The First 5 Things Every Noob Should Do

Great! You have decided to be a blogger.  Of course the question is what do you do now.

1) Decide whether you want to just be social or if you want to make money.  You can go anywhere to be social and that isn’t a bad thing, you can even do it as an extension of money making blog like I do with Live Journal.  If you want to make money though, you need to take control of your own blogging by either getting a domain and hosting of your own.  Alternately You can make arrangements for sponsorship with places like Hart Blog Network. If you have a good idea they will set you up in a blog of your own and split the adsense revenue with you.

2) After you decide where you are going to blog and if you are in this to make money set up a Google Adsense account, a Google Analytics account, Woopra, and Google Webmaster Tools. Read the story »

Common Mistakes Uncategorized

One of the most common blogging mistakes that almost all noobs and many more experienced bloggers make is us using the “Uncategorized” category.  This category, while a useful catch all, shouldn’t be left as it is.  Having any post in the category signals to Google that not even you can categorize your own thoughts and it puts less weight on posts in that category.  To optimize your SEO opportunities you should do one of two things, either not use the category or change the name to something beneficial.

Not using the category is what I did for a long time in all my blogs.  Then I got to a point where I just had too many categories with too few posts in them, which is also counter productive to SEO.  When reading Courtney Tuttle’s fine and famous article on Keyword Sniping, I deciding I could once again make use of the dreaded uncategorized category.  Once I found my niche keyword or in many cases search phrase, I simply changed the name of the uncategorized category.  This leaves me with a nice catch all that actually benefits from having lots of posts in it.  I am still not up to lots of posts in some of the blogs, but that doesn’t matter either, I will get there.

In true keyword sniping fashion, you can see where I have made good use of this on any of the following blogs:Entrecard Contest Directory, Free WordPress Themes, and The Other Blog by Pop Tart. The first use only their keywords as a category.  The Other Blog uses it solely as a catch all.

Entrecard For Noobs

Unless you haven’t been blogging very long you have no doubt seen the very popular Entrecard widget with its little yellow drop button and big E along the bottom edge.  Look down towards the bottom of the page and you will find mine.  If you don’t have a free account just click on the yellow button and follow the directions.  Unless you already have a 125×125 pixel icon you use for your blog I suggest going with one of the default button styles until you can design something, since we are doing this on the fly.
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