If you want to learn about blogging in your own time at your own pace, surfing is the way to go.
You log on and off when you want to. But, be careful of how much time and money you could waste learning not much more than you already know.
Child's play...or not
Researching the Internet at random
Surf about the web, picking up things as you go along is pretty typical for most of us starting out. If you are fortunate, you will come across accurate and up to date information to get you going.
Warning: be prepared to spend hundreds of hours reading not-so-helpful and not-so-accurate or reliable information. You will need to gauge the truth of what you read and assess its value to you.
If you find a site that is helpful and you like what it offers – make sure that you at least bookmark it. Better still, subscribe to its newsletter or RSS feed so you are the first to find out what articles they publish.
- If you subscribe via email, you just need to scan the contents when it arrives in your email inbox and decide if you want to visit or not. If not, delete the email and that’s the end of that. Unsubscribe if you aren’t getting any value out of the site.
- If you subscribe via RSS (Really Simply Syndication), you can read extracts or entire articles in a ‘reader’ such as Google Reader. You just have to remember to read it or it will get very full and become a monster of a task to clear it out when you do decide to read the contents.
Pros and cons of subscribing to email updates
- Be prepared for sites to send you links to articles and products that they receive a commission for if you end up buying it. This is called affiliate marketing and is the number 1 way of making money online. Good sites will sometimes send you links to these products and if they are a ‘good’ site the products will usually also be ‘good’ quality.
- Some sites are updated quite regularly and you may end up with many emails each week, if not daily, from them. You may want to create a rule and give some sites their own folder in your email inboxes so you can spend some time every now and again catching up on their offerings.
- Many sites offer you bonuses and free stuff for giving them your email. That ebook you wanted to buy for $19.95 but decided against, may come delivered for free in your email as a reward for signing up to email updates.
- If you intend making money online one day – email subscription is your best friend. Find sites that do email marketing well and learn from them. Save their emails, the copy they use, the products they recommend. Analyse what they do, when they do it and how you would do it differently or the same.
- If you are monitoring sites that find out about things first - you can find out about new products and news just as quickly as soon as they publish an article about it. If you are serious about blogging your email account should be jam-packed with email subscriptions from good sites.
Where do you begin?
Start with Google and type in “blogging”. 80 million results later you will realise that many results favour one or another blogging platforms such as Blogger, WordPress and other software applications before you get into sensational news stories about how blogging is taking off.
So, then you need to work out what other terms to add to your search…Stop right there!
You will be researching for years unless you stumble upon some really good resources. Get rid of the shotgun approach and go to blogs and websites that are created to educate someone like yourself – a newbie who has no or little idea about blogging and what it is all about.
I started out researching in mid 2006 when I decided to create my own website and make some money online to pay the bills and hopefully give me some extra pocket money.
I was proficient at business and marketing in the offline world but had no real idea about how business and marketing worked online.
After hours of research over a 9 month period I was eventually able to consolidate my learning and devise a winning strategy for making money online. I got my husband involved and we started our own mini Internet empire by creating 5 blogs in 5 months.
We were making money online within weeks of joining our first affiliate marketing program.
You don’t have to take 9 months or longer to work out the Internet and get into blogging. You just need to keep reading…
Read articles on blogging – on blogs about blogging
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