Blogging

Posting my sixth blog entry, I thought that some of you might be interested in blogging itself - how to start a blog, how much money it takes, is it easy or difficult to do, etc...  You can start a blog for as little as FREE, which is what I have done, using www.blogger.com as my host site (www.blogspot.com is essentially the same site).  I myself have really only followed one blog, http://pkrdlr.blogspot.com, which is titled, 'Life as a Las Vegas Poker Dealer'.  The blog is written by a friend of mine that I met while I lived in Las Vegas, and as you can see looking at the link, it's at blogspot.com - when I decided to use the same site for my blog, it linked me to blogger.com, so what I'm saying again is that they are basically the same host.  The site gives you templates to choose from for your background and your page layout (for those of you that know me well, I am NOT an artist), it allows you the option of featuring advertisements (with the possibility of making money from them), and you get to make decisions in many other areas.  It really is simple to set up the blog - you just need to complete a simple registration, which includes having a title for your blog, so be prepared to provide one, because I had to think one up while I was sitting at my computer registering.  With my blog still being in its infancy, I am sure that most of you following it at this point clicked on a link from your facebook page.  If you do get into blogging, there are many websites out there which can be used to promote your blog.  Some of them do not charge you to register, and the one that I am going to sign up with is www.blogcatalog.com.  Their site is free, but to submit your blog to be included in their database, you have to have done at least 10 posts, so after I hit the 'publish' button in a little while, I will be more than halfway there.  Blogcatalog.com also asks you which category you want your blog to be listed under (for their search engine), and mine seems to be a combination of sports and humor (the best matches that I can make from the choice of categories that they offer).

Back to the advertising that you may choose to be allowed space on your blogpage, the ads are placed there, in part, by the content in your blog postings.  I have enjoyed following the different ads placed by and below my postings as I have started this.  When I did my first true sports post this weekend, including my football predictions, those types of ads showed up on the site, where you can get football picks.  I have also had ad placements by ITT, Marriott, and Ramada, among others.  When you are in your account at the site, you can click on the number of pageviews that you have had (I am officially over 100 now, thank you), and a lot of information becomes available to you.  You can click on a 'traffic sources' button, and it shows you how your visitors found you.  I now have visitors from three sites that are not facebook.  For those of you who are not one of my facebook friends, they are the ones who have helped to get this blog off the ground, because to this point I have done nothing to get the word out other than posting the blog link on my facebook page.  The information is anonymous, so I cannot tell who is reading the blog, only how they were directed here.  Clicking on the 'audience' button gives me three interesting pieces of information.  First, I know which countries the readers are connecting from.  At this time, I have had 6 hits from Russia, and 1 hit from Germany.  The second piece of information provided is the type of browser that the user is viewing my page with - in order of most hits to least, you are viewing my posts on Internet Explorer, Mobile Safari, Mobile, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera.  The third type of pageview information provided relates to the viewer's operating system - again, in order of most hits, you are using Windows, Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, Macintosh, and Samsung.  You can click on an 'overview' button to see how many hits your blog has had each day. 

I know that this little blog entry really didn't have anything to do with sports and that it wasn't very funny, but I wanted to get out some information in case any of you were interested in started your own blog at some point. Of course, this does get me one post closer to having my blog reviewed for approval at Blogcatalog.com...  ;)  Have a great day everyone!