Recently I’ve been posting a lot on
So this morning, I’d like to share my “blogging toolkit.”
I. Blogging Software:
There are two main kinds of blogging software: User hosted and Developer Hosted.
A. User Hosted: These are programs that users put on their own servers. If you’ve got a web host and you want control over your own data, you can install user hosted blogging software yourself. Here are a few examples:
What I Use: WordPress
I’ve tried nearly every user-hosted blogging software I could find when I started out, and I’ve found WordPress to be the best for what I’m doing. WordPress is easy to install, it’s free, and there are thousands of add-ons, plugins and themes to extend the software.
B. Developer Hosted: These are blogging programs that are hosted elsewhere. If you’re new to blogging, or if you do not want to install and maintain software yourself, developer-hosted blogging software may be the way to go. Developer hosted software is mostly template-based. Though some features can be customized, you can’t get “under the hood” to tweak some of the design or functionality features.
The one big drawback to developer hosted blogging software (to me, at least) is that your data resides on someone else’s server. So, if the service breaks or if there is some kind of glitch, all of your posts could be lost. I doubt that a service like Blogger would disappear, but if it did, you’d be out of luck.
Here are some of the more popular developer hosted blogging services:
What I’ve Used: Blogger
This was the first blogging software I used when I started. It’s free, it’s very easy, and I really think Blogger is a great way to start if you’re not sure blogging is for you. But the layout of your blog is somewhat restricted. Don’t get me wrong; some legal bloggers have made beautiful designs using blogger’s templates (Denise Howell’s Bag and Baggage immediately comes to mind). But in my experience, Blogger’s limitations make it intolerable for tinkerers. And I am a tinkerer.
II. Statistics
Like blogging software, there are mainly two kinds of statistical software: user hosted and developer hosted.
A. User Hosted: User-hosted stats software sits on the web server and, in most cases, reads the server’s access logs. How does this work?
Each time someone visits one of your pages, they send a request. When you go to LawFirmBlogging.com, you are basically saying: “Get me everything that is tied to the index.php page.” That includes each image and file. Every file you request from the site is logged to a file, in this case it is called access_log.
Log File Analysis Software looks at the access_log file, processes the data, and spits out pretty looking graphs and stats.
What I Use: AwStats
Here are some of the reports AwStats provides:
* Number of visits, and number of unique visitors,
* Visits duration and last visits,
* Days of week and rush hours (pages, hits, KB for each hour and day of week),
* Domains/countries of hosts visitors (pages, hits, KB, 269 domains/countries detected, GeoIp detection),
* Hosts list, last visits and unresolved IP addresses list,
* Most viewed, entry and exit pages,
* OS used
* Browsers used (pages, hits, KB for each browser, each version
* Search engines, keyphrases and keywords used to find your site
B. Developer Hosted: With developer hosted statistical software, you put a piece of code on your page, and when someone visits the page, the code sends data to the developer’s servers.
What I Use: Google Analytics
III. Promotion
If you’re like me, you want people to read your blog. Makes sense, right? To get people reading your blog, they’ve got to find it somehow. Though getting a very high Google ranking would be ideal, there’s little you can do to make that happen immediately. So let’s focus on the promotion techniques you can get immediate benefit from.
A. Technorati: Technorati is a blog search engine. It’s a “real-time” search engine that keeps track of blog posts.
But, in order for your blog posts to be included in Technorati, you’ve got to let Technorati know when you’ve posted a new entry. There are a few ways to do this. The easiest way is to set up a technorati account. It’s free and easy. Once you set up an account, you’ll get a piece of code to add to your pages. That’s it. You’re done.
You can also “ping” technorati. This is a manual way to inform technorati of your posts in case your blogging software doesn’t allow you to embed technorati code.
B. Blawg.org: Blawg.org is a directory of
C. Getting Links: One of the best sources of traffic is having other sites link to you. I will talk about linking strategies further in future posts. Find other relevant sites and link to them. Then ask the site owner to link to you.
D. Comment: I cannot understate the importance of leaving comments on other people’s blogs. It lets people know that you’re reading their work and that you find it interesting. It also lets other bloggers know that you exist. If someone comments on my blog posts, I will check out their blog. Always.
When readers see comments, if they like what they’re reading, they’ll often visit the comment author’s website.
Summary: These are just a few methods and tools I use on a daily basis when blogging. I hope you find this overview useful in your blogging adventures. If you’ve got any questions, or if you’d like more detail on any of these items, just leave a comment. I’ll get back to you (and of course, I’ll check out your site).
Popularity: 6% [?]
