Starting a Great Blog Part 12 – Conclusion

Congratulations, you’ve finished the Starting a Great Blog tutorial! By now you should have a blog that stands out from all the Blog*Spot and Livejournal users out there. Why? You spent the time, effort, and small amount of money, to start a better blog. You paid $7/year for a real domain name, you installed the powerful WordPress blogging system. You took the time to market your blog, submitting to social bookmarking sites and commenting on other blogs.

Great job. Now what? Well, I recommend that you not just blog, but read other blogs as well. Read blogs on the topic you blog in, and read blogs on blogging. Below are some good blogs about blogging/websites:

There are more, of course. Just cruise around Technorati and Google.

Don’t get discouraged, even if it seems as if no one’s coming to your blog sometimes. Just keep blogging, and do a bit of publicizing. After six months or so, blogs generally start to gain momentum, so to speak.

Happy blogging!

Starting a Great Blog Part 11 – Social Bookmarking

Welcome to part eleven of the Starting a Great Blog tutorial. Today we address social bookmarking, and how it’s effects on blogging. How does social bookmarking affect blogs? Have you noticed those little icons at the bottom of posts on most blogs? You know,…

Customize Feedburner’s Subscriber Count Chicklet

Are you using Feedburner? North X East has an excellent tutorial on customizing the Feedburner Subscriber Count Chicklet. Using a WordPress plugin, and a bit of CSS, you can go from the default chicklet to something totally different. You didn’t honestly think you were…

Starting a Great Blog Part 10 – WordPress Plugins

Welcome to part ten of the Starting a Great Blog tutorial. Today we cover WordPress’s plugin system. No, WordPress’s abilities aren’t limited to what the developers wrote in. Anyone who knows PHP can write a plugin that extends WordPress’s capabilities. Ready to get started?

Starting a Great Blog Part 9 – Stat Tracking

Welcome to part eight of the Starting a Great Blog tutorial! We’re getting close to the end, but there are still a few installments to go. What’s today’s topic? Stat tracking with Google Analytics. What’s stat tracking? Have you ever wanted to know how…

Apple’s New Layout

FeedIcons.com

Back in the early days of RSS, webmasters used to link to their feeds using little rectangular orange buttons labeled “RSS” or “XML”. Then along came Mozilla Firefox, the web browser that re-started the Browser Wars. Since Firefox had RSS support built-in, the developers…

Starting a Great Blog Part 8 – Monetization

Welcome to part eight of the Starting a Great Blog tutorial. So, what are we doing today? Monetizing your blog. While you can do this now, some people prefer to wait awhile before putting ads on their website. As a starting blog, you’re not…

Technorati’s New Design: Good or Bad?

This is old news by now, but Technorati‘s got a new layout. A couple of weeks ago, I was surprised when I headed over to Technorati to search for something. I was shocked to see a new design. I immediately checked out Digg, and…

Screenalicious Design Gallery

Need some design inspiration? Take a look at Screenalicious. They have, as of this writing, over 8800 screenshots of websites with interesting designs. There are some really good designs there. If you’re a designer, take a look at this site for a quick bit…