Every thing you need to setup a successful blog

Filed under Blogging by Satish on August 10, 2008 at 6:42 am {2 comments}

Hello Donald, Good to know that you are going to start a blog. Here is a brief tutorial on

  • What is a blog??
  • How to setup up my blog??
  • How to design a blog??
  • How to choose a niche??
  • How to be a successful blogger??

What is a blog??

Here is the wiki definition for a blog

A blog (a contraction of the term “Web log“) is a web-site, usually maintained by an individual,with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order

A blog can be personal where you maintain a online dairy of the events in your life or you can use it to share your knowledge.

How to setup a blog?? Will it cost me anything to start a blog??

Free personal Blog:

For a personal blog with out any investment you should go for free blog at wordpress.com . The main advantages of a free wordpress blog over a blogger.com blog are

  • Its clean layout.
  • Easy to use control panel.
  • SEO friendly ( This is not very important for a personal blog ).
  • Lots of themes and plug ins to choose form.
  • Easily customizable themes.
  • WordPress has a huge user base so if you are struck with a problem you are not alone.

Free Commercial blog:

If you want to start a free blog and start earning the best option you have is blogger.com. The advantages of a blogger blog are

  • Unlimited bandwidth and storage.
  • Reliable servers with 100% uptime.
  • Your blog will not be shutdown if you suddenly get lots of traffic from social media like digg or stumble ( I shall discuss about getting traffic from social media in my future posts).
  • Unlike wordpress.Com free blog you can place ads on a blogger blog.

If you want to invest some money..

If you want to be a serious blogger, I strongly recommend you to invest some money on domain and hosting. Domains and web-hosting are very cheap these days. In the early days of your blog if you don’t expect much traffic you can go for the cheapest hosting available. Once you start getting good traffic and start earning money, you can upgrade to a better host ( Changing host will not effect your traffic and Google page rank ). If you write very good articles then you may be flooded by traffic from social media even in the early days of your blog, So if you think that you can write good and original posts go for a better paid hosting from the start. Cheap hosting services can not handle such spikes in the traffic and they may shutdown your site. You loose traffic, reputation and money. If you don’t have much money to invest at least try to buy a domain name and use it on a blogger.Com blog. On a blogger blog you don’t have to worry about the bandwidth, their servers can handle any amount of traffic.

The main problem with many people who want to start a blog or a website is that they have money but they don’t have a credit card or paypal to pay. So you need to earn some money online to pay for the domain and hosting. Forums are a good place to earn some quick cash. There are many webmaster forums which pay you for posting and you can also sell your services like designing,content writing, promoting sites etc.. at digitalpoint forums. I will discuss about earning money for setting up your blog in my future post.

Read about How I suffered for not buying a domain name here

How to choose a niche for your blog??

This is one of the key factor for the success of your blog. Choose a niche about which your passionate and have good knowledge. You can not write an interesting article if you are not passionate about what you write. If you don’t enjoy what you write why will the reader like it?? . If you choose a niche about which you are passionate you will be able to hook the readers to your blog. Do not make a blog with just copy paste posts, you will not get anything out of it except for wasting your time.

How to choose a design for your blog??

Though content is always the king , design also plays a key role in the success of your blog. You should be careful while selecting a design.There are lots of free templates available for both wordpress and blogger ( Almost infinite for wordpress ). Choosing a theme for wordpress blog is very tough as there are lots of designs to choose form. Spend some to browse through the free wprdpress templates available and choose the one that matches your niche, then add your logo and customize it to make it stand out form other blogs. Once your blog is well established you can go for either a premium theme or a custom theme.

How to be a successful blogger??

Being a successful blogger is not a one day task. You should not lose hope if you don’t get traffic or don’t earn money initially. Just post quality content promote it on social media and wait for the results.One day you will surely earn a 5 figure income.

I will be answering these questions in my future posts.

  • What is adsense??
  • How to earn money from adsense??
  • How to get traffic to my website??
  • How to get on first page of Google??
  • what is social media?How to drive traffic from social media??

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My application for GSoC 2008

Filed under Blogging by Satish on April 4, 2008 at 2:09 pm {3 comments}

gsoc-satish.png

A Plugin to publish the posts in wordpress blog as an e-Book

Personal Profile

Full name: Satish Gandham
Email: g.satish@iitg.ernet.in
Gtalk ID: satish.iitg@gmail.com

Project idea information

Project Title: Develop a plugin for wordpress which enables the blogger to publish his blog posts in the form of an e-Book.

Project Description
The main functions of the plugin are as follows

  • User should be able to upload an image to have his custom first page.
  • The PDF should have an index page and an easy navigation.
  • User should have an option to select the posts which he want to publish in the e-Book
  • In case if there are multiple authors on a blog, user should have an option to publish the posts of each author separately.
  • Each author should be able to choose if his posts can be published as PDF or not.
  • A link to save the post as pdf and number of times the post had been downloaded will be given after each post.
  • Option to publish posts from each category as a PDF.
  • The plugin should be able to support the html tags.
  • Track the number of downloads.
  • Add a sidebar widget showing link to the PDF and download stats.

Why would someone want to publish an e-Book?

  • This would help the readers of a blog to read the posts offline, this method is better than downloading the entire site for offline browsing.
  • There are lots of people who don’t blog for money, so this plugin would help them get close to their readers.
  • Even for those who blog for money, they can monetize the e-Book with yahoo ads for PDF, and I’m sure that Google will also come up with something to monetize PDF’S.

Road Map

  • I will start by downloading the wordpress source code.
  • Understand how the database is designed.
  • Study the built in functions in wordpress that would be helpful for this plugin.
  • Study the functions available in PHP to create a PDF.
  • Discuss with the mentor thoroughly about how to implement this plugin, prepare a solid blueprint of the plugin. (I will keep discussing about this right from the start of the project, but I would like to have a solid blueprint by 5th June)
  • The coding of the core parts of the plugin will be completed by June 25th.
  • After finishing the coding of core parts, I will work on designing the interface.
  • The plugin will be very user friendly, usage of the plugin will be as simple as wordpress installation. The interface design will be finished by July 10th.
  • Finally I will make a thorough check of the plugin to fix any bugs present.
  • Review the documentation of the plugin and release the plugin on 20th July

Availability

I can devote complete 3 months to this project. I can work 6 to 10 hours/day (42 to 70 hours/week) depending on the work load. I do not have any other obligations this summer.

Open Source Development Experience

I haven’t really worked on any open source project till now. I wrote a small tutorial on adding Google Adsense ads to wordpress theme on my blog, here is the link of it
http://geniushackers.com/blog/category/adsense/

Work/Internship Experience

I have been using wordpress for more than a year now; I have good Understanding of the wordpress themes. I developed a shout box, a small ip tracking site using PHP and SQL. I also worked on developing an Online Stock Market game for our college tech fest; though this project was not completed in time it gave me a good exposure to PHP and SQL.
Ip-Tracking Site: http://www.iptracking.geniushackers.com/

Academic Experience

I am a third year undergraduate student from Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, One of the best institutes for science and technology in the country and world. I was among the top 1% of the students who appeared for the entrance test to this institute. I did a C-Programming course and Numerical Methods and Computational Physics course where solutions to problems are obtained using approximations and C-Programming.
Apart from these I learned PHP, SQL and HTML form the internet and e books.

Why WordPress

WordPress is my favorite software, I strongly believe that the quote “Code is poetry“ Is very apt for them. I want to contribute something to the open source and my favorite software.

Why Me

I’m fascinated by the way the World Wide Web works; I have deep passion for building my own websites and web applications. Though I’m not from computer science department my strong passion for coding and developing web applications motivated me to learn PHP, SQL and html myself. I got the idea of this plugin when I happened to read an article on how an e-Book can be used to promote a domain and develop it as a brand name. I cannot do it as an academic project because no one would be ready to waste their time with me as I’m not from Computer science background. So I decided to do it on my own. I knew it’s a tough task for a student like me, but I’m very obsessed with the idea of this plugin.
I was very excited when I saw wordpress in list organizations participating in GSoC, I’m now having a chance to code my plugin under the guidance of a mentor and I get to learn from people with lot of experience. This summer will be the best summer for me. I will enjoy PHP coding.

Thanks wordpress, Thanks Google

Download the above application as a PDF

What is this w3mixX about..??

Filed under Blogging by Satish on March 16, 2008 at 9:30 pm {no comments}

Welcome to w3mixX.com, this post is a small intro about what this w3mixX is going to be about.
I have been playing with websites and blogs for about more than 2 years now, there are lots of things which I learnt in these 2 years and there’s still lot more to learn. I’m going to write about everything that you need to setup your own website and start earning from it. I’m also going to write about the mistakes I did with my websites, so that you can avoid such mistakes.

Real mistakes in this world are the mistakes from which you learn nothing

These are the main topics that I’m going to discuss here
• How to start your website
• which software you should use for your website
• Different ways to promote your website
• Search engine optimization
• Blogging tips
• Ways to monetize your site