Getting started with a blog can be exciting and nerve racking for some; just like learning to drive. You really want to get started, you really want to do it, but once you are behind the wheel, you start worry about everything. You want to do everything right, but there are so many unknowns. What if… How do I… Umm…

Like driving, you need to start somewhere and take it slow. Sure, you want to take on the world and just go, but there is no way to know everything right away; even if you did read all the books and how-to’s. Instead, take it one step at a time and focus on the basics first. Then, as you get those down, learn new things.

And lets not worry about traffic. Everyone who starts driving is concerned with big city traffic. There is so much of it and it and yet other drivers have no issues. Well that’s because they’ve been driving for a long time and know what they are doing. When you first start blogging you can’t expect to be as good, or as popular, as those that have been doing it for years. It just doesn’t happen that way. You need to take it slow and learn the ropes. Before you know it, you’ll be cruising along just like everyone else.

A blog should be considered the central hub of your social networking universe. Everything you do should drive traffic back to your blog, or website, as a way of combining all your efforts to give your brand maximum exposure.

Once thing you can do to help populate your social networks would be to update your status with your blog posts when new content is published.

By no means is auto-populating a service like Twitter going to get good results on its own, but as one piece of a social networking strategy, it can help a network grow.

Here are just a few of the many ways you can automatically syndicate a blog post to social networks.

TwitterFeed

TwitterFeed is quite possibly the best way to syndicate content. TwitterFeed can update Twitter, Facebook, Ping.fm, HelloTXT and Laconica. It also integrates URL shortening services, hash tags and keyword filters.

Ping.fm and HelloTXT

By default, Ping.fm and HelloTXT need someone to manually send out updates, but when integrated with TwitterFeed, you can auto post blog posts across the social web. Ping.fm and HelloTXT include nearly all social networks including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Ning, Tumblr, Posterous, Flickr, Yammer and many more.

One of the biggest features that Blogger.com had over other free blogging sites is the ability to publish files to a website via FTP. This allowed site owners to have a blog in a directory on their site without having to install and maintain software on their web server.

Unfortunately, on March 26th, Blogger.com is shutting down their FTP functionality.

Blogger claims that only .5% of their users use this feature and that it’s a big strain on their engineering staff to keep it working like it should. So they are shutting it down.

So now what? Are you a part of that .5%?

Believe it or not, this is a blessing in disguise. If you were using the FTP functionality, then you probably are serous about blogging. And if you are, then it’s time to take the next step and move away from Blogger.com.

The best advice is to setup WordPress on your site and import all your blogger posts. Setting-up, importing, and learning new software may take some additional time, but the in the long run, you’ll be happy you did. Not only will you have more features and more control over your blog, but it’ll be better for your users and perform better in search engines.

The idea of trackbacks and pingbacks are great. It’s a way of getting notified when someone else posts about you on their blog. However, spammers have taken over and it makes you wonder if there is any value in trackbacks anymore.

My guess is that most bloggers will say that the value is little to none. The number of spammy trackbacks are overwhelming at times and, even if you do have a good spam plugin protecting you, the ones that get through are not quality. The chances that a good trackback comes into your site is rare, but when it does, it is great to see.

The idea of trackbacks is fantastic, however it is to easy for spammers to abuse; and they know that. The system has been corrupt for a while and it makes a blogger think that it may be time to just disable them and forget about them.

What do you think?

Do you still see value in trackbacks and pingbacks? Or have you disabled them and let them die?

Yes, trackbacks/pingbacks are dead. Lets turn them off.

If you’d like to disable trackbacks on your WordPress blog, go into your blogs settings and then click ‘discussion’ and un-check the box for ‘Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.)’

Believe it or not, there is only one item you need to have a successful blog; and that’s ambition.

Ambition – Photo from hlkljgk

It doesn’t matter if you use WordPress, Blogger or TypePad. It doesn’t matter if you are an industry thought leader or a virtual unknown. As long as you have the ambition to post often, the ability to stick with it, and can be patient, you’ll be successful in time.

Yes, there are other things that can help make your blog successful but if you don’t put forth the effort to create good content in the first place, all the tools and plugins in the world won’t do you any good.

Have you ever wanted to have the ability to better organize your uploads folder in WordPress?

By default, WordPress organizes all uploaded media by year and month. Where this works well for some bloggers, others want to organize their uploads into things like pdfs, downloads, videos and so on. This is especially important when using WordPress as a CMS.

That’s where the Relocate Upload plugin comes in handy.

Relocate Upload allows a blog admin to setup custom folders inside the uploads folder, or anywhere on the web server, for better file organization.

Relocate Upload Settings

When uploading media, Relocate Upload is integrated into the upload window with a drop down menu that allows the user to select the folder for the item to be uploaded to.

If MacGyver has taught us anything, it’s that you don’t need big expensive tools to get the job done. The same goes for blogging.

There are plenty of free blogging tools and resources to do everything from creating SEO friendly sites to keyword research and analytics. Why spend the money on a tool when you could use that money on internet marketing services or to grow your company?

Here are 13 free blogging tools and resources that MacGyver would be proud of.

WordPress

MacGyver would surly use the most popular, customizable, powerful, and completely free, blogging software on the internet. WordPress offers a large number of feature and hundreds of plugins that will make any blog successful. From newbies to web design professionals, WordPress is a great choice for ease of use, search engine optimization and price.

Google Analytics

MacGyver’s got to keep tabs on his site and know where his traffic is coming from.  For this, Google Analytics is a no brainer. No need to spend hundreds on an analytics package, Google Analytics as all the features you need at a price that can’t be beat.

Guest posters are a good idea for all blogs. Different people have different ideas, different writing styles, and different ways to connect to visitors.

Not only is it a good idea for your readers, it’s a good idea for your blog.

The more authors a blog has, the more content that will get generated, the more active the blog will appear and, when that happens, search engines can give more rankings and traffic. All of this leading to more sales, revenue, or whatever the blogs KPI is.

More bloggers help out a blog in more ways than one and growing a blog with multiple authors, or guest posters, is a win-win situation.

And with that, BloggerDesign is happy to have Michelle Bowles, a copywriter at TopRank Marketing, publishing her first post here tomorrow! Check back to see what tips she has for bloggers.

One of the most popular posts on BloggerDesign is how to get Flash (swf) into a WordPress post. The previous post is about three years old so I thought I’d write up a follow-up post, as embedding Flash is much easier now as it’s all built into WordPress.

With the newer versions of WordPress there is a button to embed media.

Embed Button

Once clicked, all you have to do is enter in the Flash (swf) file URL, set the dimensions, hit ‘Insert’, and WordPress will do the rest.

Embed Window

It’s that easy. No plugins, no confusing code, just provide WordPress with the URL of the Flash swf file and it’ll write the code to embed the Flash file into your post.

As a bonus, the embed option also works with Shockwave, Quicktime, Windows Media, YouTube URLs, and Real Media if you need to embed those media files as well.

A bloggers dream is to get noticed. That could be in the form of a post getting re-tweeted hundreds of times, hitting the homepage of Digg, shared a lot on Facebook, getting noticed by the media, or one of the many other ways a blog can get traffic. However, a flood of traffic can quickly cripple a blog and turn that dream into a nightmare. The good news here is that the WP Super Cache plug-in can help minimize issues caused by too much traffic.

The WP Super Cache plug-in creates a static HTML file of each post and serves that file up to users. This static HTML file loads faster and is a lot less demanding on the web server and database. Now if hundreds or thousands of people were to visit the same post in a short amount of time, instead of re-pulling that post from the database and piecing it all together, WordPress would just show the cached page; aka a static HTML version of the post. This page now loads faster and more efficiently.