Anyone who’s visited this site before might notice it’s changed around a bit. I’ve moved the whole thing over to use the software Wordpress. Why? Well because it allows me to update the site a lot quicker, provides a stable platform and allows a bit of reader interaction. You can comment on any of the posts I put on the site, or ping them by linking to them from your own blog. So from today Daddy Works at Home goes Web 2.0 - whoda thought it?

What is blogging?

Think of a blog as a noticeboard where you can post any thoughts you like online. Blogging services are usually hosted by someone else, and are generally very easy to use. When you keep a blog, your most recent post goes at the top of the page and previous posts follow that in reverse date order.

Generally you don’t need to worry about the technology behind a blog because it all runs automatically, all you do is fill in a box and hit publish each time you wish to blog. The software takes care of moving the previous blogs down a bit and archiving older blogs. Superb.

You can find blogging services at www.blogger.com and at www.typepad.com as well as countless other places. Try a few out and pick the one that seems easiest to use.

OK, I’ve started a blog, now how is it going to help my small business?

There are two ways your new blog will help your business:

1. Readers become customers

If people reading your blog like what they see, there’s every chance they’d consider giving you their business. No longer are you a faceless website out in cyberspace. By sharing your thoughts you are personalising the customer experience and if they like what they read in your blog, they are more likely to buy from you.

2. Each blog entry relates to your main website and helps boost the ranking of your site in search engine results

By blogging about your business you are creating a page of text full of key phrases relating to your business. If you make sure every blog entry has a link to a page of your main website, then each one counts as an inbound link. And what’s better is that all the search terms are used in context, so each link can be worth more.

So what are you going to blog about? That’s up to you, and your business, but remember, everything view you express says something about you and how you do business. Be honest in what you write, but don’t start on a rant about a customer or client as this may just turn off new customers.

Good luck and happy blogging.

It seems that everyone recently has heard of someone making insane amounts of money from blogging. So how do you do it. Can anyone do it and will you make bucketloads of money with a blog about your cat?

Blogging is simply a way of publishing things on the internet quickly and easily. It’s about taking control of your website and not having to wait for a webmaster to update pages on your behalf. Think of it like a content management system.

You can keep a blog on absolutely any subject. It can be as vague or as targeted as you like, contain images, articles, short posts, quotes from other blogs etc.

Most bloggers making money from their blogs are doing so by showing adverts on the side of their blog. Adverts are often from Google Adsense or Yahoo Publisher Network, but a recent buzz has been the use of adverts from Chitika. The method is usually the same in that the advertiser pays you money through the advert network for each person that clicks on the adverts.

You will not make a load of cash immediately. It takes a long time for a new blog to gather enough of a readership and gain enough results in search engines to bring visitors to the blog. If only a few percent of those visitors click on your chosen ads and you only get paind a few pence per click then it becomes obvious that you need a lot of visitors to make any serious money.

Resist the urge to tinker with the design of your blog all the time. Once you have a reasonable looking design at the start, save it and forget about it. Your goal is to write everything you know about the subject of your blog. Sometimes you will struggle to find something to blog about. Bloggers block can often be overcome by just doing some research about your subject, read a magazine, read other websites, pretty soon something will pop into your head to write about.

Set yourself goals in how many times you want to post per day. Darren Rowse at ProBlogger.net is probably one of the web’s most successful bloggers and he aims for 25 posts per day across his network of 20 or so blogs. You can learn a lot from him. Consider each post as a new doorway that visitors can enter your site through from search engines. The more people that find doorways, the more visitors you will get. If you posted 10 times a day, in a year you’d have over 3500 pages on the internet, all being spidered by search engines and attracting traffic.

Each piece you blog about should be well written and contain quality information. Don’t just ramble about nothing. Give good information and your visitors will keep coming back for more and pretty soon your blog will have a decent subscriber base.

Never give up. When you’re 6 months down the line and are still only making a dollar a day from your blog, don’t give up. Keep going, keep blogging. Only by pushing through and writing more will you achieve those goals you’ve set yourself. It might take a year or 2 years for your blog to be read by thousands of people, but rest assured if you leave it to go stale, it will never be read. Keep striving and keep blogging and eventually you’ll get there.

Happy blogging!