I was hoping to pass along a little Newbie Blog encouragement and a little wisdom to any of you newbies who find your way to this site or for those of you who have questions about how to create a blog.  The wisdom is this, it takes a lot of time and work to get your blog developed and to the place where it starts generating traffic.  If you are in a hurry or if you think that you are going to be making piles of money quickly, you need to think again.   Any site that promises you easy quick money is not telling you the truth.  It takes time, hard work, and some sort of strategy to make your blog a success.  It is also likely that once you have been blogging for a while you will be changing and updating your strategy.

My encouragement is to stick with it.  There are millions of blogs on the Internet that started with a flourish and then were just abandoned.   If you can stick with it, over time your blog will start to have much better results.  You will also begin to see opportunities to monetize your site over time.  Adsesne is a good thing, but there are not  many people who are really making a living with Adsense.  There are some, but for most publishers it might eventually provide enough income to cover the cost of running a site.  More people are making money by reselling and by offering some type of specialized service.  Both of these options are easier to accomplish once your own blog is well established.

So, continue to blog and learn and don’t get discouraged.  For most of you it will take at least a year before you start to see your blogs taking shape and generating any real measurable traffic.  Take this time to write good content, develop links, and get a good keyword strategy.  You may want to get a few more blogs on line to start acquiring age for projects in the future.  Give it time and watch what happens.

We use WordPress for our how to create a blog site called My Newbie Blog.  WordPress is a wonderful platform for a blog.  It is simple to use and it has a large user base which helps keep the software fresh and innovative.  WordPress also has a lot of plugins available which can allow you to customize your blog in many creative ways.

One of the few drawbacks to using WordPress comes out of its innovation.  There are a lot of updates.  When WordPress is developing something new it may come through as a lot of mini-updates.  Each time this happens you need to update your site.  At least you should.  This is a problem if you have a lot of blogs.  If you don’t stay up with the updates you leave your site vulnerable to hackers.

One helpful tool to have is a plugin called WordPress Upgrade.  This plugin makes the process very simple and will save you some time.  The latest versions of WordPress have also made it easier to keep your plugins current.  You can usually get the latest update for a plugin now by just clicking on the update button on your plugin page.

Once a month I have a Site Maintenace day.  I visit all my sites and check on the staus of the WordPress version and see if any of the plugins need to be updated.  I also check the links out and make sure they are current and operating.  If I haven’t posted to the site recently, I will write an article of two or three hundred words on an appropriate topic.  I would encourage you to include a site maintenace day in to your regualr blogging routine.  In case you hadn’t realized it, today is site maintenance day for me.  This is an example of an article I post on my blogs on site maintenenace day.