With the ultimate goal being to validate the assumption that my opinion is worth something, I went on… I continued to find ways to expend my free time and expand my knowledge in regard to blogging. Nevertheless, in the midst of it all I realised that it was not necessarily profit or the notion of making money that energised me, but in fact my drive to learn more about how things work.

Eventually, I would like to post a complete article that incorporates all the successful steps, like the ones you can find online by the blogging ‘gurus’; or even better, to use all the steps I have taken one by one and make a successful blog with many readers.

So through trial and error, my quest of finding out if what I have to say is worth anything, my research has gone a step further.

Looking into things some more I realized that I am just in the very beginning of the process. There is a lot more setting-up and enhancing to be done before there can be more readers. I continued to look around and research other blogs for advice, tried things, eliminated what didn’t work and am confident enough to write about the steps I took.

Ping

Sending your ping, or pinging is a way that notifies others that you exist. Once there is updated content on your blog go to one of the following directories and submit your URL to let different directories, lists and engines that you did so. That way all the directories I registered with in the previous step (see

Here are a few that I have tried for free:

Pingoat

Pingomatic

Autopinger

FeedShark

I will use them again every time I post something new.

RSS Feed

Aside from the ping, what I did recently was to create a feed for my blog.

From the definitions in the help section of blogger.com, I learned that a feed is a “machine-readable representation” of a site that can in turn be incorporated in other web pages and that can inform readers about your updates.

feedburner.

Feed burner provides a service that allows your visitors to receive instant updates through your feed.

This way you can provide readers the option of notifications when you update. Feedburner provides a variety of options for its users and a easy to use and understand template with a high functionality. It didn’t take too long for a novice user (me) to get around and figure things out.

I believe that there are a few kind people that already registered to receive my feed. Thank you! It’s great to have some unexpected encouragement.

Submitting your feed

The same way you have to let the word know you have a Like with the ping there are a few different directories to submit your feed. I found that “rss specifications” has a comprehensive list of directories.

Some of the sites listed charge money, some don’t. Some links do not work. I am not sure how well this will work but I will give it a shot.

It is not hard to start a blog. Once you get visitors to your blog you can make money. In other words turn it into a money blog