OK, you are now a published author, a blogger and an Internet entrepreneur. Well, not quite an entrepreneur yet — you need to make some money to qualify for that title. With your very first effort, you should not expect to make any money in the first month or so. So long as you are using free hosting, you should not have any great expectations of making money at all.

Your next site will be the one designed to make a profit. So why bother working on this ‘practice’ blog? In part it is to ‘learn the ropes’ so you know what to do next time, and don’t have to waste a lot of time on learning the mechanics. But a more important reason is that you need to have a site indexed by the search engines in order to ensure your next site gets indexed quickly.

What do I mean ‘indexed’? — simply that the content on your site is included in the search engine’s database. There is a simple technique to see if a site is indexed:

Copy a line from the middle of the text on a post that has been on the site a week or more. If there is a period in the middle of the line, so much the better. Thus you have the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next. Just highlight it with your mouse and press Control-C to copy. Then, go to the search engine (like Google or Yahoo) and type a quotation mark; then press Control-V to paste your copied line in, then another quotation mark. To the search engine, this means you want the exact phrase within the quote marks. It is unlikely anyone else has used that exact phrase, so if your page is in the index, it should come up as the only results for the search. If it is not in the index, some search engines will show a small message saying the exact quote was not found, then show results as if there were no quotes — which means the same words were used but not all in one phrase.

This technique is important, and has several uses:

  1. It will tell you if your page has been indexed in that search engine
  2. It will show you if someone has copied your work without your permission
  3. You can use it on expired-copyright text to see if anyone has published that material on-line yet

Beginners may not realize the benefit of that last option yet, but it is important if your goal is to build a web empire, rather than have a single site you focus on. To build multiple sites you need lots of content, much more than you can write yourself. A great source of such content is the public domain, where you can find expired copyright works. Many of these, however, have been copied so often that the search engines won’t show your pages if you are the umpteenth person to use the same text. Finding un-indexed public domain text allows you to get traffic from search engine search results.

Once your first site is indexed you will have a resource you can use to get your next site indexed within days of putting it up — just add a link to it from your blog. A good place for such a link is the ‘blogroll’ which you probably noticed while looking around at the various pages — both on your site and mentioned in the control panel.

That section has default values you probably don’t want to leave, so go to Manage and Links and delete all or most of those. Then put in links to blogs that cover the same topic as you do.

Hey! But isn’t that driving traffic to my competitors?

Well theoretically yes, but at this stage you have no traffic, so don’t worry about it. In the world of blogging, it helps to show your readers other blogs that you like, even when they cover the same ground you do. Your readers appreciate it, and the other blog is more likely to link to your site. If they don’t it is still better to have the link than not, for your readers and for search engine optimization (SEO) which is something you will no doubt read a lot about, but not in these introductory posts.

For the first few weeks, you should add at least four or five posts to your blog each week. If you can manage more, even better. You will not have readers until you provide them with something to read!

Once you have a dozen or so posts it is time to go out in the world and begin promoting your blog. There are dozens of techniques for doing this, but for a beginner three or four are best. Get used to using these, then go on to learn some of the other, more advanced, ways of getting links and traffic.

One technique to promote your blog is to leave comments on other blogs who discuss the same, or related topics. Even participating on blogs that are not related at all in subject matter can have some benefit, so if you already post comments, go ahead and use your website on those. Most blogs ask for your website when you post a comment, and if the comment is published your name is linked back to your site. If people find your comment interesting, they may click on that link to see your site. So don’t just post ‘Great site’ or some other inane comment, be responsive to the content of the post you are commenting on, and try to contribute something worthwhile to the discussion.

There is a similar technique available on many discussion forums. A few of the more popular ones no longer allow footers on your posts, but most let you put a line or two at the bottom of each post that can include a link back to your website. So you write interesting posts, or reply to other people’s posts, and your link appears under your message.

Free article marketing is also a good method for promoting your site. You write an article similar to the content posts you put on your blog, but not an exact copy of one of those. Go to a free article distribution site (you can find several using any search engine) and submit the article, along with an ‘about the author’ box that goes at the bottom of the article. That box should include a link back to your site (don’t put the link in the article itself). Publishers are then allowed to use your article on their websites or in their newsletters free of charge — so long as they leave that ‘about the author’ box and its link back to your site. The link-back is your payment for allowing them to publish your article.

There is one final method of site promotion suitable for the beginning blogger: write articles reacting to something you read on someone else’s blog. Generally this works best if you liked the article, and can recommend it to your readers. This is like commenting, but since it is on your site it can be more beneficial to the other blog since it brings in potential readers that may not have known about their site. The Wordpress system will generate what’s called a track-back, so part of your post appears like a comment to the original post you referred to (if they have track-back enabled — sometimes they need to approve the track-back so it may not appear right away). Also, the other blogger may add your blog to their blogroll.

So that’s all there is to starting and promoting your first website, a free blog on WordPress. In a future post in the ‘Beginners Corner’ we will discuss your second site, this time using WordPress software on server space you rent, under a domain you purchase. The purpose of that site will be to make money! And it might not even be a blog…