Jump-start with Wordpress

WordPress is one of the well-liked online blogging platform which serves a wide diversity of bloggers for different kinds of purposes. WordPress has plenty of advanced features presented with simplicity and flexibility which elevated it better than many of the other blogging tools. Do you want to start up with WordPress?

The first stride is to sign up with wordpress.com and this allows you to create as many blogs you want to publish under a single account. Have a look at this Video before proceeding.





Go to the wordpress sign up page https://signup.wordpress.com/signup/.

Enter your

E-mail Address: Your primary email address as it is needed to activate the account and for further correspondences from wordpress.

Username: The logon name you want to use to sign in your wordpress account in future.

Password

Blog Address: This will serve as the prefix of the URL address of your blog. Consider a name that is closely related to your content and this will help you greatly in Search Engine listing of your blog.

Wordpress will do a primary validation of your details entered above and will enable the "Create Blog" button for free subscription. Click on the "Create Blog" button. An activation email will be sent to your email address given above. Login to your email and click on "Activate Blog" link available in the WordPress email.

It's all set and done now.

Here is a snap of my wordpress account landing page with significant areas highlighted.

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Reader:  This tab provides room for all of your favorite blogs (even other than wordpress blog) you follow. You can Like and Reblog your favorite posts.

Stats:  Your stats page displays the data about the number of visitors, their place, the popular posts etc of your blog in the form of graphs and charts.

My Blog:  This tab lists all of your blogs and you can click on each one of them to reach their individual dashboards.

Freshly Pressed:  Everyday this tab brews out new blog posts with unique content to entertain us.


- Create new posts and be notified about your likes, comments and followers.

My Activity: This allows you to see the likes and comments you have made.

Recommended Blogs:  List of blogs on all categories recommended by wordpress to you.

Find Friends:  This helps to find your friends from Twitter, Facebook and Google who are blogging with wordpress.

This section allows you to explore the popular subjects in wordpress with recently published posts under each topic. Click "Follow" to add a topic to your reader and keep track of all the posts under the topic of your interest.

WordPress suggests these blogs for you.










Ready to make a start!

Online Content Syndication

Currently Web Content Syndication is one among the online content marketing strategies present in the web world.

What is Content Syndication?

In current web circumstances, any established expert level website with high traffic has been forced on a constructive basis to provide high quality (strong and healthy) contents to satisfy their end users. At the same time there are people who write really valuable content in their websites but end of the day not able to generate traffic to their websites as they failed to meet factors like marketing, SEO ranking, elevating exposure level , appropriate advertisement etc. To conclude well-built websites are in need of contents and content writers are in need of viewers. Here comes the Content Syndication method in which the content writer send the contents to other websites with the help of intermediary named Content Syndication networks/Providers/Partners who distribute the content to members (highly trafficked website creators, bloggers, microbloggers) of the network with fee charged for service. PR Newswire is one of the world's largest content syndication provider.

The Content Syndication is done easily with RSS technology. Initially the publisher should look for an appropriate syndication partner. Then the publisher should set up some form of Content Syndication agreement with the syndication partner. The agreement should have some form of compensation to the author either to give monetary compensation or include author's name/web address in the content going to be circulated. The Syndication agreement can be categorised in three types.

• Licensed -  The syndication Partner pay some fee to the original author for distributing the content to it's members and also retains a backlink to the original content's website. This is the safest method for the author. Exemplar for Licensed content syndicate - http://www.newstex.com/

• Ad-supported - The publishers get share in the advertising revenues generated from the content circulated to the end users.

• Free - No payment is involved and the publisher is satisfied just with exposure got from the distributed content.

Benefits to the author:

Publicity, Money, Traffic to your website.

Benefit to the second level publisher:

Flow of consistent content i.e no shortage of contents to the websites.

Note for content writers:

One common talk is that writers who go for syndication find their content all over the internet (duplicate sources) and lose their rights on the article. And if a higher level website publishes your content, there are chances they will become the topmost source of the content in the web search like Google/Yahoo which may affect your SEO ranking. Each writer has their own goals. Some writers simply want their articles to be read by billions of people and some other want compulsory compensation for the work done by them. Hence whether to syndicate or not is purely based on the individual's goals. Syndication may not be appropriate for every writer. But the writers should carefully choose the syndication partner and review the syndication agreement thoroughly before proceeding to syndicate.

To finish off, we can say that inspite of a few downbeats, this Online Content Syndication is beneficial for content creators, distributors and consumers in some way or the other.

The Chronicle of Blogging

It is certain that Blogging will have a significant place in history with impression as the foremost informational channel of the 21st century. The earliest evidence for the culture of blogging is the use of pamphlets (is nothing but unbound booklet with info) in the 17the century for the circulation of information in all areas.

Exemplar for Pamphlet:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pamphlet_dutch_tulipomania_1637.jpg

In later period, as electronic media emerged, Radio and TV were considered the major informational system of that era. In the late 20th century, there was a change in mass media from unidirectional to participatory (where audience play active role rather than the publisher alone) which is a key factor in the concept of blogging (For instance readers can comment on the blog).

By the book, Blogging started in 1997. The word 'Blog' has been emerged from 'Weblog'. Weblog is nothing but a website that has entries in reverse chronological order i.e new post published over old post. Blogging became familiar in 2001 and the demand for blog websites increased. This resulted in the creation of a desirable number of blog hosting websites. The content writers need not compulsorily be a designer. There arose certain complications. A new technique called Content Management System (CMS) emerged which made easy for a layman in web technologies to add, edit and manage contents.

The entry of multimedia into blogging paved the way to booming market for blogs today. The mixture of different forms of content such as photos, audio, animation and video embedded into blog magnified the trend. With appropriate tools, they can even be downloaded to computers, media players etc.

Stumbleupon - Vital key to generate traffic to your blog

Stumbleupon is a social networking tool which we can make use of to generate traffic to our website and create backlinks.

• Create an account with Stumbleupon (https://www.stumbleupon.com/signup).
• Download and install Stumbleupon toolbar. For Firefox the download link is https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stumbleupon/

• Stay signed in your Stumbleupon account and launch http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit in your browser.

• Complete the above form with your website details and click Add this page. Now your site is available for others when they stumble.

Note: To discover new websites based on your interests, click Stumble! in the toolbar and you can rank the websites visited by clicking thumbs up/thumbs down button.

Generate traffic to your blog via Pinging

Pinging is a technique to drive the contents of a blog to the leading blog search engines and directories. Whenever you update the blog, you can send a Ping to the search engines by means of various free pinging services available on the web. A Ping is a brief message containing the basic information about your new post on the blog. Pings are good traffic generator. Here are some of the fascinating pinging services.

1. http://pingomatic.com/
2. http://blo.gs/ping.php 
3. http://www.icerocket.com/c?p=ping
4. http://ping.in/
5. http://pingoat.net/
6. http://pingler.com/
7. http://freewebsubmission.com/#fws_submit_form

 Exemplar:

• Go to http://pingomatic.com/
• Enter the Blog Name, Blog Home Page,RSS URL (optional) on the pingomatic home page. Check all the services that needs to be pinged.

• Now Click the Send Pings button at the bottom of the page and You will be redirected to the Pinging Complete! page. Hence Pinging can generate traffic to your blog with ease.