Monday, May 21, 2007 Building a PR5 blog in 3 months By Oliver Robillo
I.T. Talks!
FRIENDSTER AND My Space aside, serious blogging is now on the upswing in Davao. After the first bloggers party in Davao last 17 March, I've been discovering more and more Davao-based blogs. And ever since, I've gotten quite a few inquiries about "problogging", or the business of making money off of blogs.
So, I'd like to share my experience in creating and publishing one of my blogs, Ang Dabawenyo (www.angdabawenyo.com). I started it last February, and on 1 May 2007, it got a Page Rank of 5/10 from Google.
I love Davao. That's the whole idea behind Ang Dabawenyo. This is probably the most important consideration in blogging: What's it all about? Around what general idea will your blog posts develop? And once you've made up your mind, keep your blog focused on your chosen central topic or genre.
I embarked on this blog project with the objectives of promoting Davao on the one hand, and of keeping Dabawenyos all over the world up-to-date on the other.
Basically, it's an online magazine. However, since it's a blog, and because I'm not prone to sugarcoating, Ang Dabawenyo presents Davao in a sober tone. In other words, I talk about the bad as well as the good.
Having decided on the blog's literary framework, I proceeded with the technical stuff. I chose WordPress (www.wordpress.org) as my blog platform because of its usability and sheer power.
It is, in the opinion of thousands of experienced bloggers, the ultimate in blogging software in the whole wide world. And, its features and functionalities are extended even further by a plethora of plugins and themes (design templates). Best of all, WordPress or "WP" is completely free-of-charge.
Using WP's free blog application, however, requires that you have access to web hosting; although, free hosting is also available, over at WordPress.com. Fortunately for me, my good friend, Bob Martin of Mindanao.com, offered to host this blog -- and my other blogs -- for free! So I had Ang Dabawenyo up and running in no time. By the way, WP is famous for its 5-minute install. No kidding.
The WP plug-ins that I've installed in this blog are for both design and functionality enhancements. For example, the Tag Cloud plug-in lets me display my posts' categories as an interesting-looking batch of keywords displayed in differing sizes.
The larger-sized texts represent categories that have the most number of posts. There are also a plug-ins for Recent Comments, and Related Posts. The latter makes surfing the blog easier, because it displays in each post page several clickable titles of other articles that are more or less related to the current post.
Other plug-ins are not plain to see, but serve to extend the technical features of WP. One such plug-in is Google Sitemaps. This creates a link map of your entire blog -- but not for human use. This is employed by the Google spider to effectively and completely crawl all your blog's pages. This makes for better results when people do searches related to your content. Ultimately, this plugging can contribute to the PR health of your blog.
The next step in the blog development process was for me to enroll Ang Dabawenyo with Technorati.com and Feedburner.com. Basically, Technorati lets you keep track of your blog's incoming links. It also shows your blog's global rank among all registered blogs worldwide (usually a new blog starts off at the millionth place or so).
As of this writing, AngDabawenyo.com's rank stands at 109,519 (out of over 70 million blogs), with an authority of 102. This means that in the last 6 months, there were 102 blogs that linked to mine. The idea behind it is that, if your content is really interesting, more people will link to you, thus the corollary between amount of incoming links and content authority.
Feedburner, for its part, gives you a boost in promoting your blog. In a nutshell, it makes subscribing to your blog a very straightforward process.
People around the globe subscribe to blogs using digital readers, which may be Web-based or mobile (cell phones, PDAs, etc.). Feedburner has a suite of services that will make your blog sizzle! However, it might require a bit of computer savvy to take full advantage of all those high-tech services. But it's never too late to learn, if you're serious about problogging.
In my next column, I will continue presenting Ang Dabawenyo and how I reached PR5 on Google in only 3 months.
