Do you know when search engines pick up on your blog updates? What if I told you that there is a way to manually ping over 20 top search engines in less than 1 second? Would you believe me?

Welcome to Ping-O-Matic! A free service by the WordPress Foundation, this tool lets you ping your selected search engines with a single click. Every time you publish an article, all you have to do is literally go to the site and click the ‘Send Pings’ button.

With me, I simply leave the Ping-O-Matic site up in one of my tabs and with every update of my blog, I click on the tab, click the button, and I’m done. No exaggeration, the entire process takes me a fraction of a second.

One great feature is if your blog update has recently been recognized by search engines, Ping-O-Matic will let you know and won’t actually push the ping.

If I only earned a penny for every question I see about when search engines ping your blog, I could probably buy every visitor I ever had a beer. The good news is that moving forward, you’ll always know since you’re the one doing it.

Oh, and BTW, no disclosure on this since I’m not an affiliate. Why? Because it’s FREE! No catch, just enjoy.

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If you’ve been following along, you should know by now that leaving comments on other blogs can boost your traffic. Obviously, it can help directly by others seeing your comment and clicking on your link to arrive at your site. But what about an indirect benefit?

Susan made a comment yesterday on my link building article that reminded me of an SEO topic that I planned on covering but haven’t discussed until now. So when you leave a comment on another blog, are you getting link juice? Well, it depends on whether the blog has NoFollow or DoFollow for the comments area.

NoFollow and DoFollow intro

Let’s start with their origins. Spammers leave comments with lots of links on others’ blogs, just to get link juice back to their site. To them, it doesn’t matter that their post is irrelevant, way too long, not readable, etc. They simply want to stuff keywords and links just to get a little bump in search engine rankings. This makes some comments areas, especially for popular blogs, unreadable.

In 2005, Google’s spam team created an HTML attribute do deter comment spammers. That’s when the NoFollow tag (rel=”nofollow”) was born. Adding this to comments prevents search engine spiders from crawling the links so that there is no passive benefit from leaving comments.

There is actually no such thing as a DoFollow tag; not having the NoFollow code inherently becomes DoFollow.

Almost all blogs start with NoFollow comments

By default, both WordPress (WP 1.5 and up) and blogger/blogspot have NoFollow comments. So ever since you first created your blog, anyone who left comments never received any indirect benefit from you unless you actively did something to take the tag off.

Why would you want to remove the NoFollow tag that’s meant to protect you from spammers? Well, for one, you may want to encourage activity on your blog by offering link juice back to the people making comments. Secondly, there are wonderful plugins like Akismet that should keep your spam from actually being published anyway.

For the record, Free Blog Help dot Com has a DoFollow comments area so anyone leaving comments do get some of my juice. So far, none of my sites have been “abused” so until then, everyone gets a bit of love when they contribute.

Winner: DoFollow

Any page that has a PR greater than 0 will be giving link juice and it will be shared equally among all the links on each page. So if a page has PR2, all the juice is distributed to all the links on that particular page; a PR3 page would give a little bit more. By making comments DoFollow, you are allowing links from the comments area to get some of that juice.

Probably the easiest way for most of us to remove the NoFollow tag is to use a simple plugin. I personally use the DoFollow plugin by Semiologic for all of my sites. If you are using WordPress, you can alternatively just do a plugin search for DoFollow.

When NoFollow should still be used

Taking the NoFollow tag off may sound like a great idea but not in all cases. If you have advertisers paying you for links, they probably don’t want to share juice with all of your comments. Since comments don’t show up on home pages, you’re usually fine. But if you are writing a review article, you may consider making the advertiser’s links the only ones getting juice from that particular page.

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I don’t consider the topics I write “advanced” but as it turns out, I need to reach back to the fundamentals once in a while. Apparently, there is so much info on the web on SEO and making money, a lot of basics get lost — like actually creating a blog!

Look, I get it, the money isn’t there for bloggers to write about how to start a blog site. People starting a blog typically aren’t the ones who would be clicking on ads or spending any money really. I’m guilty as well; one of my first posts here described how you would start a blog site but it was so high level. I wasn’t being lazy, I just didn’t realize it was necessary.

Regardless of whether or not it will actually make me any money, I do feel I owe it to my audience to post a step-by-step process on creating a blog from scratch. Most of the active Free Blog Help dot Com c0mmunity already have sites but there are a number of new visitors every day, many of whom do not have established blog sites yet. So here goes, a little more depth on my take on how to start a blog with WordPress.

How to start a WordPress blog

Step 1: Decide on a topic

This is your most important decision. If you are planning on creating a blog just to post your random thoughts, then you will always be your only audience.

“Experts” will tell you to find a niche that’s not saturated but my suggestion is to find a niche that you are passionate about, regardless of how popular it is. Your knowledge on the subject matter is secondary because you can actually post while you gain the knowledge or document the learning experience.

If you must, find a micro-niche. For example, there are many blogs on being a father already so instead, your blog will be about being a single dad, being a stay-at-home dad, or being a dad who homeschools his kids. You get the idea, right?

Remember, fresh content is the lifeline for any blog. If you’re not passionate about the topic, then you’ll lose interest fast — especially since readers and money from your blog won’t be coming for a while.

Step 2: Choose a domain name

If you are planning on using blogger or any other free full service blogging platforms, then you can just stop reading here. On the other hand, if you want your blog to grow and make some money in the process, you will need your own domain name. This way, your blog will be stayathomedaddy.com instead of stayathomedaddy.blogspot.com. Your blog will be easier to remember but more importantly, you have shown to the world that you are committed to this blog. Your own domain name will cost you less than $10 a year so there’s no reason not to do this.

Need help on picking a domain name? I have a brief article on what makes a good domain name that you should read. Come up with a short list since it’s likely that your first choice is already gone.

I personally use GoDaddy but you can use a number of sites to register it. I’ve had nothing but great things to say about GoDaddy for domain registration so if you’re going to head over there anyway, please use this link to register your domain with GoDaddy so I get a little something something.

Step 3: Secure a host

After you purchased your domain name, it’s time to find a home for it. This “home” is called hosting and this will cost you about $80 a year. Since you are using WordPress, you will want a hosting provider that supports it.

Before you ask, I also use GoDaddy to host all of my blogs. There are many other good companies out there but I haven’t had a bad day with GoDaddy yet so there’s no reason for me not to stick with them. The cost is comparable to everyone else and I know what I’m getting from a customer service standpoint, which is one of the best in the industry.

Again, if you’re going to use GoDaddy, please use this link to sign up for GoDaddy hosting. As an alternative, although I have not used Blue Host, some of my peers have raved about how happy they are there. You can head over the Blue Host here.

Whether you choose GoDaddy, Blue Host, or another WordPress supported hosting provider, you’ll be all ready to go for the next step.

Step 4: Install WordPress

Actual GoDaddy screen cap for installing WordPress

The big reason why I recommend WordPress supported companies is because of how easy it is to install WordPress. If you are not technical like most bloggers today, you probably don’t want to mess around reading requirements, setting up a database, downloading WordPress files and unzipping them into your folders, and running the install file.

Alternatively, if you signed up for GoDaddy, for instance, you can go to your Hosting Control Center and literally click a button to do all of the aforementioned things for you. Really, you click one button. It can’t get much easier.

If you need help navigating through the site or have questions along the way, you could simply call GoDaddy 24/7 and a customer service rep will walk you through step-by-step. By the way, installing WordPress is free.

Step 5: Add a theme

Even though you don’t have to have a new theme to start posting, I wouldn’t want anyone to see my new site with a default theme. A theme is basically the overall look and feel for your site. It may also provide you with additional administrative tools. Although many themes are free, usually the better looking and more fully-featured themes will cost you a few dollars (usually $40-$80 for a single theme).

There are so many choices out there that it can be overwhelming. Just look at the blogs that you like and scroll down to the footer to see what they are using. In the beginning, experiment with free themes so you get the hang of using WordPress. You may find that a free theme is perfect for your needs.

If you decide you’d like to pay for a theme, one that is clean, looks great, easy to use, has good support and optimized for search engines, one option is the one that I currently use. Frugal theme is a great choice in my opinion. You could use this link to learn about and purchase a Frugal theme. While you’re there, check out examples of what others have done with Frugal. Pretty amazing stuff!

Step 6: Start posting

Now that you have your building blocks laid out, it’s time to populate your blog with real meat. It will seem pretty easy to fill your new blog site with content at first. Don’t let that fool you! Most bloggers fall of the face of the earth pretty fast.

If you followed all the steps so far, you’ve put yourself into a pretty good position. Look at some of these tips on how to be in the top 10% of bloggers who can survive six months. You’ll find that the first tip is to set a goal on posting frequency and stick to it no matter what. That’s easier said than done.

What to do next

There you have it. You have your own WordPress blog for less than $100! I know you’re proud of yourself but don’t relax too much though. Your work isn’t done, in fact, it’s just beginning!

If you need more depth on what you can do in WordPress, check out the video from Getting started with WordPress – the newbie guide.

Although there is a lot to do, below are the first few areas you should start learning about.

• Which plugins to you install
• How to perform your search engine optimization (SEO)
• How to get Google ads on your pages

And if you get a moment, go check out how to make money blogging with YouSayToo.

One last thing — sign up for my email and RSS!

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So I was just looking at my Google Analytics report on the keywords that drive the most traffic to this site. It’s a tie for first place: “create free blog” and “create free blogs“. Looking back in my archives, I realize that I haven’t blogged about creating a blog since I wrote How do you start a blog site? in late July, when I first mentioned using either blogger or wordpress.

With millions of blogs (actually over a hundred million as of 2008), people are obviously finding ways to create their own blogs. Of course, many of these are created by the folks who have multiple blogs, usually across several niches, while others have abandoned their blogs long ago after only a post or two. There are also a good number of bloggers who simply find a release in simply blogging about a topic they love. They don’t do it because their employers put it in their job descriptions or they’re making a living from it. Rather, they just want to have a voice.

For a good number of these folks, they don’t need their own domain name (although it would be nice and it’s relatively inexpensive), don’t need to pay for hosting, and don’t want to do any coding or advertising. They want to start typing! The quickest way to do just that is to go to one of the sources as I mentioned before, blogger.com or wordpress.com, since they have the best free offerings. Although my companies have used others before, when I started my first personal blogs years ago, I used blogger.com (or blogspot.com, same thing). Although I’m tech savvy, I, too, wanted to just start typing. Blogger provided me with intuitive tools to do just that. Seriously, it can’t really get any easier. For instance, here’s how you could do it:

1. Go to blogger.com and create an account if you don’t already have one.
2. From your blogger dashboard, click Create a Blog.
3. Enter a blog title and a blog address (it will look like createablog.blogger.com).
4. Choose a template. This can be changed later.
5. Click New Post and start typing!

Moving forward, you can use your blogger dashboard for a variety of other things, like adding gadgets, changing fonts and colors, monitoring comments, and much more. You can even earn an income by adding Google AdSense to your blog (yes, you really can and I know because I’ve done it). WordPress.com is similar in almost every way but I chose to keep all of my early blogs in one spot, which was much easier to manage. I did eventually bring some serious blogs over to wordpress.org, which is a more advanced step for those who want it. If you’re looking for a quick write up on the differences between the two, just look at my WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org post from last month. I also documented the move for this blog on these posts: From Blogger to WordPress and From Blogger to WordPress, part II.

The bottom line is, you can’t really go wrong with either choice. Remember, the most important thing is getting started. The time it took you to read this, you could’ve already been typing your own post from scratch!

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As you can tell, the new site is up and running. Obviously it’s not perfect yet. I still have a lot of work to do! Nonetheless, even if it’s currently bare bones, it’s up-and-running. And as of this post, there are no ads anywhere! (Note to blogself: get ads on pages soon!) More importantly, I can at least blog since the site is functional even if it can’t earn me any money just yet.

The process it took me to get the site to this state was not as easy as I thought. In fact, it would’ve been easier to just start from scratch rather than bringing an existing site over. There were a few emails between my hosting company (GoDaddy.com) and I but at the end of the day, all it took was a little elbow grease. In future posts, I’ll be blogging about how I’m using wordpress, since it’s really a different animal.

For now, my other blogs will reside on blogger.com until I get settled into my new home.

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Currently, I have all my blogs on blogger.com (alias blogspot). Although I have used wordpress.com before, I have yet to try wordpress.org. Basically, wordpress.com is the free “lite” version. I’ll breakdown the details between the two in another post.

Anyway, I’m going to take this site, www.freebloghelp.com, from blogger to wordpress.org. Some of the things I want to do, quite simply, I can’t on do blogger. Basically, I want total control! Since I’m somewhat technical, this shouldn’t be a problem. I just need time to do it. For most bloggers’ basic needs, as I mentioned in my How do you start a blog site post, you still can’t go wrong with blogger.com or wordpress.com.

I just finalized my dedicated hosting today and I’ll be configuring this site using wordpress.org. I will also be changing my template to something that is more SEO friendly. In future posts, I’ll provide an update on how smoothly (or bumpy) the transition road was. Stay tuned!

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If you’re a non-techie like many of my friends, you’re in luck! In today’s self-server web environment, you can create a blog with little or no experience! If you were able to find this blog, then I’m certain you have enough computer skills to create your own blog.

First and foremost, since you’re not going to build a blog site from scratch, you have to decide which blog company you want to work with. There are a good number of them out there but two of the more popular ones are blogger and wordpress.

I’ve used both and they each have their pros and cons. Without going into crazy detail, if you’re just starting out, you can’t go wrong with either. Just go there and browse around. The interfaces are very intuitive so if you can’t figure out how to start posting, then I strongly suggest you find another hobby.

Of course, right now your blog site URL looks something like this bloggeydown.blogger.com. If you would like bloggeydown.com instead, you’ll have to register the domain somewhere else. That’s a topic for another day.

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