How Do I Do This Faster & Easier? Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies AW WebBiz & Social Media Blog

Image via CrunchBase

If you’re a “newbie” just wanting to “dip your toe” into the swirling waters of the blogosphere, presumably you’ve already read How do I Do This? Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies which attempts to set out the very basics of how to get started. If you’ve gotten that far along and have a WordPress account and have your site installed and set up, I’m going to tell you an easy way to start writing your blog.

Writing your content on WordPress. Once you’ve gotten your feet wet and are comfortable with the program – perhaps a month of two from when you begin – you should probably try to put in greater originality and more of your own thoughts and stories. But to begin, I would suggest the following 3 support steps for you:

Set Up A Reader to scour the Net for material that interests you and about which you have some comment, thought or opinion to make.

Blogging takes time. And keeping up with news and other blogs so you have something to blog about takes time. So it’s highly recommended you set up a Google reader, or any other kind of reader to bring blogs or your favorite kind of information and news to you, instead of you going out and searching the Net to track it down. (This will also allow you to get more familiar with the blogosphere: the most popular blogs and bloggers, the most popular topics, the different styles which bloggers use.)

Just go to Google and create an account, or log in if you already have one and get the free reader. Go to your favorite sites and look for an orange button indicating a feed. Then you put the RSS feeds of your favorite sites into the Google Reader. Sometimes this process is automated so you will be asked how you want the feed delivered and in this instance you would select Google Reader. This will save an enormous amount of time for you. And I’m told successful bloggers peruse a huge number of sites daily. ( I could give you some numbers but it can get kind of scary how much the top bloggers read and how hard they work.)

Shortcut – Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web

A Press This bookmark you can add to your toolbar provides a fast and smart popup to do posts to your WordPress blog as you’re surfing the web:

The Press This bookmarklet is found at the right bottom of the Write Posts panel. Drag and drop it onto your Favorites, Bookmarks, or Links list or toolbar. To activate, simply click on the “Press It” bookmarklet link. A window will open with the URI of the current site displayed, and the site’s title as your post title. Here’s what it looks like:

For example, if you click “Press This” from a Youtube page it’ll magically extract the video embed code, and if you do it from a Flickr page it’ll make it easy for you to put the image in your post. Not to mention using it with regular text posts where you just copy and paste the portions you want to comment on, write your own thoughts in and Voila! You’re done.

Well, not exactly, if you really want to take your blog to another level, make it more useful and have it stand out, consider using the Zemanta plug in, which I believe is an almost brand new release:

Zemanta enables you to blog smarter with instant smart links, pictures, tags and more. The ability to automatically add a relevant graphic to the top of your blog adds interest for your users. Also, as Zementa puts it:

Save Time…with relevant content from all over the web delivered instantly as you blog.
Build Traffic…with immediate tagged links created between your posts and others sharing related conversations.

These features bring increased value to your blog. Plus using these fast and easy techniques will build up your confidence and get you moving in the right direction…..towards a higher level level of blogging

Related articles by Zemanta