If you decide that Niche Sites sound like an avenue of blogging business that intrigues you, staying organized will be very important.  One strategy for developing Niche sites is just sheer volume.  Even if your sites only make ten or twenty dollars a month, you can do well if you get 200 niche sites developed.  I know some people that develop 1 new site a week, and some that shoot for 4 or 5 a week!  Using the methods we are talking about it can be done for very little money.  It just takes time and you have to stay organized.  As you add sites and domain names, do keyword research, write articles, and build links you can get overwhelmed pretty quickly.  Some of the most common options for staying organized include keeping notepads, having a traditional filing system, or using spreadsheets.  I want to give you another option that I have developed for staying organized.  I call it the Organizational Blog.

The Organizational Blog

I developed a blog that is really just for me.  It is set up so that I can get to all of my sites from that one blog.  I also use it to pass blogroll links to some of the blogs I am developing.  I never want to miss an opportunity to build links.  I have some pages set up that are password protected where I work on sites that I don’t necessarily want people to see.  I have links to all of the tools that I think are important.  When I sit down to work I start by going to my organizational blog.  From there it reminds me of what I am working on, where I am on each project, what needs to be done when, etc.  To set up the blog I used free web hosting so it doesn’t cost me anything.  It might take a little extra time in the beginning to set up but it will pay huge dividends later.

I justify the time further by the blogroll links it provides.  I write short articles about the sites I am promoting and what I am doing to them.  I don’t promote the organizational site at all and I don’t think that anyone will ever read the articles (it would be fine if someone does and hopefully it would lead them to my main sites), but each article combines with those blogroll sites and builds links over time.  The organizational blog will easily add 50 links over the course of a year (probably closer to a hundred) to each site I add to my blogroll.  Considering it is work that I am already doing I think it is the best way take advantage of it.  As you consider how to create a blog you might just want to start an organizational blog of your own.

Another important answer to the “How to Create a Blog” question is writing and marketing articles. When you market your articles properly you can get some good links to your blog. There are many directories where you can submit your articles. Here are a few examples:

Article City (articlecity.com)
Article Dashboard (articledashboard.com)
Article Directory (article-directory.net)
Ezine Articles (ezinearticles.com)
Go Articles (goarticles.com)
Idea Marketers (ideamarketers.com)
Internet Home Business Articles (internethomebusinessarticles.com)
Search Warp (searchwarp.com)

These sites are a good way to get your articles out into the world. The drawback is that it takes a lot of time to go through the process of submitting your articles. A faster way to accomplish the same thing is to use Article Marketer. This service will submit your articles for you. They offer a free service which has a partial distribution or you can pay a fee to take advantage of their full service. I pay for the full service because I feel like I can spend my time more wisely doing other things with the blog than hand submitting my articles to numerous directories.

Using Article Marketers

Go to the Article Marketers website.

Take some time to read about the services the site offers and then go ahead and press Open Your Account. This option works if you are signing up for either the free service or one of the paid services.

You will need to enter some basic information.

You then need to decide which of the services you want to use.

Once you have entered in all your information hit Next and you have an Article Marketers account.

Login to the site with the User Name and Password you just set up. Now you can enter a article for submission to the directories. One word of advice; if you have already posted the article on your own site you should rewrite it before you submit it to the directories. Keep the main ideas but change the title and the headers, etc.

You are going to type in the title of your article and then paste in the text of the article. The author boxes are where you get to add the text top get your link back. There are two author boxes, one that is a text box where you can enter the URL of your blog. The other box allows you to enter in your blog site URL and the URL of your post into the box.

The HTML that I enter looks like this:

Stephen Lawes teaches people how to <a href=”http://mynewbieblog.com”>create a blog</a>. He shows them <ahref=”http://mynewbieblog.com/create-a-blog-you-can-be-proud-of/”>how to create a blog</a>, and how to begin to make money from it.

You then need to choose what categories to submit your articles.

Enter in any special requests you have about when to submit the article and then click on the agreements and type in the spam code and hit Next.

The Review Process

Once your article is submitted it first gets reviewed by a computer (since Article Marketers wants to send you article to as many possible directories there are some pretty specific guidelines they follow). If there are any issues that need to be resolved it will point them out to you. Fix any problems and save your update.

The article is then reviewed by actual people. If they find problems you will have to fix them as well. Don’t get discouraged if you have to make numerous changes, it is making your article acceptable to the largest number of directories. The more sites that publish your article the more good back links you receive. Keep on writing and learning how to create a blog!!!

To start writing posts you need to go the WordPress dashboard and then press the Write button and then the Write Post button.

In the Title area go ahead and type in a title for your post. For this exercise your title is not that important. In the future you need to make sure you use good titles for your posts so that people will read them. We will talk more about that in a later post. I typed in “Using the WordPress “Write Post and Write Page” Editor” as my title for this post.

Working with the Editor

Now that you have a title put the cursor in the text area. The WordPress editor works a lot like most word processing programs you might have used. Once you master a couple of basic skills you will be well on your way to writing comfortably. There are two ways to look at what you are typing. The Visual mode is the setting most like what you are probably used to using for word processing. The Code mode lets you see the actual code that is being generated as you type. As you learn to use the WordPress editor don’t be afraid to try things. Switch from one mode to another. Press the buttons on the toolbar to see what tools are available to you.

There is also a hidden toolbar that can be very helpful. Click on the last icon on the right side of the toolbar and you will get another toolbar.

Check out the options on this toolbar as well. I use the option on the left of this toolbar often. You can use it to make the headings in your post larger than the rest of your text. Check it out by pressing on the down arrow next to where it says Paragraph. You will get a drop down menu with a lot of options.

I have been using the Heading 2 option for my headings in the posts and I like the way it looks. I am going to put a new heading in here, check it out.

Saving, Previewing and Publishing

As you write the WordPress editor is automatically saving your draft. What you write is called a draft until you publish it. As you are writing you should routinely hit the Save and Continue Editing button.

Once you have hit the Save and Continue Editing button you will also have an option to Preview the post on your blog. This option will show up just above and to the right of the toolbar. By hitting Preview you can get a loook at your post before you Publish it. If you need to take a break from writing hit the Save button and you will be taken back to the WordPress dashboard. When you have completed your post hit the Publish button and you will see the post on your blog. Don’t worry if you need to make changes after you publish the post, you can go back and edit it at any time.

Write Pages

When you are adding pages you use the same editor to enter your information. Take some time to get familiar with the editor because you will be using it a lot.

Links

It is a good practice to link information in your posts to other posts that pertain to the same thing or to places on the internet. To make a link all you need to do is highlight the text where you want to put a link. For example, I will put a link in that will take readers to a post I wrote called Starting a Blog from Scratch. To insert the link I first highlight Starting a Blog from Scratch. (To highlight text, put the mouse cursor to the left of the text you want to highlight, then hold down the left button on the mouse, and with the button down move the cursor to the end of the text you want to highlight. Let go of the mouse button and you will see your text highlighted.)

With the text highlighted press on the icon in the toolbar that looks like a chain link.

When you press the link icon you get the following screen.

After the http:// in the Link URL type in your blog URL followed by the name of your post. If you changed the Permalinks like we discussed in a previous post you can just enter the title of your post with each of the words separated by a hyphen. To make my link I typed in mynewbieblog.com/Starting-a-Blog-from-Scratch/

Click on the insert button and you have a link. Go to Preview and check it out to see if it works. If it doesn’t work you may have typed in the URL wrong or missed or mistyped a letter. I am going to go back and insert another link in this post before I finish. I am going to make a link to the post I wrote about Permalinks. I also am going to add a few Tags down in the Tag area. I will add Permalinks, links, and pages to the tag area.

That’s it. Now I will go back and see if there are any mistakes in spelling or grammar. When I feel like the post is in good shape I press the Publish button and the post is then on the blog. I check it again for any errors and fix anything I see. Go ahead and take some time to practice with the WordPress editor until you feel comfortable with the way it works.