Blogging Lesson 2: Blog Regularly

If you don't update your blog often enough, blog readers will move on to other blogs. There are too many blogs out there competing for attention. Blog readers will go where they can get enough of what they want.

Successful blogging takes a commitment of your time. When you begin blogging and wish to capture an audience, you should be prepared to blog every day. In this way, you can develop an audience who counts on you to help them begin or end their day.

This means you should also try to post at the same time each day. Your readers will get accustomed to your schedule and check your blog at the appropriate time. The time of day is not as crucial as the consistency in your posting.

Since you now have quality content and a regular posting schedule, it’s time to drive traffic to your blog. Your readers will do a lot to promote your blog just by telling their friends. Don’t count on this alone! You need to do some additional work.

When you post, make sure you set your blog to “ping” blog tracking sites every time you add a new post. Think of this as a means to get their attention. The ping says “Hey, we just added a new post”. An alternative to automatically pinging from your blog is to use pingomatic.com. This is a one-stop place to automatically ping everyone you should notify of your new post and only takes a couple of minutes to accomplish.

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One critical issue I have to voice out, it's much secure for you as a blogger to back up your blog regularly to avoid any disaster.

Creating backups of your blog is like drinking water. You know you should do it at regular intervals, but often times other activities get in the middle and you just forget about it.

The possible consequences of not backing up your blog, however, are much more serious than missing the middle-morning water glass. Should your server crash for some reason, or your websibe get hacked, you will lose valuable data.

Below you will find a quick checklist for backing up your blog.

1. Use an FTP client to download all the site files (the Wordpress folder)
2. Log into phpMyAdmin and select your Wordpress databas
3. Click on “Export” and make sure that all the Wordpress tables are there
4. On the “Structure” section tick “Add Drop Tables,” “Add AUTO_INCREMENT,” and “Enclose table and field names with backquotes”
5. On the “Data” section leave all the boxes unticked
6. Tick “Save as file” and download the database (you can use compression if your database is big)
   

If you don’t have access to phpMyAdmin, you can use the Wordpress Database Backup plugin.