Any bloggers out there?

[rdwriter]

New to this site, but I didn't see any particular place for freelance bloggers, so I figured the writing forum was the best place to check in. I'm wondering if anyone else read the recent article about the hottest outsourcing job skills of 2008? The reason I mention it is because it shows that demand for blogging skills (http://www.odesk.com/blog/2009/01/top-growth-tech-skills-in-2008/) has increased by 4 times that of the previous year. I don't know about you, but I found that pretty amazing, especially in this economy. Pretty cool stuff! :kewl:

[Audrey]

I have three blogs. Two are on blogger and one is on Wordpress.

[smbwallace]

Hi, yes, there are lots of bloggers here! I have five myself, all for personal use. One of them, Mommy's Working (http://www.mommysworking.blogspot.com), is about freelance writing. :work:

That link is pretty cool. Thanks for sharing that. :t9:

There is a blogging folder here a bit further down the forum.

[UpAndAtEm]

Yes, I have a blog too! Mine is a blog for writers who want to earn serious money with their writing. The blog focuses mainly on the publishing industry's little known niche of writing booklets.

I am the author of six booklet titles. Last summer, my contact at a food manufacturing company told me he wanted to buy 600,000 copies of one of my titles. To put this into perspective, with this many booklets being sold every nickle in the price of the booklet is worth $30,000! Most authors don't even realize this kind of opportunity exists. My goal with the blog is to be a resource for authors and wanna be authors interested in this very lucrative niche.

My best to all the writers and bloggers here, and come visit me on the blog! The link is below!

[Starturwork]

Well, I am thinking of starting one. I have heard people saying blogs help on traffic. Is it true? Also what you need to write on your blogs?

I am getting confused.

[Audrey]

Visit blogger.com They offer free blogs and their system is incredibly easy to navigate. A blog is basically an online journal. Your blog can be personal or it can contain information related to the products you are selling.

[UpAndAtEm]

I prefer http://www.wordpress.com. You can get a free blog there too and it is also very easy to use. You might want to compare it with blogger.com and see which one you like best.

Yes, a blog can drive traffic to your website, but in order to use the blog for this purpose you first must drive traffic to your blog. If you can't get traffic to your website, you'll have a difficult time getting traffic to your blog, which means your blog won't be able to help you with your website traffic problem.

If your blog is attached to your website rather than being through one of the free blogging sites, then Google will pick up each new post you create and that WILL help your traffic - some.

As for what to write, since you're trying to drive traffic to your website I would write to your market. You don't want to make every post about your products or services, and you should have a little of your personality in at least some of your posts. Your blog should contain real content in order to keep people coming back for more, and you should post often. For business purposes, I recommend posting at least five days per week. Many business blogs are updated more than once per day.

If you're interested in starting a blog at your website, I would look at blogs at other websites in your industry and see what they're doing to get a few ideas of what you can do.

I'm not sure the free blog a wordpress or blogger will help you since you would need to drive traffic to the blog. If you are interested in pursuing this route, I suggest you do a little research on how to drive traffic to websites and blogs. You can find information in books as well as online.

Hope this helps!

[Chelle]

Great advice. I love Worpdress (but the ones from Wordpress.org). I have a personal blog and a blog about TV with Wordpress. But the blog attached to my main website is with Drupal. I'm trying to earn money with the personal blog on PayU2Blog.

[Kelly Watson]

Blogging is a great way to drive traffic to your site. Blogger is an easy way to get started, but I prefer WordPress because of its customization features. It's a little more complicated, so I've been hiring freelance coders to make the changes, but overall it's much less expensive than having an entire web site built from scratch -- something that can easily cost $1500 or more.