The Smart Blogger’s Guide
Got something to talk about? Find the right home and best add-ons for your blog.
These days, you can find a blog for just about anything. Looking for affordable art prints? Weheartprints.com has them. Interested in Craftsman, Mission, and Prairie furniture? Check out Hewn & Hammered . In fact, according to the blog-tracking service Technorati, there are some 70 million active Weblogs. And for good reason: blogs are a fun and easy way to communicate. They can even be profitable. Some blogging services (such as Blogger and TypePad) include tools that automatically publish advertisements, based on the topics you write about, on your site.
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Illustration by Peter Sturdevant |
No matter what your reasons for blogging, there are plenty of tools that can help you get started and keep readers tuned in. But not all blogging services are the same. Our Smart Blogger’s Guide gives you the inside scoop on five great online services that appeal to different types of bloggers, as well as 13 add-ons that let you customize your blog with music, games, headlines, and more.
- The Smart Blogger's Guide
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A blog for everyone
Different blogging services have different strengths. So it makes sense to choose the one that works best for the type of content you’re creating. While some services offer pure ease of use, others are geared toward business blogs or social networks. Here’s a taste of what’s out there.
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Widget wonderland
Anyone can slap pictures and text on a Web page and call it a blog. It's much harder to make a blog that stands out from the pack. One way to do so is by dressing up your site with widgets. Widgets are essentially tiny programs that add functionality, transforming your blog into something unique.
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Tips for getting started
So how do you create an interesting blog and get the word out? We talked to Anil Dash, the vice president of evangelism for Six Apart, to glean some of his best blogging tips.
Got something to talk about? Find the right home and best add-ons for your blog.
