1. Asking for Comments

The first thing to try and get comments is to ask for them. Kash Dash doesn’t receive a huge number of hits yet so for those few readers who are loyal, you are welcome to comment

2. Write Something Stupid that is Wrong

I came across this idea of the past few days while arguing a point by commenting. I seldom comment on other blogs however the fact that the guy posting had the facts wrong was enough to provoke a reaction from me to correct him. The continued battle for who was right in the comments sent the number he received very high. So I began thinking, why not just write rubbish…no jokes about by normal content… or get something wrong in a post to try and get that one person who wants the truth to be known

3. Question Your Readers

By asking your readers questions directly you are likely to provoke thought in that readers mind. You comment box is a great place for them to express their opinion.

4. Reply to Comments

After asking your readers a question, its always nice to get a response from the person who wrote the original post. Interact with your readers and reply by commenting. This will increase your comment count and make visitors intrigued to what all the fuss is about.

5. Top Commentors

Kash Dash has a plug-in that shows who comments the most. I have this in the footer of the blog. You might want to implement a similar plug-in. Competitiveness between readers to see who can get the most can only benefit you. …I think.

6. Do Follow Comments

Blogs that provide Do Follow links are increasing popular. The reason for this is due to getting more comments. Do Follow was created to reduce spam in comments, however reverse its purpose and website owners will comment for a free back link. They know that the comment has to look real to ensure its not marked as SPAM so again by having Do-Follow links you can benefit. I used a plug-in for Kash Dash so that these are enabled.

7. Comment on Other Blogs

Ok, now its time to be that webmaster in the tip above. Go and comment on blogs with similar content to yours to increase back links to your website. This will increase your blogs popularity and therefore encourage more comments. Steps 6 and 7 go hand in hand in a sort of loop.

8. Freebies

Everyone wants stuff for free, so take advantage of it. Create a free digital product, ebook, theme, script or whatever and offer it free to the most interesting comment you see in the next month.

Just a few idea’s to help you get comments on your blog, let me know below what you think of the above and how it helps your site.

So with the possibility of many other blogs having the same theme, what makes my blog stand out from those? The content will be uniquely written by me however it will be based around the same topics. I had to change it to make it my own so that there is more chance of a user remembering it.

As you can see I have done away with most of the grey dullness and gone for a blue, a colour to commonly used however for the reason that it works well. The chances of another blog, unless they copy, selecting the same colours I have used are very unlikely. This is a good first step to making your blog more unique.

Templates are usually very easy to edit, especially due to the great features of CSS. A graphics editor is needed so that images and notepad or a HTML editor to change the CSS colours.

Something that I should focus on next is creating a logo for the site. I am trialing a logo, I am not sure that it goes with the site,  time will tell.

Favicon

The logo came after I tried the below with an image I have.

Previously if I wanted an favicon for a website it meant loading Fireworks creating a nice PNG, downsizing it and changing the file type to .ico. I have recently come across a much quicker way to do this. This site allows you to create a favicon by just uploading any picture you want. It will re-size and allow you to download it.

Click here to use this service.

Blog posts are displayed in order of the most recent written. Most blogs are about a particular subject that the blogger is interested in. They can include a running commentary of a person’s life, interesting news and personal diaries.

Readers of blogs have the ability to leave comments from their point of view. Many regular readers may subscribe to a blog so that they don’t miss any posts. Blogging has become increasingly popular of the past few years due to how easy it is to do. Computer literate people would be able to setup a free blog within a matter of minutes. Many new users to the Internet are also jumping aboard the good ship blog.

In the modern day there are now many different types of blog. There are now corporate blogs from companies which allows them to interact with their stakeholders.

There are many different varieties of blog software available. One is Word Press and another is Blogger. They both allow you to customise your blog by changing the theme to make your blog unique.

I hope you have a better idea of what a blog is now, if you feel I have missed something then please comment below.

Most of the methods and techniques that i have used are web related and around 99% will involve a website. So it may benefit you to learn HTML/XHTML and CSS. These are the basic coding languages that you will need to know to create a sucessful website.

I taught myself these over the years starting with Microsoft FrontPage. My first site simply included changing the background color to black and creating a landing page with an image on which more than likely originated from Paint.

My advice is to learn by doing, if you do not have software to help you with making web pages then don’t worry. You can still create pages using notepad. It may take a little getting used to but at least that way you will be forced into understanding code from the start. I learned by using a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) and then looking at the code and seeing how it affected the website.

To understand the code take a look at this website. http://www.w3schools.com/

If you have the cash i would recommend getting Adbode Dreamweaver to create and maintain websites.

Your website can be based on anything that you want. Many years ago it would be fine to create lots of websites and get the benefits from them all. However in recent times it seems wiser to create a single website and put your efforts into making that one sucessful rather than try and create many standard websites that may not take off as you expect.

Once you have a site you are going to need to upload it and for that i recommend this free FTP program named FileZilla. http://filezilla-project.org/

Another way to go about getting online is to have a blog. This will enable you to post your thoughts etc online. The benefit of a blog is that it can be hosted free by sites such as WordPress or Blogger.

I recommend WordPress as blogging software. You can create a site on a sub domain on their site or host your own blog. Hosting your own site costs money and i will talk about hosting in my next post.

Check out wordpress here: http://wordpress.org/

Take Care.