Ricky’s Online Business Blog

I was asked by a customer on how to create a blog like my RickySoo.com.  I guess I might as well post the reply here so that others can be benefited too.

First of all, this blog is not a prominent one.  There are many other blogs doing much better than mine, in terms of their business model, strategy, marketing, design, usefulness and content.

But having created a few blogs for myself and others, I guess I still qualify to give my two cents.  Below is not a step-by-step guide but just an overview.  Not only the technical side, but also the business and marketing aspects as well.  If you need any detailed information, please post your questions in the comments below.

Why you want to blog – Decide on the objective of a blog.  Is it to promote your business, sell your products, bring traffic to your main web site, be a PR channel for your business, express your opinions, earn money by blogging or anything else. Even if it is just a personal blog, you still need a “business model”.

Domain name and web hosting – Register a domain name and web hosting.  For serious blogging, don’t use free blogging service.  There are many such domain name registrars and hosting providers.  You can also consider mine at http://bizpartner.com.my.  Alternatively, if you already have a business web site, you can include your blog into it under a folder such as http://www.yourbusiness.com/blog, or a subdomain such as http://blog.yourbusiness.com.

Get WordPress – Download the free blogging software called WordPress here at http://wordpress.org/download/.  There are many other such software.  But so far WordPress is the most popular one.  Your web hosting provider, like me, may also provide a facility (such as cPanel) to install WordPress on your web server with just a few clicks of button.

Install WordPress – If you have downloaded WordPress manually, install it on your server.  Refer to the documentation at http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress.  It’s a 5-minute installation.  Basically you just need to upload the files to your server, run the install file, and then follow the instructions on screen to finalize the setup.

Tune up your blog – Login to your admin account, click “Design” to choose a user-friendly blog theme. Click “Settings” to set up various options, especially options for Discussion and Permalinks.  For a start, you should allow anyone to post comments.  You should also change the “permalink structure” from the default to another more search engine-friendly structure such as “Day and name”.

Publicize your blog – Let Google know about your blog.  You can submit your blog to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl/.  Let your friends and customers know about your blog.  Try to get other web sites to link to your blog.  Incoming links help search engines to find you, and also to better your search engine ranking.  If you have another business web site, you should put up a link there to your blog.

Blog consistently – It is one thing to set up your blog, but it’s another to run it successfully.  To make it effective, you need to make new blog posts regularly and consistently, even if it means just once a week.  In other words, you need to keep on adding (good) content into your blog so that search engines and other people can recognize it.

Review your blog – Evaluate your blog regularly to see whether it’s helping you to achieve the objective you set in the first place.  Change course, or fine tune your blog to make sure it works for you.  Close it down and restart another one if necessary.  I had two other blogs on RickySoo.com since years ago but closed them down since they were not serving any useful purpose.

More advanced options – The above is just scratching the surface.  As you use blog more often, you will naturally learn more.  Then you can consider other more advanced options such as installing useful plugins, dealing with comment spams, search engine optimization (SEO), tracking your feed readers, doing web site analytics, promoting it on social networks and so on.  But don’t worry for now.  There is a time for everything.

Have I missed out anything else important? Please correct me or add your comments if any.  Happy blogging!

Has any hosting provider approached you to offer 100GB hosting space, 1000GB of data transfer and so on, at dirt cheap rate of only RM188 per year?

Sorry but you should not be too excited about the numbers above – the large space and lots of bandwidth as promised. You will never use that much.

Firstly, an average web site will not use so much space. All but one of my own sites are below 50MB each. Check this out.

Secondly, you will not use so much bandwidth. Almost all my customers’ web sites use less than 2GB per month!

Thirdly, I’m wrong. Your web site is another The Star or MalaysiaKini. You indeed need lots of space and bandwidth. But in such case, your site will have consumed too much so-called “server CPU resources” that we will have to ban your site because it has used too much space and bandwidth compared to others! Read the fine print, you have violated the hosting policy!

Fairness is a virtue in shared hosting. No site is allowed to take up too much resources at the expense of other sites shared on the same server. Is your web site having more than 1000 visitors per day? Chances are your traffic is too high compared to others that your site will be banned for monopolizing the server resources!

So even if you have access to 100GB server space and 1000GB bandwidth, you will not get to use it. Better go for dedicated hosting – one whole server just for you.

This is an “overselling” kind of business model. Let’s say a server has 100GB hard disk space. One can dare to offer 10GB hosting to 100 customers! Does the extra space of 900GB come from the air? Because, statistically speaking, we know an average customer will not use even 1GB!

If that’s the case, I can also claim to offer you 1000GB space and 5000GB bandwidth per month for the price of 1GB only. Overselling is over promising! But this seems to be how some of us compete in hosting industry

So by claiming to offer unbelievable tons of space and bandwidth to customers, are we actually deceiving people?

When you give a “link love” to a web page, it means you put up a link from your web page to that web page.  It is often unsolicited, that means the other web page owner does not ask for the link.  But you want to link because it may be so interesting, funny, admirable, funky, useful, informative or worthy of your link love.

According to common understanding (or misunderstanding?), when you link out to another web page, you are giving them a “vote” on its importance.  Google will treat your link to the page as a backlink, therefore ranking that page higher in its search result pages.

Furthermore, when you link out to another page, according to the common (mis)understanding of the Google PageRank formula, you can be losing “importance” for yourself, and so your link love makes you less important, and so lower ranking in Google search result.

This is not to mention that, when you link out to another page, you can drive visitors away from your web site to those page, therefore reducing traffic on your web site.

Therefore, many site owners or bloggers are very careful in linking to others.  Reciprocal linking (both pages agree to link to each other)?  Maybe.  One way linking?  By default no!

But have we understood it correctly?  After reading directly from the source in the official Google webmaster central blog, it seems that it really does not matter whether we should be generous or stingy in our link love or not.

What really matters is that we link to only web pages whose content are relevant to ours.  This can make our site even more “important” in our subject matter.  But we need to avoid linking to web pages with irrelevant content, “spammy” pages which exist only to increase their search ranking, and “bad neighborhood” which is a collection of web sites which scheme to increase ranking of one another.

By the way, I wonder if “link love” is an appropriate term or not.  True love to someone, as I was taught, is something we give out unselfishly, even if the other person does not deserve it.  It is a mercy and grace.  It is not about what we can get in return.

So are you a generous link lover or a stingy link lover?  As for me, I’m learning to be generous one.  I will link to you if you are good and relevant, whether you ask for it or not.  And as a site owner, my job is not to beg for links, but to develop really good content so that others will “love” me more