Web Exploits

Because of the much initial labor in the building of a blog, many lazy people suggest that it is better to create a forum, which requires less labor. This is a misconception. Most successful forums on the web are products of spontaneity.

They grew because users or subscribers found particular passionate interests in the subject being treated by the forum. It takes 5 times more effort to write than to read. Many web surfers prefer to ‘read and go’, than writing to contribute their 2 cents.

If they would write, at all, it must be because the issue is sufficiently passionate to warrant their written contributions. That is why the population of blogs to forums in web space is like 1,000 to 1. Meaning you would have seen 1,000 successful blogs before you come across one successful forum.

The web space is full of dead forums than you can imagine.

Hyper Text Markup Language is one of the simplest computer languages, written in form of tags, used by bloggers to direct search engines and visitors to any website or blog they want to showcase. You can read more of that for academic pleasure from Wikipedia But we are more interested in just a very tiny aspect of it as bloggers, which we can use to increased our visibility on the internet.

You need to know how to ANCHOR a text to be ‘clickable’ on your blog and would lead to another page, either on your blog or to another blog of reference. This is the most basic technical side of blogging you can’t afford to ignore. It is like learning how to control the steering wheel for a new driver.

It is a technique used by bloggers to link to one another or refer their readers to a website where visitors can make purchases and accrue commissions to you as a blogger.

Examples of Anchor Text
If for example you want to create a link to Philomena’s blog. You can write something like this:

“I was browsing through the blogosphere yesterday and I saw this television story blog which boasts of the complete episodes of the Columbian Second Chance telenovela”.

For that statement to make any meaning or carry any value, you must put Philomena’s blog address in the highlighted (blue) anchor text, so that whoever among your readers clicked on it would arrive at Philomena’s blog at http://www.telenovelastories.tv

How would you do this in a blog post? The simple formula is…

anchor tag hypertext ref “BLOGADDRESS” “ANCHORNAME” anchor tag closed.

The only thing that would show in your post is the anchor name, that technical html language would not appear, they were only written there to give command to the browser and computer to execute certain functions, in this case, provide link to the BLOGADDRESS or website address indicated by the anchor name.

From the original statement above,

“I was browsing through the blogosphere yesterday and I saw this television story blog which boast of the complete episodes of the Columbian Second Chance soap opera”.

The blogaddress is: http://www.telenovelastories.tv/?p=69 and the anchor name is: ‘television story blog’ which is the only word or words that would appear from that technical jargon.

Another Example:

“I visited Chioma’s blog on breast-feeding yesterday, and whao! it was a cool site”.

The BLOGADDRESS is: http://www.breastfeedingroom.com while the ANCHOR NAME is: Chioma’s blog in the acove example.

On of the tricks of our trade as probloggers is blog design. Because many readers and visitors to your blogposts may get too familiar or accustomed to your blog, which may induce boredom, many probloggers change or tweak their blog designs every quarter (three months).

That stage is not for you yet, until you begin to make ‘heavy bucks’ from blogging, then, you will realize that blog design is like a dress, which needs changing regularly to give your readers and visitors a sense of freshness about you.

At other times, blogs are designed with the primary motive of increasing the monetization channels through your blog.

In my standard recommendation, I always advise that a blog should always have a structure of five posts per page. This would help your blog to upload easily when visitors come to read your blog.

Many amateur bloggers whom I noticed, leave their blogs with 15 or more blog posts per page. Recently, one of the gurus of the blogging world John Chow, adopted my 5-posts-Per-Page structure on his popular blog.

I always advise that a blogger needs a basic grasps of html and other simple technical web design tips. This would definitely help you from running to and fro your blogging mentor every day. more about html in the next chapter…

In registering your chosen or preferred domain name, you have to first search out if that name is available. Many web hosting companies also have their domain name registrars. You can always type the proposed domain name into the search box of your domain name registrar and click to find out the availability of that domain. If that name is not available, you can always amend the name to one that is eventually available.

One of the most popular domain name registrars and web hosts is Go Daddy.

Hosting
To host your domain, you must bear in mind that a Linux/apache sever is best suited for blogs than a Win server….

Don’t be baffled by the technical details of disk space and monthly data transfer (band width) or megabytes and gigabytes. In simple layman language, what it meant is that, as an ‘aspiring landlord’, you must first buy a piece of land big enough, to accommodate your dream house.

You must also register the title deed with the authorities saddled with that task. That would be the proof of your ownership, in order to avoid future disputations. Once you are set up on this level, you have become a bonafide member of the virtual estate world. Welcome to the virtual estate world, it is bigger than real estate in many respects.

Because Africans are still ignorant and yet to wake up to the great opportunities on the internet, many local paid hosting providers have and are still ripping-off many bloggers and website owners. Particularly in Nigeria, these quacks sell disk space as small as 10 to 20 megabytes for the price 1,000 megabytes.

This is akin to selling a 10 sq meters piece of land to somebody to build four units of 3-bedroom flats. Apart from the fact that the space is ridiculously small to build any house on it, they have also cheated the buyer by collecting money equivalent to the price of a full plot of land for a tiny portion (less than 10%).

For me, it is almost ridiculous to pay $40 for a new top level domain (TLD) name, in this age of infotech when you can buy it for $10 or less! That is how much our Nigerian ‘resellers’ are selling TLDs for gaullible and desperate victims in our midsts.

If we must succeed as an army of bloggers with a vision to stamp the banner of AFRICA on the global map of the blogosphere, we cannot permit cyber touts and hustlers who pretend to be indigenous web hosting companies to pollute the market; we must sack them out of the market and bring quality service for bloggers from Africa.

These fellas also have the low uptime of their servers which are always down, due to poor infrastructures (lack of uninterrupted electricity and also absence of skilled technical manpower).

No serious problogger desirous of success would surrender to be trapped by these unscrupulous local hosts.

What is LANDLORD BLOGGING
A landlord blogger is one who registered and paid for his or her own domain name, and also for hosting it. A landlord blogger does not exist at the mercy of anybody. All the labor of a landlord blogger goes directly into building his or her web reputation, blog traffic, blog rank, blog authority and brand name, in the blogosphere.

All the rewards (monetary, ranking, branding etc.) of landlord blogging come directly to him or her.

A landlord bloggers has every right to offer for sale and sell his or her blog in the market place of the blogosphere.

Landlord blogging is the launching pad for going to professional blogging career. Until you graduate into landlord blogging, you are just a miserable joke in the blogosphere. Without graduating into landlord blogging, your problogging dreams would be a stillbirth.

3 Steps to PRO-BLOGGING
The first step into a problogging career is to register a domain name. This costs from $2 to $20 or more per annum, depending on who your domain registrar is and also if you are registering a dot com or dot net or dot co.uk or any other custom domain name. In fact custom domain names are known to cost as much as $200 or more.

The second step into problogging career is hosting your domain name with a web hosting company. You can host your domain with any amount from $50 to $150 per annum for a standard disk space of 1.0 Gigabyte (1,000 megabytes), and a minimum traffic data (bandwidth) of 10 Gigabytes per month.

The third and most important step into problogging career is to upload the most popular problogging software into your database space, from WordPress dot org is the best pro-blogging platform in the web because of its diversified and flexible functionalities and plug-ins that can be added to your taste and preference.

Teaching you how to upload your WordPress software to your paid host and domain name can be found at CODEX WORDPRESS. Whenever you reach that stage, I would gladly help you because you have paid for this e-course.

After the third step, you are then set to start your pro-blogging career. Any further step to enhance your blog’s reputation and rank would be taught in the succeeding chapters 3 and 4. (Search Engine Optimization and Traffic Generation Strategies).