So you’ve got a great theme and great ideas for your blog - now it’s time to start posting your content. In most blogging software this is pretty straightforward. If you have ever used a word processing program, then you can write a blog post. As a minimum you need to specify a title, some content, and a category or tags, then you can hit publish and you’re done.

But you can make your blog even more noteworthy by jazzing it up with images, music and video. ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ is a phrase that has been overused, but it still has a ring of truth. There is no better way to immediately capture your readers’ attention than to have an image near the start of your post.

Images And Multimedia

You don’t have to take the photos yourself (though you can). Instead you can go to a site which makes photos available for free. My site of choice is Morguefile which has thousands of photos on almost every topic you can imagine. Just put in your keywords, hit the search button and click on a thumbnail to see the image. Next, download it and it’s ready for uploading - or almost. I always resize my images as I don’t need a large, high res image for web use.

Tools for resizing include Photoshop, Gimp, Windows Picture Reszer or a host of online tools. In Wordpress you can also add a caption to the image and place it wherever you like in the text.

If you want to add other kinds of media, to a WordPress blog, such as MP3s or video, then it’s worth considering a plugin such as the Anarchy media player. This adds settings to your post composition window which allow you to embed video with only a couple of clicks. I’ve tried it the other way and using the player is definitely better. Alternatively, if you know you are going to use a lot of video, then choose a theme that has video functionality built in.

Planning Your Content

One way to keep your blog running smoothly is to have a plan. Darren Rowse suggests using an editorial calendar - and if you’re not sure where to start, there’s a spreadsheet that will help you. An editorial calendar is a way of determining what posts you will publish when. If you’ve been following this series, then you should have a list of post ideas ready. Try slotting them into a calendar to see where there are gaps.

Some people import this as a new calendar into their web calendar, so they can see if a planned holiday conflicts with a posting day. If this happens, then you can take advantage of a great feature of most blogging software - future posting: the ability to write a post today and publish it in the future. This can really help with blog management, as you can set aside a few hours to create all your posts for a particular week, find images and load them up ready to go. Then all you need to worry about is handling comments when they come in.

Comment Management

When you start blogging, you don’t get many comments, though you may get a lot of spam. I find it useful to turn on comment moderation, which is available in both Blogger and WordPress. In WordPress, you can also back this up with a range of anti-spam plugins. The latest version of WordPress also has great features for managing comments, allowing you to handle them all from the dashboard. If you happen to be running an older version, then try Better Comments Manager.

Next in our series on Getting Started In Blogging are posts on promotion, linkbuilding and stats. If you have any questions about blogging you would like us to cover, please let us know in the comments.

Sharon Hurley Hall
Get Paid To Write Online.com

_____

Don’t miss a post in 2009, subscribe to receive PiggyBankPie’s articles by Email. Using an RSS reader? Subscribe to our Full RSS Feed.

Related Posts:

50 Conversion Tips For E-commerce Websites
Five Plugins to Give Your Content a Boost
Lessons From Choosing a Premium Wordpress Theme
RSS Mixers: The Options at a Glance
Track Your Blog Conversations With Backtype