Yesterday we saw what
brought me to blogging and how I created my first blog. Now the discussion
continues with my first steps at blogging. Happy reading!
Now I was
ready to start blogging. An exciting moment indeed, like a first date! Writing
an article was no problem for me as I had been trained in that wise and Google
trends was also at hand to show me which topics were most searched by my target
audience. I finished five long articles in MS Word, making sure to integrate my
site’s keywords into them for Google ranking so that people searching the web
with those keywords could find my site easily.
Now I had
to load the articles onto my site (no problem); but then bam, wam! I met my major obstacle when I tried to embed HTML banner
affiliate links I had applied for and obtained from various companies into the
blog posts. Check them here
First, I copied the texts and HTML codes onto the blogger posting page and
clicked “Publish”. To my horror, the texts appeared but where on earth had the
HTML codes gone to? They refused to appear while I was itching to promote the
companies’ digital and physical products on my web site! I tried several times
but failed. “How on earth does one go about that?” I kept on muttering to myself.
Web
Colleagues, from whom I had purchased the training material, gave the assurance
that should I run into any difficulty I could contact them. Sad to say, but
little did I know that they were more interested in selling the training
material than in helping their customers. Even when I managed to finish the
blog and asked them to have a look at it to see what their training had enabled
me to do, nobody took the trouble to so much as congratulate me.
With that
door closed, I didn’t know who to turn to. My country is a French-speaking one
so I couldn’t consult any computer specialist because of the possibility of the
language barrier. As an English teacher here for 12 years I should know that!
So
something as simple as embedding an HTML code into a blog post took me about
three weeks of trial and error to fathom out. I have to confess that that
nearly made me give up!
When
finally I got the hang of it, it was still in an unprofessional way that I went
about it. In effect, I would post the whole text, hit the HTML button and copy
the code onto the top of the page, although that was not the position for the
link. The link then appeared when I clicked on COMPOSE. Then I would drag the
banner down to its right place.
I don’t
really know if what I’m doing now is the right thing but it gives me good
results. I copy and paste all my links (including URLs) into my posts which I
still write in MS Word. Then, to load them on to the blogger posting page, I
copy and paste texts up to the link on to the COMPOSE page. Then I hit the HTML
button and embed the HTML code onto the end of the text the machine had
transformed into HTML codes. I have my banner when I click COMPOSE! I continue
this back-and-forth technique until I have my complete post, then I publish it.
Experts may
cringe in horror at my method of posting but well, that is my road to Rome. Besides, I have a
lesson here for people who wish to blog but are afraid of the complexities of
the medium: Practice makes perfect and he who waits will never master anything.
Tomorrow, in the concluding
part, we will look at how I drove traffic to my site.
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