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Blogging is crucial to online network marketing success. Yet too many network marketers don’t do it, or they don’t do it effectively. While there are a variety of reasons why, the number one reason I hear from people is that they have tried but just couldn’t do it without going crazy. Here are some tips on how to blog without going crazy.

1. Create a blogging plan. This is a must and too many people don’t do it. If you need help. I highly recommend the ebooks by Darren Rowse on blogging.

2. Have a specific niche market. This is another key one. You can’t just blog about anything and everything and expect success.

3. Set aside a few hours each week to blog. It won’t just happen. You need to block off time on your calendar to write your blog posts and to work on your blog.

4. Work on improving your blog and increasing traffic a little each day or each week. You won’t get a ton of traffic all at once, work on making your blog better a little bit at a time.

5. Celebrate your small successes.

What other questions do you have about blogging without going nuts?

Get the best guide to better blogging I’ve ever read.

Creating a blog and blogging without a clear plan is a recipe for disaster. That said, it can be challenging to figure out how to create a social media plan for blogging. Here are some tips to make it work.

1. Who is your target market for your blog? This needs to be very clear in your mind and you need to have one primary target market and maybe 2-3 secondary ones at the very most. For example, my target audience for this blog is primarily network marketers and direct sellers and my secondary markets are sales people and people who want to start a network marketing or sales related business and use social media to market it.

2. What are your main goals for your blog? There are lots of options but you need to pick 2-3. Are you trying to generate leads that you will contact about joining a business opportunity or purchasing a product?

Do you want people to buy something right there on your blog? Do you want to earn money with advertising? Be crystal clear about your intentions.

3. How often will you post to your blog? At least twice per week is really necessary in order to get the kind of traffic and results that you will want.

4. Will you include videos and audios, or just written content, or maybe the entire blog will be a video blog?

5. What opt-in freebie will you offer to encourage others to join your list so that you can stay in touch with them and sell to them over time?

6. How will you promote your blog? You need to spell out in your social media plan for blogging exactly all of the ways that you will promote your blog.

Any other ideas? Comments?

Are you using a free blog platform? I hope not. This is a common mistake that many beginning internet marketers or people who are just getting started online make.

While there are some benefits to using a free blog platform, in the long term you will not want to use one. Even though it is free you really want to be aware of the risks and problems with a free blog platform.

1. Even though it may be free now, it may not stay that way. Companies can decide to start charging at any moment. Would you be willing to pay for your free blog platform?

2. Free means that the company who owns the program has the right to decide what kinds of content they will allow on their site. If you publish content or do something that is against their terms of service, they can shut you down. The biggest example of this is wordpress.com If you have a wordpress.com blog and you are blogging about network marketing, or affiliate marketing, you are violating their terms of service and they can
and will shut you down without notice. This happened to me a few years ago and it was not fun.
Paid blogging platforms let you write about and do what you want instead of what the free platform company says you can do.

3. Free options do not give you as many features as those platforms that you pay for and in most cases you will want these paid features. For example, wordpress.org which is self hosted and requires a paid hosting service, has thousands more plugins and therefore features that the free wordpress.com does not have.

4. Free blog platforms are subject to hacking, viruses and other ugly bugs a lot more frequently than those that you pay for.

5. Many free options have advertising and other limits on features that make it hard for you to really ever gain momentum or to generate the kind of traffic that you will need to create a sustainable and long lasting profitable business.

In short, you can get a paid blogging platform for less than $10 a month and if it’s not worth that to you, then you need to reconsider why you are in business or blogging in the first place.

Learn how to use wordpress.

If you are new to blogging or even if you have already been blogging for awhile, chances are that you may still have questions about blogging and the vocabulary associated with it. Here is a blogging glossary to help you better understand the world of blogging.

Platform- This is the word used to describe the software program used to create a blog. WordPress is an example of a blogging platform.

RSS feed-This is the term used to describe a feed of all the posts on a blog. Every time you publish a new post it becomes a part of the RSS feed and people can subscribe to receive updates to it.

Ping-This is when you notify the search engines and other blogs that your blog has been updated. A popular site to use is pingoat.com

Feedburner-This is a Google owned tool you can use to offer blog subscriptions via email or RSS feed.

Theme-This is what creates the graphics and layout for your blog. Most blog platforms give you hundreds if not thousands of themes to choose from and programmers can even create their own.

Layout-This is where you place the various columns and items on your blog. It is also determined by the theme that you use.

Plugin-This is the word for a piece of code or a program that you add to your blog that then does something. For example, the facebook like button is a plugin. WordPress offers the biggest and best amount of choices for plugins.

Widget-This is a term used by most major blogging platforms to describe the content you can place in the columns. For example a list of categories, a list of pages, a text box for HTML, or a list of the most recent posts, these are all widgets you can place in one of the columns on your blog.

Tags-These are similar to keywords. You use them to describe the major content topics for your blog. Usually you will list 2-5 of them.

Categories-These are used to organize your blog into subjects. For example, internet marketing, leadership, social media etc.

Permalinks-This is the tool in wordpress that creates the easy to read url for each blog post. For example, http://scentedcandlesclub.com/fundraising. The default url is a number that is not search engine friendly, is harder for people to remember and does not look as good.

What other blogging terms did I leave out?