BloggingLine - Blogging Tips & Resources

My last article talked about some reasons why company should start blogging. This time, I want to share my opinion about another topic — it’s still related to my previous one. This time, I will write something a little bit technical, and — of course — it’s related to blogging activities.

If someone (or even a company) wants to start blogging (after having the concept), the very first questions to answer is: “What’s the best platform?”. The simple answer should be: “Use a blog engine as its platform. Period.” But, sometime, some companies go to an opposite direction. They created their own platform, getting someone make a custom content management, etc. For what reason? Because “it’s just cool to have our own application”? Think again! Personally, if it’s related to — again! — blog, it’s useless to build blogging application from zero, especially today. Why?

Read the rest of this entry →

When you start blogging seriously, you probably would consider these few tips. These tips were made based on my experience in building and running my own blog for almost three years.

1. Passion

You need to have passion in writing blogs. You should consider writing blogs not because you want to earn money from it, but because you love writing and want to share your life experience to others. Start from the heart, they say. If you’re a passionate person in blogging, you would not give up easily just because nobody commented on your posts.

2. Focus

What do you love the most in life? Do you like reading, watching movies, or travelling? You should have a blog with topics that are not too broad, but not too narrow either. Okay, so nobody would be angry with you if you want to have a blog with various topic discussions. However, then blog readers would be confused in finding your blog’s identity. Just imagine, if suddenly you find a topic about cooking roasted chicken in this blog. Would you find it weird?

3. Dream

Can you imagine what your blog would be like in the future? Where will you lead the blog next year? You should think yourselves as an entrepreneur. They start by dreaming and creating steps to achieve those dreams. Set as higher dream as possible. If you want to have a blog as famous as TechCrunch or Mashable, then start by creating steps to explore the possibilities to achieve it.

4. Identity

If you have found the topics of what you want to blog, then start checking alternatives for your blog name. Your blog name should suit your topic and preferably, you should have a domain that have the same name as your blog. Your blog and domain name will be your identity. So, be careful when you choose the name. The name would stick with you as long as the blog lives.

5. Frequency

Write as many posts as possible. With each post, put certain keywords that resemble what your blog is all about. The more you write, the more articles would be indexed by search engine. Someday, when a person search something related to the information about your blog topic, he would find your blog among the top list.

6. Design

Blog design is part of your identity. Even though you have great contents, nobody would read your blog if it’s not user friendly designed. You should avoid using free templates for your blog. If there are a lot of blogs out there with the same designed as yours, your blog identity would be blurred. In the future, you should consider designing a custom template only for your blog.

7. Start ’selling’ yourselves

Promote your blog in your daily activities. Make a name card with your blog URL on it. Tell your business partners about what your blog is about and how it would help them gain good information in it. You can also join a mailing list or groups discussions with topic related to your blog. Give some introductions and teaser of your posts in those groups.

The more you write good quality posts, the more your audiences would see you as an expertise. Hopefully, these posts would lead in giving you good project opportunities related to your competences.

Just like what I got when certain clients like what I wrote in my blog.

This post written by Pitra Satvika. He is currently active in his own company, Stratego, as client service manager and creative strategy.

The domain name business is a $2 billion one and is expected to reach $4 billion by 2010. The domain number has reached over 150 million, of which over half is .com or .net domains.

This inevitably results in more difficulties to assign a good domain name for a new site. CCTLDs (country-code top-level domains) are then chosen for the alternative.

But soon, the problem recurs for CCTLD. ICANN had to release new TLDs based on continent (.eu, .asia), culture (.cat, .sco), or segment (.travel, .jobs). Then there started a new wave of cross-bordering domain registration.

Some countries started to see it as a good business. Tuvalu, an island with 14,000 inhabitants, sells its .tv domain internationally, for ‘television’ domain; and an ex Soviet-country Moldova offers its .md domain for medical doctor communities.

Domain pun started coloring the Internet culture. Laos offers its .la domain for Los Angeles citizen, while North Ireland businessmen prefers to register .co.ni subdomain from Nicaragua rather than using .uk domain.

The pun flows inevitably. GTLDs with complete name (.info, .name) are licensed for fun and pun, such as Useless.info, Invalid.name, etc. And also CCTLD, like .it of Italy, .to of Tonga, etc. Improve.it, Go.to, Who.is.

Another idea came to use CCTLD as part of the word. Cr.yp.to, Del.icio.us, Blo.gs. Eu.ro, Wristwat.ch, , etc. And also name. Ma.tt for Matt Mullenweg (the founder of WordPress), Jes.us, or my own domain Kun.co.ro. Now they have a name: domain hacking. Steve.jobs? No, I haven’t checked it.

Criticisms have been cried against the practice of domain hacking. It breaks the mapping of Internet sites to political or geographical position. True, but it has been so since the rise of .com.

And how to start a domain hacking? A service like Xona.com could help finding ideas for domain hacks, albeit sometimes inaccurate. But Wikipedia is surely a good point to start. Start on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCTLD. A list of CCTLD could be found, with a sign to indicate whether the domain could be registered internationally.

A click on our chosen CCTLD will show the terms & conditions to register a domain under the CCTLD. We can see whether we’re lucky enough to be able to register a domain on second level (directly under the CCTLD).

We must also re-check whether the domain registration requires local presence. The address of each registrar is also linked on Wikipedia. If we’re unlucky, just wait.

Sometimes the policy is revised. It is not necessary to plan annexing a country just to gain a domain name.

Image credit: GettyImages

Kuncoro Wastuwibowo is a worker of telecommunications technology and business, and a lover of science and music. He lives in Bandung, West Java, currently works for Telkom, Indonesia’s largest telecommunications provider.

Welcome to Blogging Line, my WordPress blog. This is my first post. You can’t edit or delete it ( ), but you can start to read or share your comment!