Blog at the begining

I thought I'd post a little about this blog. The reason I put this blog together was as a journal for my social media experiment and so others will hopefully find some use when starting there own online social network. But there is something more about blogs. Weblogs are very useful when it comes to promoting something online. Maybe an online store or just yourself and here is no exception. As I mentioned previously I set up a feed using twitter feed so my new blog posts are tweeted. Now a few years back before the likes of facebook, twitter and myspace were on the scene, if you created a post you would have to wait till it was indexed by the search engine, possibly do some seo or post to blog directories. But now, as soon as your post is created it can be tweeted, or posted on your wall for all to see. So its fair to say blogs are an important part of the social media group.

Now the thing ive found with twitter is you are limited to what you can say, so if you want to promote something then its probably better to create a blog post then tweet the post with a catchy interesting title.

So I think we can see a blog is useful. But what about my blog? what have I managed to achieve so far? Well basically using blogger, which is free is dead simple to use. I have played with the gadgets and added a few including some cute little fish at the bottom. Adding gadgets is easy, just hit the design button in blogger and you can simply add a range of widgets to your blog.


I also wanted to add some stats and submit to webmaster tools as you should with all sites if you want them to be indexed. Adding to webmaster tools was no problem, and finding stats is also very easy, however what about an xml sitemap? You are always told its good practice to submit a sitemap, especially to google. But how do you find. Well apparently the atom feed doubles up as a sitemap in blogger.

To find the sitemap in blogger simply look at the robots.txt
> www.yoursite.blogspot.com/robots.txt
And you will see
> www.yoursite.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated

Now simply submit /feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated as your sitemap in webmaster tools. Job done.

Thats pretty much it for now on my blog. I will be looking to submit to blog directories and rss directories in the future and just keep on blogging.