What is scheduled posts?
They are posts that you write before hand, and will be published automatically during the time that you have set earlier.

Many blogging platform allow you to write scheduled posts. It is a good practice to write scheduled posts to keep your blog “alive” when you are away.

How to write scheduled posts?
For WordPress (2.5) user, you can do it by editing the publishing time under Publish Status.

Click on the “Edit” right beside the “Publish immediately“. This will expand the date feature. Select the future date you want your post to be published. You can click on “Cancel” to cancel the process. After that, just click on the Publish button once you are done with your post. This post will then be a scheduled post.

For Blogger (blogspot) user, you can edit the publishing time by clicking on the “Post Options“. Then edit the Post date and time to the future publishing time you want.

Once you are done with your post, just click on the “Publish Post” button then this post will become a scheduled post.

Why scheduled posts? Who need it?
This is indeed a handy feature, but many bloggers (especially new bloggers) don’t know about it, or don’t bother about using it.

Scheduled posts are good when:

• You are away for vacation (or other reasons) for several days.
• You want to save some “backup posts”. There are times that we can’t think of anything to post, a scheduled one can save your day.
• You have too many blogs to maintain. You may “abandon” some of them. Scheduled posts can keep them “alive”.

I have many blogs, sometimes I do scheduled posts when I’m free. I was asked how I can keep up my blog update frequency. Well, doing scheduled posts is one of the method.

Have you done any scheduled posts before? Do share your experience with us. If you haven’t, you can try it out, it’s not that difficult, you just need to spend some time to write some quality posts.

This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.

Many people try to hide their true identity in the blogosphere. But most bloggers who own a niche blog will provide an “About” page to serve as an FAQ section of either their blog or the author themselves. How are you going to write an “About” page? What’s the impact of it?

If you take a look at the navigation on top of this blog, you will see the word “About”. This is a page written by me, to tell you a little more about this blog nature and my objectives of starting this blog. After reading my “About” page, I believe now you know more about my background. Why is this “About” page important to a blog?

The “About” page gives you the following advantages:

Transparency
Readers get to know about the author(s) general or personal information such as the background, interests, experiences of the author(s), as well as the objectives of creating the blog. This can help to build some trust between the author and reader by asking the question “How trustful is the blog content written by this author?”. It’s rather hard for one to judge an author straight away.

Interaction
Blog is part of Web 2.0, which encourages interaction among site admin and readers. Once you have posted the informative “About” page, readers will feel closer to you. If they have faith in you, they may always come back to you to ask for opinions.

Highlights
In the “About” page, you may also like to highlight your featured pages or posts. Most of the time, the “About” page gain more hits than the posts or pages in the archives. So if you have something to share with you readers such as “Featured post”, “Popular post” or whatever you name it, this is a good place for you to introduce to your readers – especially first time visitors.

How to write an “About” page?  Here are some key features that you may want to take note:

• Photo - Don’t let your readers having the trouble to imagine how you look like. It’s a recognition.
• Blog objectives – What is your blog about?  What will your readers gain from it?
• Introduce yourself – Tell your readers about your experience related to your blog nature.
• Introduce blogging – Some readers might be new to the “Blog” tech.  Tell them what is a blog or at least give a brief guide on your blog navigation.
• Contact details – In case your readers have something to ask you.  You may like to put this in a separate page such as the “Contact” page.

An “About” page should be:

• short
• relevant
• an outstanding navigation
• posted with privacy concern content

Last but not least, an “About” page also means the impression of your blog!

• Standard
• Professional-looking
• Recognition (trust)

So you decided to start a blog. You need a domain name for your blog. What is a domain name? It’s the address or URL (Universal Resource Locator) that points to your blog content. People recognize your blog by the address. Therefore, it is important for you to pick a relevant domain name that most identify your blog.

If you are not ready to buy your own domain yet, it is also important for you to choose a subdomain name for your blog that resides in some free blog services such as Blogger or Wordpress.com in the form of subdomain.domain.com. (i.e, xiaoyenzi.blogspot.com)

How to choose a good domain (blog address) name?

1. Nature of Blog – what is your blog about?
2. Effective Name – can someone tell what is your blog about at a glance of your domain name?
3. Matching Name – is your domain name and blog name matching?
4. Easy to Remember – is your domain name too complicated?

Practical:

1. Identify what is your blog about. Is it about food? sports? tech?

    

2. A good domain name is one that can easily let the readers know the blog nature just before they visit it. Take for example, www.blogging4novice.com, from this domain name, you get the idea that it’s a site about blogging.

    

3. You don’t want to have a domain name like myspace.yourdomain.com for a blog with the name of “Food Junction” which mainly discuss about food and drinks. It will be very misleading to your readers, thinking that your site offers something about the popular MySpace.com.

    

4. Make sure your domain name is easy for your visitors to remember. Avoid complicated phrase or hard-to-remember numbers. You want your visitors to visit you frequently, not just once. A nice domain name is also part of the blog impression.

The above can also be applied to blogs that reside in domains such as subdomain.blogspot.com, subdomain.wordpress.com and many other free blogging services.