Over the last few months I've gotten more than a few emails asking me for advice about how to create a blog. Well, if you want to be the next Glenn Reynolds, Charles Johnson, or Michele Catalano, today is your lucky day. I've been a webmaster for more than 4 years and I'm currently on my 4th web page (1st -- Archfiend's Utopia Resource, 2nd Brass Knuckles Webzine / Brass Knuckles Interviews, 3rd Brass Knuckles Gaming, 4th Right Wing News). So now that you know my qualifications, let's get started shall we?

Coding your website used to be quite a trial. You had to learn HTML and then spend countless hours just trying to put together an amateurish, no frills webpage. Fortunately, those days are long gone and there are now a plethora of easy to use blog creation tools. Here's a quick rundown of just SOME of your options.

Blogger is the most famous and not coincidentally the easiest to use web-based publishing tool. You can sign-up, select a basic template and literally be publishing your material 30 minutes later on a blogger hosted web page at no charge. The downside with blogger has always been the atrocious customer service, technical errors, and server problems that were caused by the incredible popularity of the product. However, since Google has just purchased Blogger's parent company, I expect those problems to go away in the not too distant future.

Here are some other possibilities...

Movable Type: I currently use this one and like it much better than blogger. However, unless you really know what you're doing you'll need to pay $40 to have it installed and you'll also need to pay for a host (mine is Addr although there are thousands of other web hosting companies out there of comparable quality).

PHP Nuke may be the most feature rich 'advanced content management' system out there, but unless you're a pro you'll need someone to install it for you, a web host, and I found it to be buggy (which is why I eventually stopped using it).

A Few Other Options Of Varying Quality, Cost, And Difficulty: Salon, Slashcode, Radio UserLand, & Grey Matter.

Ok, so you've chosen a blog creation tool and you've gotten it up and running. What's next? You may want to consider adding some extras to your page. First off, you'll want to get a statistics tracker so you can see how many people are looking at your blog and where they're coming from. Here are some suggestions...

Extreme Tracker is probably the best stat tracker in the business. However, I have found that it can be temperamental and difficult to get working correctly depending on where it is placed on the page.

Onestat is my current stat tracker. The statistics it provides are almost as good as the Extreme Tracker and I find that it consistently works no matter where it's put in the code.

Counted.com: This was another tracker I used back in my Brass Knuckles Webzine days and found that it did a good job -- although I liked Onestat a bit better.

A Few Other Options: Bravenet, Nedstat, Sitemeter, & Ipstat.

***Hint #1***: Don't forget to have your stat tracker on EVERY page, not just on the main page. Other pages will often link certain articles and if you don't have your tracker on that page, you'll never know.

***Hint #2***: I have tried 2 or 3 different statistics services that you pay for and I have been entirely unimpressed. Stick with the free services.

***Hint #3***: There's nothing wrong with having more than one stat tracker on your page. In fact, it's a good way to double check the accuracy of your stats.

Now, here's where I'm going to probably part company with a lot of other people. I think that most (although not all) of the "services" that are offered to webmasters out there are pointless and can even be detrimental to your webpage. There are two reasons I say that.

One, services that are hosted on other pages can often slow your page down when they have problems. I can't tell you how many times I've added a cool looking new feature to my web page, only to dump it a couple of weeks later because it caused my page to hang when server problems cropped up on the host of the service.

Secondly, even if it doesn't slow down your page, any service that doesn't bring new people to your page or encourage them to stick around is probably not worth your time. By that, I mean is anyone coming to your page just so they can sign the guest book or look at your Weather Pixie? If the answer is no, I'd say why bother? But, just in case, here are some services that are popular around the Blogosphere -- give them a look...

Bloghop, Blogroll, Java Chat, Guestbooks, polls, etc, Stephen's Web Referrer System, Weather Pixie, World Time Server

Ok, so now you got all of the technical aspects down. Your blog is up and running, you've got your statistics tracker installed (and maybe some other things) and you're ready to write. What should you write about? If you just want to create a personal blog for a few friends, don't even worry about what I'm about to say. But, if you're looking to build an audience, here is something I wrote several months ago that gives you a pretty good idea of what to do...

"If you want to build traffic for your blog, you need to have some sort of hook, some sort of reason for people to keep coming back. In the warblogging world, that usually means you need to either be a "linker", a "thinker", or run a "theme" blog.

"Linkers" are blogs like Instapundit, Daily Pundit, and Crooow Blog that pour on the links. These pages are frequently updated and people usually hit them to find interesting news on other pages.

"Thinkers" focus on producing content instead of massive amounts of links. Rachel Lucas, USS Clueless, and Lileks (James) The Bleat are good examples of this type of blog.

The "Theme" blogs focus on certain motifs. For example, Little Green Footballs focuses on radical Islam and terrorism, Scrappleface focuses on humor, and Jim Romenesko's Obscure Store And Reading Room hones in on strange and obscure news.

Now the problem many bloggers have is that they're not consistent enough. They try to be a "linker" but they only post four or five articles a day or they want to be a "thinker," but they never write anything longer than 200 words. This causes their readers to get turned off because they really don't know what to expect.

Inconsistency and not really knowing what you want to do leads to a second problem: poor quality posts. If you don't know what you're trying to do, how do you know if you're doing it well or even often enough? If you want to be a "linker" then you know that short posts are fine, but you better pop out at least 8-12 links a day. If you want to be a thinker you may only need 2-5 posts a day, but they'll need to be longer and much more in depth. If you're running a "theme" blog then you need to focus your time there."

All right, so your blog is up and running and you have content on it. Now how do you bring people in to look at your blog? Here are a few suggestions, mostly taken from, "The Guide To Promoting Your Web Page article I published a few months ago...

Buying Advertising: The average person can't afford to buy a massive advertising campaign, but there are a few options that people can afford even on budget. Personally, I've probably bought advertising from a dozen different sources on Ebay over the years.

If you buy banner ads keep in mind that your click-through rate is probably going to be around 1%. That means a million banner ads will probably only bring 10,000 people to your web site. I've had my best success with pop-under ads (on Ebay you can get about 100k of those for around $25). Although they may be annoying, they are also effective. I'd strongly recommend that you stay away from any type of spamming however. The headaches it'll cause for you probably aren't going to be worth the traffic it brings in.

Link Trades: To trade links, you simply find a web page you like, acquire their email address and then email the author of the page asking them if they'd like to trade links. This is an excellent way to increase your traffic because not only will you get more traffic from the link, but it will make the people you link more likely to link things off of your page.

Linking Other Pages: Linking other websites will help you get bigger. That's because it increases the value of your page to your readers by giving them more content than you alone can provide and because it will get YOU linked. Furthermore, most webmasters check their statistics regularly and if they see a link from a new place they go to check it out and see what was linked. That gets your web page in front of people who are in a position to send you traffic.

Promotional Emails & Link Submittal: Look for pages that link the type of information you have on your page and shoot them an email or submit a link (if they have a way to do that) telling them about articles of interest on your page. As a general rules of thumb you might want to keep the number of promotional emails to two or less per week and you'll want to make sure the articles you're promoting are exceptional. Sending people links to mediocre posts is going to annoy them and cause them to tune your emails out.

Search Engines: The only two search engines I've ever gotten a significant amount of traffic from are Google and Yahoo (which uses the Google engine) and both of these Search Engines will find your page even if you do nothing. There are services out there (some are free, some aren't) that will let you submit your page to various search services but, I personally now consider them to be of dubious value. I would certainly recommend against paying for any service related to search engines.

Top Referrers: Every week I go to my statistics tracker, count up my top referrers for the previous week, and post the list on my front page. This has helped my page to grow and I do believe it has inspired other people to link my page in order to get that reciprocal link. This is an idea that I'd strongly recommend because I genuinely believe it can help you grow.

* Do not try to get attention for your blog before you have at least a minimal amount of content in place. Personally, I find it annoying to have someone ask me to take a look at their blog when it has only one or two posts up and/or half the links don't work.

* Building a popular blog usually takes a LONG TIME even if you're good. Let me give you a great example; today Fark pulls more than 5,000,000 page views per week. But, when they started back in 1999, do you know how many page views they pulled in the entire year? 50,000 -- that's it. Drew Curtis, the owner of Fark, had this to say about building an audience last night, "If you don't stick to it for at least two years straight day in day out it won't take off." There may be a few exceptions, but I believe that on the whole he's right. So don't be frustrated if you feel like you're doing good work, but you're not picking up readers as fast as you'd like.

* Expect your traffic to take roughly a 40% dip on the week-ends whether you post or not. Back in my Brass Knuckles Webzine days I used to publish seven days a week and I was always frustrated by the drop on the week-ends. Eventually, I decided to take the week-ends off and you know what? It didn't effect my traffic one bit. My guess is that you'll have the same experience.

* Ideally, your blog should stay at 50KB or less on each page to keep the load time down for dial-up users. It doesn't always work out that way (RWN is often over that size), but that's the goal.

* If you'd like to learn more about coding, take an HTML class at LVS Online. It's cheap, effective, and it only takes a few hours a week. Best of all from my perspective, if you mention my name (John Hawkins) and email address (webmaster@rightwingnews.com), I get $7.50. So if you take a class, don't forget to mention me.

* Before you make ANY change to the code of your blog, make sure to copy the original code somewhere else first. That can save you hours of backtracking and work. Don't learn that the hard way like I did.

* Anyone who has an opinion about ANYTHING on the net is going to get ripped for it and that includes YOU. So expect to get hate mail and don't allow it to upset you -- it's just a part of life on the net. Furthermore, don't even feel compelled to reply to it. Why waste your time responding to someone you don't know & will never meet who is writing you for no other reason than make an ad hominem attack?

* I wouldn't bother with putting advertising up on your page until you're getting a significant amount of traffic. For example, I didn't put up any advertising until I cracked 3000 daily uniques per day and I'm still making VERY little money. Until you get some traffic, I'd suggest not cluttering your page up with advertising that will bring in almost no revenue anyway. I'd also strongly recommend staying away from pop-ups since they will annoy your readers.

* Can you link other people without permission? Yes, link anybody you like and don't worry about it.

* Take what I say with a grain of salt since I'm not a lawyer, but let me give you a short rundown on copyright issues. As a general rule, you should not put up an article in its entirety on your page unless you get permission from the author. Conceivably, I could see where an exception could be made for an article that is being fisked as long as you don't regularly put up articles from that author or publication in their entirety. However, the law is not entirely clear on this matter and a judge might see things differently.

As far as using quotations from an article goes, you're fine. With photos, as long you're taking a single photo from a source and give credit, you should be fine there as well (at least that's what the copyright lawyer I consulted a while back told me). Again, while I have had some experience with these issues, I am not a lawyer so don't take what I say on this issue as Gospel.

* If you post your actual email address on the net, you're going to a certain amount of spam. Many people get around this by spelling out there email address like so, webmasteratrightwingnewsdotcom. A human can interpret that, but a spammer's spiderbot can't.

* Make sure that somewhere on your page you make it clear that any email that is sent to you may be published. At some point, you'll probably want to post an email and that'll give you something to direct them towards if they complain.

Of course, what I've explained to you here isn't going to tell you **everything** you need to know about starting your own blog. After all, there are whole books that have been written about this subject. However, this should be enough information to help get you started. Good luck and good blogging...

© Copyright 2001-2008 John Hawkins

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