“Credibility is something most blogs lack”
John Chow

So what you ask and who the hell is John Chow? Well, the reality is you are likely reading this to learn about blogging and possibly have visions of earning some extra income from your new blog. That probably means you haven’t met all of the big players in the blogging for dollars end of the blogosphere. John is one of the biggest. He’s also Canadian, which is a big deal for me, as I love to promote Canadian talent whenever I can.

When I wrote about choosing a blog topic recently, I pointed out that you should write about something you know and are passionate about. That will build credibility for your blog. Without that credibility, nobody will want to read your work. If you’ve been collecting and selling garden gnomes for 10 years, you would be foolish to start a blog about fairies because you think that’s where the readers are.

As Mr. Chow points out, there are many people writing blogs about making money blogging but only a handful of those are truly earning substantial income as a result of their blogging. My primary work over at The Garage is the result of a lifetime spent around cars and 20 years in the car industry. The team of writers that I’ve assembled all have similar backgrounds, from working in the industry to taking part in motorsports. Here at Blogtater, I’m attempting to collate the knowledge I’ve gained from blogging for the past few years and pass those lessons on to the new blogger.

I’ll leave the fairie blogging to someone else, I encourage you to do the same. Unless of course you have an intimate knowledge of the fairie world.

Post frequency is quite the topic. Some folks believe that too few posts will kill a blog, while others feel that too many will actually drive away traffic. The golden rule used to be something like Thou shalt post as many times a day as possible. These days though, it seems that many blogging experts believe that consistency is key. It really is one of those topics where personal experience hugely influences ones’ opinion.

Let’s take the automotive corner of the blogosphere as an example. The large, corporate owned automotive blogs typically have teams of bloggers. Together these teams typically churn out anywhere from 10 posts a day on the weekend, to close to 30 during the week. That is some serious quantity. Most of the B List car blogs are written by 1 or 2 bloggers and might post 5-7 posts a day, while the C Listers are usually flying solo with posts coming in at under 2 or 3 a day. Below the C List are the occasional bloggers who love cars, but don’t have the time or inclination to write more than every few days.

What we can learn from this is that post frequency does matter, at least as much as consistency. However, irregular posting of quality content will certainly overshadow reams of crap in the long run. As regular readers can see (not that anybody is regular yet) Blogtater certainly hasn’t been populated with any great quantity of posts yet and certainly hasn’t been consistent. Blogtater is an experiment and most of my time outside of the day job is focused on The Garage.

In The Garage, a small team is posting roughly 10-12 quality posts a day. Since adding this team to my own meager writing skills, post frequency has jumped from 3-4 a day and our traffic is on a steady climb. Along with that climb in traffic has come an increase in Technorati ranking. As a result of both, we are receiving more advertising inquiries, which is our end goal. As far as I’m concerned, posting frequency is absolutely important, but it must be done in a manner that does not cause the blogger to burn out.

From way back in other guy’s archives, there are a couple of must reads. First off, Eric Kintz has a list of 10 reasons why post frequency doesn’t matter. Eric’s post spawned this great response from Darren Rowse. Go read both!

Whether you are blogging for yourself, or for the audience that you hope to build, the key is to blog about something you are passionate about. While you may think you know a thing or two about garden gnomes, are you truly passionate about them? Can you write daily or weekly about garden gnomes for months on end without growing bored or running out of ideas?

When I began blogging, it made complete sense for me to blog about cars. I was 37 years old and my obsession with cars began when I was just a wee baby. No kidding, I had been going to one race track or another since my parents dragged me to Mosport when I was a newborn. That love of things on wheels followed me into my career in the auto industry. In other words, I’m passionate about cars and I now have 40 years of experience with them. That means I could even be considered an automotive expert.

So let’s see, passion and expertise. Do you see a trend here?

In the past 3 years, I could likely count the days I haven’t written on both hands. Many days I write as many as 5 or 6 posts! I’m still just as excited about cars as I was as a kid. Probably more so. Many, many people start blogs, and almost as many abandon them within a few months. The primary reason is that they ran out of ideas, or they burned out because they weren’t as excited about the topic as they thought.

Just a word of caution about personal blogs for those of you who actually want to generate traffic. Children and pets are like navels. Almost everyone has them. Unless you are one hell of a witty, insightful writer, nobody outside of your immediate circle wants to hear what colour young Johnny’s spit up was last night. The exception to the personal blog rule is if you already have a modicum of fame. Then everybody wants to hear about your toy Yorkie getting humped by a Rottweiler.

Now I know that some of you are asking: What about that girl who got fired for blogging? She writes a personal blog. Well, yes she does. Heather is her name and her blog Dooce got her fired. That firing gave the talented Mrs. Armstrong a level of infamy that caused her traffic to grow in leaps and bounds. In essence, writing about her personal life caused an explosion that allowed her to earn her living with a personal blog. Bear in mind that there is more at work here than Heather’s wit and talent as a writer. As in many businesses, timing is everything. She got Dooced very early on in evolution of blogging. In fact, you could consider the most influential personal blogger of all time. You would have to be incredibly good and incredibly lucky to duplicate her success.

Once you’ve decided that you just have to blog about garden gnomes, start immersing yourself in the online garden gnome community. Is there other garden gnome bloggers? Do they appear to have some community going on, with links back and forth to each other and lots of comments? Begin commenting on some of those blogs until you become known. Those relationships will serve you well as you grow your own garden gnome blog.

Now you’ve chosen a blog format and a topic. Next up we’ll discuss how to get noticed within your chosen niche.

As I’ve mentioned before, my first exposure to the world of blogging was through Google’s free blog service, Blogger. Sign up was easy, the software was intuitive and super easy to follow. To get a Blogger blog up and running requires no more skill than it takes to send an e-mail and within minutes you can be writing your most intimate thoughts about the day’s trash and uploading pictures of your kitty.

As I learned my way around the blogosphere, I learned that Blogger isn’t the only game in town. There are tons of free blogging services out there like WordPress, Typepad, LiveJournal and many more. It really is easy to get started with a free blog. Blogger is dead easy for the neophyte, while WordPress takes a little bit of getting used to. I’ve never used any of the others, so I can’t really judge them.

What you want to accomplish with your blog should impact your decision on which format to use even in your early days. If you are blogging strictly for personal pleasure and to share with friends and family, then any of the free services will serve you quite nicely.

If you have visions of your blog being a world stage, or promoting your business, or even becoming your business, then you need to put a little more thought into your choice. Search engines do not give much weight to free hosted blogs as compared to those which are hosted privately with their own domain name. What this means is that you might write great content about garden gnomes, but your blog will remain buried deep within the 2 million pages Google has with information on garden gnomes. What does that mean? It means your visitors will range from few to none.

If indeed you have aspirations of growth for your blog, then you need to think about using WordPress. A very large segment of the blogging world works with WP and for good reason. First off, the software is free. Being open source, WP has developed a huge community of bloggers, developers and design types that are more than eager to help the newbie. Want a great looking blog? No problem, there are literally thousands of WP themes that have been developed by enthusiastic WP users who want to get others drinking the same cool aid they are. There are hundreds of great plugins (add ons) that have been developed to help make your blog great. Most of them are free.

At some point, you will need to decide upon and register your own domain name. I’ll attempt to cover domain names in a future post.

Blair Valley Media uses WordPress for all of our blogs. For this reason I’ve started Blogtater on the WP free service. After we get some of the blogging basics out of the way, I’ll be switching over to the blogtater.com domain on it’s own dedicated host.

For now, get registered and start getting familiar with your choice format.

Sometimes it can be pretty easy for an experienced blogger to forget that blogging is a foreign concept to a lot of people. They probably read blogs every day and don’t even know it.

So, what is a blog?

Wikipedia calls a blog: A blog (a portmanteau of web log) is a website where entries are written in chronological order and commonly displayed in reverse chronological order.

Darren Rowse at Problogger says: a blog is a type of website that is usually arranged in chronological order from the most recent ‘post’ (or entry) at the top of the main page to the older entries towards the bottom.

The Beeb says: Blogs (or Weblogs) are basically online journals or diaries which are great for sharing information and ideas.

So you get the idea. A blog is a website where data is entered and posted in a time stamped manner which makes it easy to read chronologically.

So what! What can you do with it?

Well, that really depends on what you want to do with it. For some people, all they want is to keep an online journal they can share with their friends and family. Or they want to keep it private, but want the convenience of an online format. Others want to share their passion for garden gnomes with the world. Some more ambitious garden gnome aficionados yearn to earn a living by recounting their travels to well adorned gardens around the globe.

The beauty of blogging is that it allows one to express their desires, in private, in public or for profit.

Next up, we’ll explore the next steps towards launching your very own corner of the net.

My name is Gary and I’m an addict.

A blogging addict.

Way back in September 2004, on a rainy Saturday afternoon, I first ventured online to learn about these things called blogs. I Googled the word blog. Of course one of the first links to turn up was Google’s own free blogging service, Blogger. I was intrigued, but also intimidated. There was discussion of designing your own blog and that terrified me. I needn’t have worried, as I was publishing my own brain farts in minutes.

Brain farts only keep one’s interest for so long, and rarely attract the interest of anybody else. I needed something to blog about. The obvious choice for me was cars, so I began blogging about cars.

A few months later, I discoved this cool Aussie guy called Darren Rowse who published a blog called Problogger. I was stunned. Here was this great resource on everything blog related from how to create traffic to how to earn money. Wait a minute. Earn money? How the hell can you do that? Darren’s work spurred me on to create The Garage and even our own little network of blogs.

Fortunately, through all this I’ve had a team mate. Jaimie Macpherson takes car of all the techie details that scare the stuffing out of me and makes sure that everything works. Together we’ve been able to put together some pretty cool bloggers who work on some pretty sharp looking blogs. The one thing we’ve never blogged about though is blogging.

There are lots of folks doing a really good job blogging about blogging, so why would we even think about it as a topic. Well, because we’ve learned a lot over the past few years and it will be nice to give back to the blogging community. Oh yes, and maybe earn a few bucks along the way!

Blogtater will be a blog about blogging with a bit of a twist. We’re going back to our roots a little bit and starting out on a free blog service. Except this time, I’m going it alone. I will show readers how I’ve chosen my format, my template (and what a template is) and even how I’m dealing with hosting. As we move forward over the next few weeks, I’ll be moving Blogtater from the free service to an independently hosted domain. I’ll be doing it myself, without my trusted tech guru to smooth out the wrinkles and I’ll be bringing readers along for the ride. As we learn together how to generate traffic, we’ll begin looking together at ways to make money with a blog.

What do you think folks, can I create a blog from scratch? You’ll just have to keep reading and see!