Blogging 101
 

This is a thread dedicated to blogging and my advice thereof. It is a work in progress and will be updated periodically (like a blog!) so keep that in mind.

This thread will be edited and will appear on my blog as a 'how to' guide in the future once i'm pretty much done here. Feel free to ask questions as you'd like.

Why start a blog?

Blogging is a great idea for a few simple reasons. The primary reason being that if you do it right, blogs are text based.

Search engines love text. It doesnt take a genius to see that by writing an entry and describing a news article, a product, a girl in a photoset, or just about anything else, you are creating search engine food.

Secondly, because it gives you a 'voice'. Tired of trying to convince someone to try a product in a line or two under a banner ad? Blogging allows you to have entry after entry, paragraph after paragraph, of things to say. When you incorporate a blog into your hub and people find it, they find 'you'. Its easier for them to learn about you (or your webmaster persona) and earn trust and trust makes sales, pure and simple.

Thirdly, its an alternative traffic source. Link list traffic is incredible, TGP traffic not so much, but your two primary sources of traffic for blogging are very valuable as well. The first source being, of course, the search engines. The second source being other blogs. Once a reader is established as enjoying reading blog entries, they are highly valuable indeed. They're a surfer that isnt just pouring through your site looking for thumbnails they are surfers who like to read your text. Love to read your text... may only be there simply FOR YOUR TEXT.

Finally, blogging continues to be the new 'buzzword' in this industry and all others. More and more searches for the term are being done each day. "MILF BLOG, PORN BLOG, SEX BLOG, DATING BLOG" and more and more searches appear on your favorite search anylizing tools each day as surfers plug in this keyword and apply the word 'blog' to it. Where will your sites be when they perform that search?

As always, if you use this guide we hope that you'll be so kind as to link back to my blog when creating your own. :)

Getting Started
 

Getting Started

First you'll need a blog script. Currently there are three very popular and very easy scripts to use.

My personal favorite is Wordpress , which is an open source blog that is commercially free. yes free.

It requires SQL and must be installed on your server, but is highly customizable in all ways including the look of it (themes) and the application of the hundreds of plugins being developed by knowledgable coders. From incoroparting polls to category pages, for many blogging source integrations, or amazon.com intergration, you'll find its pretty easy to do all of these things by simply installing a plugin. Most trained monkeys can use wordpress.

typepad is likewise very popular. It is one that I've never personally used but it seems to be one of the most prevelant. From looking at their tour they have a free trial so giving it a shot shouldnt be a problem. They also offer hosting options.

The third suggestion is Blogger, which is owned by our good friends (or hated enemies) at google. This script can be done either on your site, or hosted at their domain blogspot.com. Both are good choices. Blogger lacks many of the features of typepad and wordpress, but is incredibly easy, is integrated into the google toolbar and the free hosting makes it pretty much mindless.

So choose a script, get it installed, and tomorrow we'll talk about your theme and/or content choices.

how much do I pay you to discontinue this tutorial?

Just go away. That should do the trick.

Pretty much sums it up.

Please continue Boogie I do want to know more about blogs :)

Why Start A Blog Part The Second
 

why start a blog 2.0

One thing I forgot to mention above that's pretty important.

Most people seem to think blogs are simply a new TGP. A new way to deliver hosted galleries to consumers each day.

While some blogs that are like this are very popular, they're not really blogs. They're still at the base TGP's.

When you design a blog to look and work like this, most times, you'll have been better off simply creating a new TGP to work with.

A weblog is meant to be read. I cant read photos. I cant read pictures. These are Phoblogs, or Picblogs, not weblogs. If you want to share photos go make a flikr.

If you want to write about things, talk about things, share conversation with your surfers... this is why you should start a blog. :)

If you're just looking for another place to create links to your penis pills and hosted gallery sites then you're not going to do very well.

The search engines are learning that blogs grow organically if they're worth anything. Links create themselves every day from message boards to other blogs when you've created valuable content. who is going to link to your blog entry about a hosted gallery, rather than the gallery itself?

Who wants to share your excelent article that's nothing but a link to some breast enhancement creams?

There are two people who get into blogging.

There are good writers who are capable of creating good content that people like to read. Eros blog. Fleshbot. Perhaps even myself.

Then there are those folks who know nothing other than writing ad copy about their sponsors. They often do miserably poor in the blogging field.

If this is the person you are, or this is the kind of blog you want to create, chances are your time is best invested elsewhere. You may make b-list but you'll find a-list forever out of your grasp.

Put that same effort into a CJ script though I'm sure you'll be seeing 6 figure traffic within a month.

Maybe you just need to find a new board.

Great thread for those getting their feet wet with blogs.

Read this for those getting started. A blog is not a blog if it only has a daily image gallery.

Boogie, don't forget to mention the importance of RSS feeds, and where to submit them. :)

Just an FYI. boogie sent me a link to this thread because we work together with our blogging. It was a fucking joke.

Well, then maybe you don't need to find a new board - LOL :D

For an outsider that was kind of hard to figure out :)


If it wouldn't be such a pain in the ass to write text, I'd start a blog :)

Well, I was speaking to him and I know he got it, so mission accomplished. |thumb

Yeah, its a joke.

(when can I cash the check?)

It became null and void when you continued posting. . . . guess we will have to renegotiate.

Ok I'm in!

I choose Blogger for mine. what's next? |pimpin


One thing I hope you will end up covering if possible, is stuff like the blog linktrading things like blogroll and pinging/trackback and all the other cool little bits n pieces bloggers seem to have.

Choosing a Subject
 

choosing a subject

What kind of blog should you write? There really is only one answer to that question and I dont know it. But I can help you figure it out for yourself.

You should choose something you're knowledgeable about. do you like finding links on the web that are fun to view? Create something like iambored.com

Do you like "Single Girl" content? Raven Riley and FTV Girls and Met Art? then creating something similar to badgirlsblog.com (Their blog, in my opinion, lacks an important part however... that's text)

Its best that you write about things that

1) you enjoy viewing yourself so it doesnt seem so much like work
2) you are knowledgable hats (MML, sounds like you need a boobshat blog)
3) something with plenty of resource material at your fingertips
4) something that is "news worthy"

One important step here is 'what is newsworthy?' Well, if you create a gay blog, you'll want to write daily articles about the gay community, about new gay websites and pictorials, about new gay events and other such information.

Alternatively, some of the most popular blogs dont even have a theme. Fleshbot, Eros Blog, BoingBoing... these blogs link to whatever catch their fancy. They write interesting to read articles every day that are from a wild variety of topics.

But its newsworthy. Its something they learn about before writing. Its something people find amusing. That's what keeps someone coming back to read your site day in and day out.

My blog is another example of a 'multiverse' blog. I pretty much write whatever covers my fancy.

The added difficulty in creating a multopic blog is that people stop coming for the subject matter and start coming to hear _YOUR_ voice... just to hear what you have to say, like calling up an old friend.

If you arent a decent writer and dont feel comfortable about that its best to pick a topic and write on.

Great tutorial Boogie, gonna experiment with these things you call blogs as soon as I wrap up my current project :D

count me in :)
if there will be some of us we can do some nice blog trades in near future? :)

yeah, im in too :)
btw, great post, cool links :)

Boogie you are doing an excellent job writing this tutorial |band

yes boogie, thank you! This is a great tutorial and I hope you will keep adding to it, there are alot of advanced things you can do with a blog I hope you will also cover later on.

your tutorial has convinced me to grab a new domain name for my new blog :)

Thanks! This really helps!

Writing Your First Few Entries
 

Writing your first few entries

Recently I got an email from a decent looking blog that was exactly 24 hours old.

The site looked great, the articles he had written were fine, but there was an obvious problem.

Why would anyone trade links with a blog that's 24 hours old?

What possibly do they have to offer the reader?

One article? two?

It is important that while your blog is in its infancy you write to it several times, over several topics, to create several entries, before showing it to anyone else. Nothing is more embarassing for a veteran blog reader or writer to come across a blog with 1 entry, especially if it reads "WOOT MY NEW SCRIPT IS UP AND RUNNING I CANT WAIT TO START BLOGGING"

For your first 5... or 10... or 15 entries, your target audience should be yourself.

Get comfortable writing it. Get comfortable using your script. Get comfortable creating content.

Cover some of the core aspects of your chosen topic, or if you havent chosen a topic, come up with some choice topics to start with.

This is especially important with a script that creates a seperate page for each entry.

When the engine bots come around for the first time, what do you want them to find? 30 well written pages on your topic, or just the one front page with nothing important to say?

Its fine to show your friends and family to get some feedback while you're building, but before you start sending hits or sending link swaps its a great idea to start off with the simple act of creating content.

While you're doing this, its also a great time to find out whether or not you're a blogger at heart.

Are you capable of writing 2-3 entries a day or is it like pulling teeth? Are you capable of finding good resources or are you struggling for content? Are you able to write things that are readable (tested on your friends and family) or are they all crappy and mispelled like my last entry about blogging was? (lol sorry I was just about to goto bed and forgot to spellcheck!)

Its during this trial and error time that you keep things hidden for yourself that you will learn whether or not you'll one day be an a-list blogger, or if you'll burn out like so many have before you and find that your time and resources are best spent building an easier to maintain website.

After you've written a nice set of entries, we'll talk about traffic.

How to write an entry
 

How to write an entry

Telling you how to write an entry into your own blog is a lot like telling you how to make love. no one can really help you find your own techniques, but, we can give you the basics of what works and what doesnt.

One of the largest problems with commercial bloggers is that they are two commercial. Sure, if you are selling bike clips and do nothing but write about bike clips you'll eventually get some search engine hits about bike clips.

But by every standpoint its better to create an interestnig blog about biking and your personal adventures in biking. Not only will you recieve those same search engine hits but you'll recieve loyal readers who enjoy your voice.

So, what I'm saying here is.... just like when making love, there is the technical aspects and then there is the technique.

Lets imagine I want to write about a brand new site I found today called "Greenguys Link-O-Rama". Here is a technical entry about it.

"Greenguy's link-o-rama has tens of thousands of categorized porn links. The background is black and the text is green! The amateur section alone has over a thousand links!"

Boring. What might be a little more interesting and keyword savvy would be this

"Well, today I was out looking for something to jack off to. I was over at my usual site, Cfporn.com and I found a link on the main page to something called Greenguys link o rama.

"First off this site is fucking hilarious. he uses this little green mascot on just about every page, its an animated gif, and he has to have about a thousand of them. You can tell this guy doesnt take life too seriously.

"I'd imagine he's got about few tens of thousands of porn links up there. I spent most of the afternoon pounding it to his amateur category. I counted no less then 50 Raven Riley links on there, christ, I Think I sprained my dick. So if you're looking for a new place to pound it I'd suggest starting Here "

Can you see the difference between the two postings?

The first is like listening to Dan Rather read it off a teleprompter.

The second is a little more like listening to howard stern talk about things with Artie. Its just fun to read.

And its just one example of the many voices out there that people tune in to read every day on the blogsphere. Some people _ARe_ very technical. Some people are very FUNNY. Some are weird. Some are obscure. Some are crazy.

But they all have a unique voice with one thing in common. They're fun to read.

Finding your own voice, your own writing style, and making it interesting is what will make or break you here.

:)

Thank you. I can't believe the number of trade requests I get from brand new blogs.

The hardest part about blogging is keeping it up, and as far as I am concerned, you need to show me that you have what it takes to keep posting every day. It isn't as easy as it sounds, trying to come up with new topics can be a real PITA.

I have a question about WordPress option to change links like /?cat=3 etc. to /name-of-category/. It's an option called Permalinks in the admin area and when I change it to let say "/&category&/&postname&/" everything works fine, besides the Pages. When i click on Page created by me it keep giving me 404 error.

----------
Oke found out. It was a .htaccess issue ;)

This is a GREAT post. Before the board crash of 2003, Boogie had posted he was starting a blog. I'd heard of them and really had read quite a few mostly by my indie camdollies.

Well because of Boogie's post, I now have 7 active blogs, on all different topics and despite all my efforts at other traffic sources, my #1 referrer to my main site is my Live Journal.

So thanks Boogie, for the original idea and for this great refresher course!!

|bow|

PS: i def think MML should do a Boob-hat blog: |mml|

So let everyone show us your blogs :)
What do you think? ;)

Hey Docholly.

Thank you so much for your praise! I'm flattered beyond belief. Email me via my sig and lets do exchanges on a couple of your blogs. Traffic trades and link pop never hurt ;)

As for showing blogs, if you want to share, share! Obviously mine is in my sig so take a look!

Your RSS Feed
 

Your RSS Feed

If you used any of the major systems for creating your blog, you should already have an RSS feed (atom feed, xml or other) built right in.

What is RSS? RSS stands for Real Simple Sindication. Its a 'whats new' feed for your blog. What this allows is for other websites to see whats new at your site and quickly and easily incorporate whats in your RSS into their sites, whether it be their search engines, the reprinting blog, their news readers, or otherwise.

What it means, in the end, is more viewers for your blog and more eyes on your text.

Read your blogging programs documentation and find its RSS feed. Once you've done this you're going to want to find places to start submitting it to.

There are plenty of important places, most can be found by a google search, but here are just a few of the more common places.

technorati.com
bloglines.com
Feedster.com
Weblogs.com
syndic8.com
........

Well, fortunately, our good friends at Ping O Matic make it a little easier for you.

For the price of zero dollars and no link back, you can plug your feed into pingomatic and let it submit your rss feed to some of the biggest syndication sites on the internet.

Some require you to visit the site firsthand and submit it by yourself the first time, but after that, each time you update your site (and your rss feed) you can hop over to pingomatic and let them know that your feed is updated, to send the bots over, and syndicate your text.

This may or may not be something you'll want to do, but for most scenarios, this is a great way to get people writing your blog, especially if you're writing about interesting topics that are being searched for. Hungry eyes want information and these sites can lead those readers to you.

Now, one of the neater features of Wordpress and Typepad, is the built in autopinging system. If you're using one of these systems you're probably already automatically pinging pingomatic each time you publish to your blog.

If not, read your blogging softwares help documents and find out how easy it is to set this up automatically. I've never been able to set it up with blogger but you'll find that with most other scripts its fairly simple to achieve.

Blogger already pings weblogs.com :)

There are also hundreds of other sites out there on the net that are pingable, and perhaps this would be an interesting turn for your blogging career.

Perhaps you'd like to have a site that republishes peoples rss feeds and is pingable. There are many facets to the blogging industry, choose your space wisely!

Now that you've gotten some entries on your blog, and your RSS feed is syndicated, if you're writing interesting articles the readers should start showing up...

the syndication bots are aware of your new space on the web and are watching it with hungry mouths ready to regurgitate it into the monitors of the world....

and the search engines bots cant be far away.....

Oke, my blog created yesterday is Gonzo Blog Now, question to Boggie :)
I submitted it to Pingomatic.com, what more can I do to get some bloggers traffic? :)

Hi blind, that's the topic of tomorrow's topic.

I took a look at your blog. Its a nice start for sure. You'll run out of sponsor stuff though soon enough if you stick to just that one gonzo sponsor. There are definately quite a few others out there. Diversity always helps ;)

Next section will be on the other places to get traffic for a blog. :)

More Traffic
 

More Traffic

so now you're RSS feed is active. you've set it up at pingomatic and you've done some google and yahoo searches looking for the newest and hottest places to feed your feed.

You should be seeing some traffic now each time you update with your topic. IF you're using wordpress you should be seeing traffic from your categories tag via technorati. These hits are good and, like search engine hits, targeted. Nothing better than a pre filter.

One of the goals here is to be updating often enough and writing good enough content and having a solid enough site design that the surfers who find your site from these places remember it. Was it your catchy logo? Was it your sizzling content? Was it your unique writing style?

Whatever the reason, the important thing is to have something that makes these folks think to themselves "this site is worth viewing". The reason is twofold.

First, bookmarks are invaluable to a blog. The idea that someone will come in every day and read what you write, INCLUDING YOUR ADS, and click what you link to, INCLUDING YOUR SPONSORS.... well, that's pretty much the heart and soul of blogging.

The second reason is that your blog absolutely has to grow organically. Links have to appear in other blogs, not just as link exchanges, but simply because people like your content. If people are not linking to your articles, you'll need to change something soon, because this is the lifeblood of blogging.

There is little more success to be had in the game of blogging than when a big name blogger links to one of your articles and gives it the thumbs up, not because he was going to get a traffic or hardlink from you, but because they genuinely liked your articles.

The single most valuable traffic source for a blogger is other bloggers. :)

They're sending you over their trusted, bookmarked, and favorite readers because they like what you're doing in a day. That's pure gold.

One of the most confusing part for most bloggers is that, they dont realize that if all they do is link to offsite content, there is little to no reason for a blogger to link to their BLOG, rather than the content itself.

Sure, its great if some dude out there pics up your hosted gallery and sends a few hundred hits that way, but isnt it so much nicer if that content is on site and you get a few bookmarkers out of it in the process?

Another trick is to have weekly features. I do "movie monday" and "flash fridays" as a way to remind the viewer that each friday or monday when you come back there will be more of what brought you here in the first place. That's the kind of thing that really encourages bookmarks.

So, start working on creating valuable linkable content. Start working on getting eyes on your blog. Start finding other bloggers to read your content and if they like it, link it.

This will open the gateway into our next topic, link trades.

Thanks for kind words Boogie, I'll work mostly with this Gonzo stuff (they have enough content in their members areas for some time). I can't still find out how this RSS thing works in WordPress... :(

More Traffic, Interacting With Other blogs
 

Traffic From Other Blogs

Now that youv'e started your site, put the finishing touches on your script, written some nice interesting entries, and published your RSS feed to the best of your ability, you should even have a trickle of hits coming in.

Now is the time to turn on the juice.

First off, its pretty unfair to ask for traffic trades if your traffic is currently zero. List your blog on your own feeder sites to get at least a little bit of traffic in there.

Alternatively if you dont have any of your own traffic to use, consider purchasing a small feed to get you started. (See one of any number of threads on this topic right here at GG and J)

Now its time to start working on link exchanges.

Sites like GG and Jim make it easy to exchange links with blogs. In fact I started a thread on this topic, pop on over and get started. Post your blog and find others interested in listing yours :)

Beyond that, contacting a webmaster through their websites most days can be taboo. But in the blogsphere, this is still common. Get your link up to their blog if you're interested, find their contact information and let them know you're interested in a swap. It doesnt hurt to write an entry about their blog.

Some blog scripts (hi word press) allow for "trackbacking". This is a very common thing to do within the blogsphere.

If you like someone's article enough to write about it in your own blog, you can add their trackback url to the proper spot in your script to autoping their script and let them know you're talking about them.

Most scripts that allow trackbacking notify the owner of the blog that a trackback attempt is taking place and they can moderate it if they wish.

If a trackback is approved a automatically created linkback to the site who sent the TB is created along with a small snippet of article. Want to see an example? Check out my article on Give Me Pink

If this is done in moderation, it is a welcome part of the blogging lifestyle. Many blogs do not allow trackbacking after they get to a certain size though due to spam. This is always a consideration when allowing trackbacking on your blogs! A good script with good moderating tools is very important if you want your blog to grow.

Top lists for adult sites are almost dead, but top lists for blogs are just starting to emerge. There are some decent ones that I use.

http://www.top-blogs.com/cgi-bin/rankem.cgi?id=boogie
http://blogs.freeadult100.com/in.php?ref=146

Both are providing a steady stream of traffic.... not just traffic but blogger traffic. :)

So, between top lists, search engines, blog link trades, and trackbacking, it shouldnt be long before you're blog has begun to grow organically. You should be seeing more url's in your stats each day, you should be seeing a constant traffic growth.

Remember its not uncommon to trade links with 20, 30 , 40 blogs in your niche. Its not uncommon to write about and link to other blogs (which they may do in return for yours).

Dont be afraid to send your traffic to a similar blog. If you're linking to other blogs you serve as a 'hub' of the blogsphere and can earn bookmarkers for that alone!

Now this is how I've built my traffic up. Gaining mass traffic was never exactly my area of expertise. I would love for some of you good folks to chime in with ideas of your own!

Our next section, btw is the Question and Answer section.

If you've got questions you'd like me or anyone else to answer, ask away. I'll answer as many as I can in one long FAQ.

Hmm i wonder how to put a toplist's button in my left column and how to write some welcome text above all blog entries. :)

Link Exchanges, Part 2
 

Link Exchanges

Now that you've created some articifial link exchanges, have done some trackbacks, and have written some other blogs lookin for link swaps your traffic should be fairly reasonable.

500 hits a day? 700? 1000?

Once you've seen a reasonable influx of daily hits from various sources you should now begin to recieve emails from other folks who are looking for link swaps... presuming you're using a pretty obvious way to conact yourself.

One of the hardest decisions is to pick which blogs you'll want to swap with. The link list/TGP mentality says 'anyone with traffic' but that's not always the case with blogging.

First off you'll want to get an diea about their traffic. Check their alexa.com rating.

Secondly you'll want to get an idea of their PR and google backlinks (as well as yahoo backlinks). Use the google toolbar for this, or, use some smart googling techniques. See how many pages they've got indexed in google. check how recent their cache is. Check how many backlinks are pointing towards their site.

All of these should be important factors in who you decide to swap with.

Most importantly, however, is that your link outs to blogs should be valuable content as well as hard link exchanges.

Lets say for example I'm running a blog on gay sex. Should I link to straight sites? Should I link to a Gonzo blog?

Generally its best to exchange with blogs that either are the same theme or are directly connected to your theme. For example if you're doing a 'babe blog', it would be natural to link to any 'solo girl' blogs, or even an amateur girls blog. Perhaps its not so far fetched of an idea to link to a hardcore blog either. But know where to draw the line. :)

This way you're swapped surfers are generally always going to be into the topic of both your blog and theirs. No reason to send lesbian hits over to a hardcore site most days, they're just going to hit the back button. You want the folks who are going to stick around, add you to their RSS reader, and click all of your links. That's where the real fun is ;)

Boogie, Great Work
I can't belive I never really noticed this thread.