Headline news reviews can also be a good way to incorporate outside material into your blog. One tactic that is often used is to copy a news story into your blog, or provide a link to the news page for your readers. Above the link or news article, you can put a paragraph or two expressing your thoughts on the matter. It is a quick way to create more posts and more unique content for your blog.

Another way you can get information to make a new blog post is to use Google search for facts, ideas, and trend information. When using Google, you are searching for facts to help generate an original post for your blog. First you need to consider an element of your topic to search for online. Then, you can run a Google search and see what you find.

Naturally, you will get pages and pages of results for any query. However, one of the nice things about Google is that you can quickly and easily review large amount of information.

The first thing to note is that the results listed in the tan box on top and down the right hand column of the page are paid placements—these are not ‘organic’ results. Organic results are the naturally occurring matches for your search.

Generally, the organic results section of Google will give you better quality information than paid placements, who may simply be trying to sell you their product rather than provide you with any information.

To get original content from your Google research, select several results from your search page. Quickly read through the information presented on each page. Take notes of interesting points on a pad of paper or bookmark the web page for later use.

When you are done, look back over your notes and think about your observations. You should now have enough material for a good quick blog post. Just write up two or three paragraph putting your spin on the information you found and post it to your blog.

You will be surprised how far a reputation for good quality content can take you. Just having lots of information at your site is no good to your reader. He or she is looking for useful tidbits of information. It is your job to filter through the mountains of information out on the web and separate the wheat from the chaff. Present only the interesting and informative bits and you will have readers loyally coming back to read all of your updates.

Finally, a quality blog post should contain only accurate and true information. Gossip, slander, and lies are not popular in the real world and they are not well-liked in the blogosphere, either. Also, deliberately spreading false information about individuals or companies online can get you into offline trouble with the law. So play it safe—check your facts, stick to what you know or can prove, and don’t attempt to mislead your readers.

An exception to this rule would be a gossip blog. If your website is Colorado Buffs Football Rumors, then publishing less than 100% proven information is crucial to your venture. However, even if you run a celebrity gossip, sports commentary, or other entertainment blog, remember that deliberately misleading your readers and consistently publishing false data will ruin your reputation and drive traffic away from your site.

Getting Ideas and Doing Research

Now that you know the basic elements of a blog post and the characteristics of a good quality blog post, you should be able to sit down and write as many as you like, right?

Wrong! We’d all love to just have eloquent posts flow effortlessly from our fingertips, but it never seems to be that easy. Blogging can be fun and enjoyable, but it is also hard to just sit down at the computer and pound out dozens of good quality posts, even if you know a lot about your subject. No matter how well you know your niche topic there will almost surely be days when you are not able to think of a single good idea for a post for your blog. Writers block does not discriminate. It strikes online authors as well as their offline counterparts.

Fortunately, there are two easy ways to find new topics and original content for your blog, both free. The first tool is headlines, and the second tool is Google. When using headlines, all you need to do is look at the breaking stories of the day and consider how your niche area is affected by the news. Responding to current events is a great way to keep your blog on the cutting edge of new developments. Also, by watching the news you can get other ideas of things that might be weighing on your readers minds.

Good quality blog posts can be about any topic, but they share a few key characteristics. Good blog posts use good grammar and spelling, inform or entertain the reader, and contain accurate and true information.

Good grammar and spelling are essential to a good blog, and yet many bloggers ignore the basics of good writing when posting to their blogs. Some think that because a blog is less formal than other kinds of web communications, rules don’t matter. However, this is not true.

It is especially untrue if you plan on using the blog as a source of income. You don’t have to be perfect, but using a spell checker before posting up your content and making an effort at good sentence structure will help you communicate with your readers. Using good grammar and spelling will also help improve your virtual reputation in the eyes of your readership—they will consider you to be more intelligent or at the very least well-educated.

For the sake of your readership, write using traditional punctuation, capital and lowercase lettering, and try to get your posts presentable.

Presentable posts are easy to read. They are broken into short paragraphs instead of one solid block of text. This makes posts easier on the eye of your reader and makes your readers more likely to return to your blog.

Also, short paragraphs with lots of white space look less intimidating to a potential reader than a dense block of text, which may scare them away. Keep your blog looking warm and inviting by having posts that look easy to browse.

Next, your blog post should inform or entertain your readers. You earn repeat blog traffic by having useful information or quality entertainment items housed at your site. Idle thoughts and keyboard ramblings are not likely to earn you readers unless you are very funny.

Therefore, earn repeat visitors by having good information available in your niche for your readership to enjoy.

Now that you have chosen your niche and set up the technical shell of your blog with WordPress, it is time to get to the heart of things: Content!

Content is very important to your blog. The level of content provided goes straight to the heart and soul of the operation. Therefore, it is very important to have good content on your blog from the very beginning.

Fortunately, there are a number of sources where you can get the material and data needed to make good content for your blog. However, while there are many places to learn and absorb data, there are only two ways that content actually gets added to a blog. You can either write the material by yourself and post it up on your blog, or you can get content from somewhere else and post it up to your blog. This is the “create or cut & paste” dilemma faced by many bloggers.

Now, out in the blogosphere there are some people who may say that you are not a “real” blogger if you are not creating 100% of your blog content on your own. These purists will insist that you diminish yourself and your blog when you incorporate previously created content on your site. This can be an especially strong accusation in blogs that are based around your personality, especially if you are passing off the work of others as your own. Yet using premade content openly and acknowledging that you do so and crediting the authors should not carry any stigma.

You may personally have qualms about incorporating content written by other people into your personal blog. After all, it is your blog so why not have each and every piece of content be your own work? However, to have a money-making blog that keeps people coming back, you need new content frequently, and it can be difficult to come up with all of that content on your own.

Therefore, if you want to consistently provide fresh content for your readers, you can’t be a purist. You need to deliver the goods in the blogosphere, and the goods here mean frequent updates for your readers. The most important thing for the long-term health of your blog (and your wallet) is to have good quality content, no matter who wrote it.

Naturally, the above is not to imply that you should take the work of others and pass it off as your own creation. Unless you have hired a ghostwriter for that specific purpose, any borrowed content should be properly cited, much as you would cite a quotation in an essay. But we’ll talk more about what is known as “content acquisition” in a moment. In the next post, I’ll review some basic guidelines for creating your own content that you will need to remember and consider as you put together material for your loyal readers.

Now that you’ve carefully chosen your topic or “niche” it’s time to choose a home for your blog.

There are many hundreds of places on the web where you can set up a blog. Some are free, while others cost money. By learning about some of the different options and considering your personal technical skills and support needs, you should be able to settle on an option for your blog home that suits both you and your budget.

Generally, there are two ways to host your blog. They are known as remote hosting and self hosting. Hosting in this instance means housing, as in housing your blog. The computer server with your blog data on it is your host. Remote hosting means that to access your blog, you go to a website that houses your blog. Self hosting is for those with their own servers and domain names, or their own domain names and a paid web host.

Many beginning users opt for remotely hosted solutions. In some ways this path is much easier for a beginning blogger. The remote hosting company will often provide you with a template for your blog so you don’t need to do any web design. The host will handle all of the html code needed to make your site run smoothly. Often, your remote host company will provide you with tools and tutorials with step-by-step instructions to complete many basic blog tasks.

Some remote hosting solutions charge bloggers a monthly or yearly fee for their web hosting services, but some of the most popular hosting solutions are free. The big names you should be aware of are Blogger and WordPress. With each one you can get yourself set up rather easily and start blogging through one of their templates in a matter of minutes.

Let’s use Blogger as an example. Blogger has several advantages because it is simple, and it is a great site to get set up on so that you can practice your blogging skills if you are a new blogger. If nothing else you can easily put a quick site out and try a few sample blog entries to get a feel for blogging.

To get signed up, simply go to www.Blogger.com. It’s part of the Google family, so if you already use Gmail as your email provider, you will just need to log in to the members area in the upper right corner to get started.

If you do not use Gmail, don’t worry. A large orange button just below the sign in area is “Create A Blog” and it really only does take a minute! In fact, the hardest part of the whole process will probably be deciding on a name for your blog and choosing the template for your website. Even if you are use Gmail on a regular basis, you will still have to select a blog name when you log in to the Blogger application.

Once you are signed up, you can go through the process of selecting a template (colors, shapes, etc) for your blog. Automatically applied, you can modify the look of your blog several times by just clicking around. Posting is equally simple.

However, if you have been online for some time, you may not want to use these free sites or any of their pre-fabricated templates. Additionally, you may not like some of the features or feature restrictions, or perhaps you would just like to have more complete control over your blog. You may want to carefully customize every nook and cranny of your blog. If this is the case, and you have some web savvy, then you may want to pursue self-hosting for your blog.

Self-hosting tools that are available to bloggers are many and varied, but one of the best, and the software that this ebook will focus on for the rest of the text is the WordPress blog software suite. While the remote hosting side of WordPress (www.wordpress.com) is free, to use the self-hosting WordPress software you will need a domain name (less than $10) and some kind of web hosting arrangement, which will cost you around $7 – $12 per month. We will cover domain names and web hosting options more completely in a later post “Resources for Bloggers”. For now, just consider that while the free versions are convenient, when you use the self-hosting software you will be able to customize your site more completely and you will be free to run all kinds of advertisements, which can be a good money maker for you. 

To get the WordPress software for self-hosting, go to www.wordpress.org. You can download the software for free directly from the website. Once you have downloaded the software, you will need to install it. Do not worry about this being hard or overly complicated—WordPress brags about their “famous 5 minutes installation” and you will be up and running in practically no time.

Should you need additional help for only $17 you can download Blogging Made Easy With Wordpress® it’s a package of 10 Videos of step by step Tutorial, this package of Video Tutorials will help you build your own brand (Domain Name) recognition.

Till next time, happy Easter everyone.