Future bloggers

Are you thinking to start blogging? For the last weeks or so I´ve been thinking to list some of the most popular free blog platforms, and some best blog practices.

First of all, choose which platform fits better with your future blog:

1. Blogger – Google owns Blogger and they created the easiest and most practical way to start and update a blog. My first blog was with blogger and it´s a great starting point.
2. WordPress – There is a difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. I am talking about a self hosted WordPress.org blog, because WordPress.com is pretty much the same thing as Blogger. The blog that you´re actually reading has been created using WordPress.org. If you’re looking for something that’s relatively simple to use with great features and almost unlimited plugins, it´s the option that I´ll definitely recommend you.
3. Joomla –  Joomla gives you a lot more customization options than WordPress with just a slightly greater learning curve and a great focus in design.

The following recommendations were written by Hubspot with a focus to rank better and specially for business blog, however I believe there are some key points to learn from:

Use Keywords in Your Blog Entry Titles

You optimize a blog entry by ensuring that the keyword you’re trying to rank for is front and center in the blog entry title. If you were trying to rank for the keyword “supply chain management” you might write a blog entry titled “Top 3 Signs of Good Supply Chain Management.”

Be Educational, Not Promotional

Companies that blog regularly receive 97% more inbound links and 55% more visitors than companies who don’t. The more people that link to your blog entry the more likely it is that search engines will rank it – so write posts that people will want to link to! Be educational, interesting, and useful in your blog posts, not self-promotional. A blog entry that’s nothing more than an ad for your products or services isn’t interesting or useful to anyone. Write entries that you can imagine someone forwarding on to their coworkers or family members because it’s useful.

Be a Teacher

A good way to approach building useful content is to think like a teacher. You know more about your industry than anyone – what can you teach your potential customers? If you’re a flooring installer, you could blog about installation tips, materials selection, pricing, vendor selection advice, and so forth.

Make It Easy to Read

Half the battle is writing something interesting and useful. The other half is getting people to read it. You could write the secret to eternal life but if it was in a big, intimidating block of text no one would read it. It’s important to break up your content into bite-sized chunks. If someone could understand the main point of your blog post at 8:00 AM before they’ve had their coffee, you’ve done a good job. Here are some tricks you can use to make your blog posts easy to read:

• Have white space between thoughts or paragraphs
• Use pictures to break up text
• Use bulleted or numbered lists
• Bold or color key sentences
• Keep it short, usually around 200 – 300 words (I didn´t respect it whit this post)

Finally try to write about what you are passionate, what you like or what you wonder. My blog has adapted for the last 2 years as I did it, however it always has been a repository for thoughts, ideas and experiences and I trust it´s the best way to transfer them. Start blogging, it´s fun!