Pro Blogging Guide

Author’s Note: I originally posted my comprehensive guide prepared from my “Preparing to Blog” series covering the first four months of creating this AI3 blog site in September 2005. Due to high demand, I have now provided a permanent page link to the Guide on this site. Welcome!

The citation for this effort is:

Michael K. Bergman, “Comprehensive Guide to a Professional Blog Site: A WordPress Example,” A Guide Book from the AI3 Blog Site, September 2005, 80 pp.

Click here to obtain a copy of this free guide (80 pp, 1016 K)

Gone beyond Blogger? Want to really be aggressive in functionality and scope of content for your personal, professional or corporate blog? If so, this Comprehensive Guide to a Professsional Blog Site may be useful to you.

This Guide is the result of 350 hrs of learning and experimentation to test the boundaries of blog functionality, scope and capabilities. I myself began this process as a total newbie about six months ago — which likely shows in gaps and naïveté — but I have been aggressive in documenting as I have gone. The learning from my professional blog journey, still ongoing, is reflected in these pages.

This Guide addresses about 100 individual “how to” blogging topics and lessons, all geared to the content-focused and not occasional blogger. More than 140 citations from more than 80 experts provide additional guidance. The Guide itself occupies 80 pages. It is all free.

In this Guide you will find discussion of these useful topics:

• How to choose blogging software and add-on tools
• Taking control of the blogging process by hosting your own site
• Getting your blog to display and perform right
• Effective techniques for converting existing documents to your blog site HTML
• Being efficient in posting, organizing and work-flowing to allow your diarist activities to flow naturally and productively
• Keeping the blog site pump primed with fresh and relevant content.

I created this Guide as a discipline in learning how to be a diarist or journalist, akin to the heyday era of “persons of letters” prior to the telegraph. In part, I undertook this discipline to rekindle those daily journal skills of the past. But, for the most part, I undertook the effort because I believe a fundamentally new means and mechanism for adaptive advantage is being created with social computing, of which blogging is a part.

Enjoy! And I welcome your corrections or suggestions for improvements via my email link.