Learning blogging for profit as a beginner is quite a difficult thing, but I am encouraged for one big reason. I’ll get to that in a minute…

I recently left an MLM business (EcoQuest International) for a few reasons, one being that trying to build an MLM business doesn’t depend totally on you because you have to get other people involved. As my wife and I have found out, a large percentage of people just don’t do what they say they’re going to do.

The home business industry is rife with people who just aren’t motivated enough to work at something for an extended length of time. I’m assuming that’s so in the blogsphere as well. For a good reason that encourages me.

The reason is, I’m having a difficult time figuring out Wordpress, CSS, the ins and outs of blogging, trackbacks and so on. The point is, learning blogging as a newbie is a bit difficult. There aren’t really any good books that pull it all together, Wordpress is a bit quirky and so forth.

Most people aren’t going to take the time to figure this thing out. That’s a big plus for those of us that are. There’s a huge learning curve here to do it right there’s a huge opportunity as well for those that take the time to get it right…as right as it can be.

So take heart if you are persevering. There’s an open field of opportunity in the blogsphere if you work at it long enough.

AlanLeS

Blogger.com will soon be irrelevant to what I’m doing on the web and it might be irrelevant soon to many professional bloggers if they keep up with there blog purges. They are ticking off a lot of people lately. But enough of that.

I’m learning the ins and outs of blogging as a full timer and I don’t have time to deal with the Blogger.com nonsense anymore. I have better things to do with my time like learn what it takes to be a professional blogger and set up a small blogging network.

If you’re looking for some great tips and info on blogging and need to understand how the whole blogging game works, I suggest reading Darren Rowes’ series on Blogging For Beginners over at Problogger.net.

It’s shaping up to be an informative mini class for people like me who are just getting started and don’t have much of a clue about all this blogging stuff. There’s also a lot of info over at Problogger.net about monetizing your blog and info on blogging in general. Go have a look.

AlanLeS

Why would anyone use blogger.com? They are up to their idiotic blog purge again. 

I’ve had it with Blogger for all I’m concerned. I’m going to do everything in my power to see that everyone knows what jerks they really are. Their ruthless blog deletion campaign is completely outrageous. I’ve had one of my blog identified as a spam blog again because I haven’t posted to it in 6 days. Sorry Blogger, some of us do like to take some time off, you idiots!

While they are busy deleting legitimate blogs in a completely lame attempt to deal with splogs, they are missing tons of spam. Just do a search for air purifiers within the blogspot domain at Blogger and see what comes up. Yes, that’s right, pure meat-by-product SPAM.

Blogger is indiscriminately deleting whatever they feel are spam blogs when they don’t seem to have a clue that they are erasing months of hard work and they don’t seem to care either!

Don’t get caught in Blogger’s purge, switch to your own hosting and WordPress or Movable Type.

So much for free speech.

AlanLeS

I’m starting to figure out this WordPress thing a bit more and we’ve started our first blog within the weblogstop.com sub-domain.

The blog is named Log Cabin Furniture and Log Cabin Decor and the name makes it obvious what it’s about. My wife and I have a log cabin rentals web site and the log cabin furniture blog is just a natural extension of the cabin rental site.

I’m not really that happy with the way the theme looks at this point but I’m working on it and trying to figure out hoe to put an image in the background ot the template. Hopefully it won’t take me the 5 or 6 hours I’ve spent trying to figure out other simple things like getting a link with the proper heading in the sidebar.

Anyway, the Log Cabin Furniture blog is up and running. 

AlanLeS

I guess I’m just a glutton for punishment because now I’ve decided to learn CSS. Many people already know lots about CSS, I’m not in that crowd unfortunately. I don’t know squat.

I’m a leftover html junkie that never bothered to learn anything about CSS at all and now I’m struggling to design a decent looking blog. I do have the advantage that I was a graphic artist for 7 years with BellSouth so I have the design skills but, all of this CSS, PHP, blog stuff is really frustrating me.

As I slowly dig through the WordPress Codex I’m starting to pick up a few things but the progress is seriously slow.

I thought blogging was easy…well, I mean from the technical standpoint.

AlanLeS

Switching from a free blogging platform such as Blogger.com to a hosted solution seems like it is the smart thing to do since Blogger likes to delete blogs for no apparent reason.

However, learning how to modify your template and get some tools on your blog to help you work better is a huge chore. I spent nearly 5 hours the night before last just trying to figure out how to change the color of the background on two columns of a template I downloaded. Well, nothing worked, so I switched to another template. I then spent 4 hours yesterday just figuring out how to get my new individual pages listed in my sidebar and have them formatted to look good.

I also downloaded a spell checker plug-in because WordPress doesn’t have one in its text editor (I’m sorry, but that’s just incredibly lame even if WordPress is free). Well, I installed it and, of course, it didn’t work.

All of this gives me hope though because I figure if it’s this difficult to get going and the learning curve is so huge, it’s going to keep most people from doing it. Many people would have given up if they would have had to deal with what I’ve already dealt with.

For those of you that are new to blogging, Darren Rowse over at Problogger.net is starting up a series for beginng bloggers. I believe it’s going to be more about actually blogging than any technical issues with a blogging platform but I read Darren’s stuff fairly often and I’m sure it will be good.

AlanLeS

Well, I’ve finally made the switch from Blogger to WordPress and Dreamhost.com hosting. I had to make the switch because of the fiasco that Blogger has become and especially with their blog deleting rampage they seem to be on as of late.

I had several blogs deleted for no apparent reason. One of my blogs was identified as a spam blog by someone sitting behind a terminal and they, just on a whim, decided they didn’t like the content of one of my blogs. After trying to get in touch with them by sending them 4 or 5 alerts to the fact that I wasn’t a machine or a bot creating and posting to my blogs, I guess they got annoyed with me and deleted everything.

I have since reinstated my home based business blog, that I spent months building, because they didn’t lock the sub-domain.

I’m just learning this WordPress dealy and all about blogs, and it’s a bit more overwhelming than I first expected. I find it reather annoying that when you install WordPress it only comes with 2 rather lame templates. It is especially annoying for someone that doesn’t know jack about CSS, PHP, Styles and all the other stuff you need to know to make your blog look as though you actually care a bit about design.

Anyway, I found a great template and I managing to struggle through this whole change slowly.

I’m going to leave my first post down there just cause it will eventually become nostalgic and a bit geeky.

AlanLeS

This is a test post for the web network Weblog Stop. We will feature several different blogs on a wide range of subjects.

You might be interested in some of them and you might be interested in none of them. This is a new blogging network that is taking over the world.

Get ready