If you learn a technique from an expert it’s fine to state you learned it from them (and affiliate link to their product too!) but you should then take that technique, apply it to what you are doing and then report back YOUR results, not there’s. Frame things using your opinion – your stories – and don’t regurgitate what the expert said. The key is differentiation and personality, not replication.

Expertise comes from doing things most people don’t do and then talking about it. If you do this often enough you wake up one day as an expert, possibly without even realizing how it happened, simply because you were so good at reporting what you did.

You Are Already An Expert

Most people fail to become experts (or perceived as experts) because they don’t leverage what they already know. Every person who lives a life learns things as they go, takes action every day and knows something about something. The reason why they never become an expert is because they choose not to (which is fine for some, not everyone wants to be an expert), but if your goal is to blog your way to expertise and leave the world of reporting behind you have to start teaching and doing so by leveraging real experience.

Experience can come from what you do today and what you have done previously; you just need to take enough steps to demonstrate what you already know and what you are presently learning along your journey. I know so many people in my life, who are experts simply by virtue of the life they have lived, yet they are so insecure about what they know, they never commit their knowledge to words for fear of?well fear.

Blogs and the Web in general, are amazing resources when you leverage them as a communication tool to spread your expertise because of the sheer scope of people they can reach. If all you ever do is talk to people in person and share your experience using limited communication mediums, you haven’t much hope of becoming an expert. Take what you know and show other people through blogging, and you might be surprised how people change their perception of you in time.

Reporting Is A Stepping Stone

If your previous experience and expertise is from an area you want to leave behind or you are starting from “scratch,” then reporting is the path you must walk, at least for the short term.

Reporting is a lot of fun. Interviewing experts, talking about what other people are doing and just being part of a community is not a bad way to blog. In many cases people make a career of reporting (journalism is about just that), but if you truly want success and exponential results, at some point you will have to stand up and proclaim yourself as someone unusually good at something and then proceed to demonstrate it over and over again.

Have patience and focus on what you do to learn and then translate that experience into lessons for others, and remember, it’s okay to be a big fish in a small pond, that’s all most experts really are.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind please click this link:

www.BlogMastermind.com

Click here to download the Free Blog Profits Blueprint

Having your own registered domain name for your Web site or blog is important. Before you can register a domain name, you have to choose one! Here’s some tips to help you find a good domain name.

Your domain name gives your Web site or blog professionalism and credibility. When someone sees a domain name that has been carefully chosen to successfully represent a Web site or blog, then trust is built between the Web site or blog and its readers and visitors.

A registered domain name is one you have the exclusive right to use. You use a domain registrar like Go Daddy to find and register a domain name for your Web site or blog. Domain name registration is very affordable.

Domain Name Registration

www.GoDaddy.com

This blog uses www.wpblogsandwebsites.com as its domain name. I blog here about WordPress, and Web sites created and using WordPress, and also about Web sites and their development and design. If instead, I blogged about how to fix and repair Jeep Grand Wagoneers (something for which I pay big bucks to my mechanics), then my domain name would be misleading. Your trust in me would not be as strong if I used www.wpblogsandwebsites.com to blog about the maintenance of Jeep Grand Wags. With www.wpblogsandwebsites.com I have branded this blog as one that discusses WordPress and Web site topics.

While it is relatively easy to register a domain name, selecting the domain name to register is not so easy! In the end, you should select a domain name that suits your blog or Web site, and one that you like too. Selecting a domain name is both a technical and personal consideration. There are no absolute rules about selecting a domain name. Some very successful blogs and Web site have not followed conventional advice about selecting a domain name and have done very well.

Some tips to consider when choosing a domain name for a Web site or blog:

• What is your Web site or blog about? The domain name should represent what your blog’s subject is.
• Who is going to be reading your Web site or blog? You’ll want the domain name to be one these people will recognize.
• Is your domain name easy to remember? Can people remember what the domain name of your Web site or blog is? Word of mouth is valuable, so make it easy for people to use their mouths when they remember or say your domain name.
• Can people spell and pronounce your domain name? Sometimes cute spellings and pronunciations of words can backfire.
• Will the domain name limit you to just one, or a few areas or subjects? As time goes on, you may find you want to branch out and widen what your blog talks about. A narrowly focused domain name may hurt you when you want to expand. Let your domain name give you some elbow room to grow.
• Your domain name should reflect the tone of your Web site or blog. Are you always going to be serious? Are you going to be humorous? Are you going to be a political blogger with your eyes bugging out in anger? You may want to have the tone of your Web site or blog shown in its domain name.
• Will your domain name be good in the future too, or will it become dated? If your domain name is geared towards one of today’s hot topics, then in a few short years (or months!) from now that domain name may look like yesterday’s news.
• Usually short domain names with correct spelling are better because they are easier to remember. This can be debated, as longer domain names, or an odd spelling, can work out great.
• A domain name with the .com domain type is the most familiar. There are others such as .net, .org, or .biz that may work well for you. As there is good use of .com in a domain name, you might find it difficult to find a suitable domain name with the .com domain type. It depends on your Web site or blog’s topic and the amount of competition you have for your domain name.
• You might consider registering multiple domain names. For example, you might register and use yourgreatdomainname.com for your blog or Web site, but you might also register yourgreatdomainname.net, yourgreatdomainname.org, and yourgreatdomainname.biz so that you corner the market on "yourgreatdomainname." You would set things up at your domain name registrar so that anyone who types in yourgreatdomainname.net, yourgreatdomainname.org, or yourgreatdomainname.biz in their browser address box winds up at yourgreatdomainname.com blog or Web site.
• Brainstorm domain ideas! Sit down with a paper pad and a pencil in a quiet place (or noisy if that makes you think better!) and think up as many words as possible that match, relate to, and represent what your Web site or blog is all about. Jot down these words and match them up, combine them, play with them and come up with a list of possible domain names. Ask friends, relatives, and associates what they think of your prospective domain names.
• Once you choose a domain name, and it’s available (you can check domain name availability at a domain registrar, like Go Daddy), then REGISTER it! Stake your claim on the Internet by getting that super domain name for yourself, before someone else grabs it. Domain name registration cost is very affordable.

An important thing to remember about choosing a domain name is that your domain name be legal. I strongly recommend you avoid using any trademarked name as/or as part of your domain name. Let’s not feed the lawyers and lets keep you out of court.

I follow my own advice with www.wpblogsandwebsites.com. "WordPress" is a trademark, and WordPress asks you to not use "WordPress" in your domain name if you are going to have a Web site or blog about WordPress. WordPress says that using "wp" instead of "WordPress" in your domain name is fine. That’s what I have done with this blog’s domain name of www.wpblogsandwebsites.com. Here is information from WordPress regarding the "WordPress" trademark:

For various reasons related to our WordPress trademark, we ask if you’re going to start a site about WordPress or related to it that you not use "WordPress" in the domain name. Try using "wp" instead, or another variation. We’re not lawyers, but very good ones tell us we have to do this to preserve our trademark. Also many users have told us they find it confusing.

 

If you already have a domain with "WordPress" in it, redirecting it to the "wp" equivalent is fine, just as long as the main one users see and you promote doesn’t contain "WordPress."

By the way, I also registered www.wordpressblogsandwebsites.com too, and it points to www.wpblogsandwebsites.com. I also happen to have this blog installed at my web host as a subdomain of my main Web site of www.nellaware.com. That’s why you may see http://wordpressblogsandwebsites.nellaware.com/ in your browser’s address bar as you visit this blog. This is fine with WordPress, as they state on http://wordpress.org/about/domains/:

"WordPress" in sub-domains is fine, like wordpress.example.com, we’re just concerned about top-level domains.

My point is, you must be aware of trademarks when you choose your domain name. I gave consideration and respect to the "WordPress" trademark when I chose my domain name for this blog. You should do the same with your Web site or blog and its subject matter. Remember, don’t feed the lawyers!

There are many factors that go into selecting a domain name, but basically you want a domain name people can remember and spell correctly. Your domain name is how people will find your blog or Web site, so pick a domain name that makes it as easy as possible for people to find you.

Domain Name Registration

www.GoDaddy.com

More helpful information:
Get Your Own Domain Name

What Is An URL?

Here is a guest post by expert blogger Yaro Starak. Yaro is a guru on the subjects of Internet marketing and promotion. His words and thoughts about blogging are well worth reading. I recommend his advice.

In every bloggers life comes a special day – the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else’s blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader – you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog but that’s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called "traction", which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don’t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commenter and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger’s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry – it’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important – it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have – your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it’s certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind please click this link:

www.BlogMastermind.com

Click here to download the Free Blog Profits Blueprint

WordPress wins Overall Best Open Source Content Management System Award

This is an important award for WordPress because WordPress has mostly been thought of as a blogging platform by the public. We who are familiar with WordPress know that WordPress is much more than just a software platform for blogging, WordPress can also operate as a complete CMS.

President Roosevelt shown in 1937 with other big shots admiring WordPress’s 2009 CMS Award?

WordPress also was named the first runner-up in the Best Open Source PHP CMS category.

WordPress gains thousands of new users and devotees each and everyday. Blogs and Web sites are now often powered by WordPress. WordPress Works Wonderfully.

Join in on the fun, have a self-hosted WordPress blog and Own Your Own Blog!

Are you wondering just what the Sam Hill a Content Management System (CMS) is? Well, here’s WikipediA’s explanation:

A Content Management System (CMS) is a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based. The procedures are designed to:

• Allow for large number of people to contribute to and share stored data
• Control access to data, based on user roles. User roles are used to define each use as to what information they can view or edit
• Aid in easy storage and retrieval of data
• Reduce repetitive duplicate input
• Improve the ease of report writing
• Improve communication between users

In a CMS, data can be defined as almost anything – documents, movies, pictures, phone numbers, scientific data, etc. CMSs are frequently used for storing, controlling, revising, and publishing documentation. Content that is controlled is industry-specific. (Entertainment content differs from the design of a fighter jet). There are various terms for systems (related processes) that do this. Examples include: Web Content Management, Digital Asset Management, Digital Records Management, Electronic Content Management (and others). Synchronization of intermediate steps, and collation into a final product are common goals of each.

WordPress Works Wonderfully

Go to www.blogger.com or www.wordpress.com and sign up to get a free blog started. There is plenty of help available online at either of these free blog sites to get you going, you won’t find it difficult to set up a blog at either blogger.com or wordpress.com. Each of these free blog services have made it very user-friendly to get a blog published. They will walk you through the process and you will simply fill-in a series of forms to get your blog created. It will probably take you less than 15 minutes to have a free blog live on the Internet.

I suggest you choose the free WordPress blog service for your “beginner” blog. When you switch over to your own self-hosted WordPress blog after learning the basics of blogging with a free WordPress blog, then you will find similarities between the two blog platforms and this will shorten your blog learning curve.

Use your free beginner blog to blog about anything you want, but it might be a good idea to save the blog topic you really want to blog about for your self-hosted blog. Blog instead at your free blog about something else, a hobby, your city, your dog or cat, or whatever might provide enough to post about for a month or so. You just want to learn about blogging and how blogs work, so save your good stuff for the big game – when you own your own self-hosted WordPress blog!

Use the help and tutorial resources that are available with the free blog and become familiar with all you can. After you have your own self-hosted blog, you will find that you have many more features, options, and design capabilities with this kind of blog than a free blog.

New, beginner bloggers can learn a lot with a free blog. Start blogging with a free blog and then move on to a self-hosted WordPress blog. Think of a free blog as your warm-up and basic introduction to blogging. A free blog can be your INTRODUCTION TO BLOGGING 101 course.

You’ll have some fun with a free WordPress blog, and learn a bunch about blogs and blogging too.

• A blog is a kind or type of, Web site. It often has a registered domain name associated with it, and is often hosted at a paid-for web hosting service. A quick and overly simplistic definition of hosting, is that web hosting means where all the various files and gizmos that make up the blog (or Web site) are found on the Internet.
• A blog or Web site needs to hosted somewhere. Blogs can also be hosted for free at places like wordpress.com or blogger.com. These hosted-free blogs can have registered domain names associated with them too, but free-hosted blogs have limitations. Serious bloggers should strongly consider having their blog setup with paid-for hosting and certainly using a registered domain name. It’s best to Own Your Own Blog!
• A blog is a powerful and flexible way to publish information on the Internet, for just about any purpose you can imagine.

The word "blog" is created from "web log." A blog is an online chronicle, account, journal, or diary. It is made up of content that is published chronologically (the newest content appears at the top of the blog) in the form of entries that are called "posts." You are reading a blog post right now. Posts are saved in the blog, you can page backwards (travel back in posts time) through a blog and view all of the posts previously published. Blog "archives" are a special way to view older posts.

A blog can also be customized and configured so that it appears and behaves just like a regular Web site made up of individual pages linked to one another in various relationships. The blogging platform (or engine), that powers a blog can add this Web site-like functionality to a blog. For example, the WordPress blog engine is very good for configuring a blog to act like a common Web site … only with lots more flexibility, options, features, and power!

A blog can be published by just one person (probably the way most blogs make their way to the Internet) or by a team of people (an example would be a business) who create the content and information appearing on the blog.

Blogging is the process of writing the content (think words!) that make up the information in the blog posts. I was blogging as I wrote this post, then I clicked a button and published the post to the www.wpblogsandwebsites.com blog so you can read it.

Each post to a blog will have its own unique and permanent URL (Uniform Resource Locator) that someone can type into a browser address input box (or save as a bookmark in their browser) to arrive at that particular post in a blog. The author of the post, the post’s date, and categories (categories are ways to classify posts) the post belongs to, are usually included as parts of each post.

Readers of blog posts are often able to add their comments about the posts, to the posts. The reader comments (and the post author’s responses) are usually included or available to be read as part of the blog posts. So, discussion and communication are inherent to a blog.

A neat feature of a blog is that you can "subscribe" to the blog. This is done through RSS or syndication. What these fancy terms mean is that readers of a blog can use a special link that is part of the blog’s features, to view the content of the blog away from the actual blog.

A reader of your blog can keep track of what’s going on with your blog by subscribing to your blog (using the special subscriber link of the blog) with what is called a "reader" service. Google’s Reader is an example of such a blog reader subscription service.

All of this blog subscription and reader stuff comes in handy if you have a number of blogs you like to follow. Instead of having to visit each blog separately to see what’s new, all you have to do is go to your reader service. The blog reader service collects all of the new posts from all of the blogs you like to read in one place where you can view the content of the posts, or click on through to the various blogs. This makes it convenient to keep in touch with what’s going on in your favorite blogs in just one place.

WordPress is a very popular and very powerful blog publishing platform.