Blog writing is something anyone can do. You can start a blog and do your own writing or you can do blog ghost writing for someone who does not want to maintain his own blog.

Blog Writing 101

A blog writing style is relaxed, first person and friendly. It may be focused or rambling, depending on your purpose. If you are writing a social blog then a rambling writing style works well. If you are writing to try to earn money and need Google to find your blog post then SEO and focused writing are what you need.

Blog Writing For Yourself

There are free blogs and or you can start a blog where you have to pay for a domain name and hosting. Now it may seem silly that most serious bloggers prefer to pay for their blog, but here is their reasoning:

• Free blogs have an awful web address, eg your blogname.blogger.com. Who is going to remember that, especially compared to yourblogname.com?
• The free blogging company can shut down your blog at any time, without notice. If you pay for a domain name and hosting nobody is going to shut you down ever. Your investment is secure
• Many people see free a blog address as a sign that the blogger is not serious enough to invest $85 a year in their blog. These people will NEVER visit a free blog
• Having a proper domain name ands address helps to establish your credibility

Free blogs are fine if all you want is to ramble on about what you are doing today. Be aware though, that you could lose your blog and all the time you have invested in it at the drop of a hat.

To set up your own blog, visit Blue Host account (Link opens in new window) and buy a hosting package for about $85 a year. You get one domain name included and you can add extra domains to your hosting just for the cost of the domain. There are no bandwidth or disk space limits on a Blue Host account (Link opens in new window).

In your Control Panel, scroll down the page, double click on the large WordPress ‘W’ and it will install the WordPress blogging software on your domain.

Play around with WordPress and make a few posts. Apply to Google to join the Google Adsense program for web publishers, because as the owner of a website, you are now a web publisher.

SEO Blog Writing

Assuming that you are looking into this in detail because you want to make some money from your blog, you need to lean SEO blog writing.

There are three parts to Search Engine Optimisation in blog writing

• Research
• Writing
• Links

Research means finding niches where your blog post stands a chance of getting onto page one of Google’s search results. Research means finding keywords that are worth your while, but that are not worth the while of the big guns. Research means finding keywords that you can find related affiliate products for. Research means finding a niche where you might make some money.

Writing means improving your On-Page SEO. It means Using H1 and H2 tags (sub-headings) that contain your keywords. Writing means scattering your keywords through your post and using synonyms and long-tail variants of your keywords wherever you can. Writing means composing interesting posts that grab the readers’ attention. The posts should mostly be in the 500-1000 word category. Writing means posting about what people are looking for, rather than whatever title comes to mind.

Links means building links in to your blog posts and pages from sites like Best Reviewer and Info Pirate (Links open in new windows).  You MUST have links to every page and every post.

Blog Ghost Writing

Many companies and famous people have blogs because it is part of their online marketing. Many of these blogs are ghost written. The site owner does not want the work associated with keeping a blog updated, so they find someone with experience of blog ghost writing to do it for them.

If you are doing any blog ghost writing you should expect emails at least every few days with important ideas that your ghost posts need to cover. You will often be tasked with promoting the blog, too.