I was looking into trying a different niche. I have seen many bloggers making decent money from their blogs so I thought It would be a good idea to start blogging. Well I know how to setup a blog, I know what wordpress is, know how to blog, understand how blogging works, but I do NOT know the insight and little secrets I need to know before setting up a blog, I'm not familiar with many terminologies and don't understand the purpose of pinging your posts, feedburner, technorati etc. and another dumb question, what are the different ways of deriving traffic to your blog? I have been searching, but there are alot not to the point, non-practical and useless information. I know many members here have successful blogs. I'll appreciate if you'd share your experiences with me or give me links to exactly what I am looking for. By now I hope you understand what I am looking for.. Thanks a lot!
One thing to note is that it can take months before you start having loyal visitors and also to make some revenue. If I was you I would select a niche that you know very well, it could be a hobby or whatever. Pinging blogs is like sending a signal to other places that you've made a new post or have edited an existing one. There are lots of different ways to get traffic. Use services such as technorati, forums or from other blogs. If you setup the blog correctly you can also receive lots of traffic from the search engines, depending on how popular your niche is. read Problogger he has all the answers you need.
Thanks cormac for replying. I am willing to do hard work for it. I visited your blog, irelandseomarketing.com. Nice active blog you have there. How did you convert the standard wordpress links into search engine friendly URLs ?
one thing you can also do is submit your blog posts to social bookmarking sites. I think it can help your blog's SEO if you do it frequently.
I'd spend time thinking about why you want to set one up and how you'll stack in the industry. At Chitika.com, they have a PDF about blogging and it's full of commentary from tons of bloggers. It might be a good read for you. http://chitika.com/blogbash.php
Yep, I second this: do it asap. (I remember I didn't do it in the beginning... and it was a mess to change it later ) Another thing to remember is to set up spam system (like Spam Karma or Akismet that comes with Wordpress). Claim & ping your blog at www.Technorati.com (like cormac already suggested). That should get you started.
Just write useful content in your blog that might help other people. People will come searching to read yours. Promotion and money making comes secondary.
Blogging is one of the best method to earn ! Just start few blogs with different contents and market it.