Mini-Series: Roadmap for New Bloggers

It’s a new year and we would guess that for many, 2007 is the year begin blogging.  The most recent numbers bring the estimated number of blogs worldwide to over 50 million.  Pretty impressive! To welcome the newbies and to provide some insight to those who are on the brink of starting a blog, we’ve compiled a mini-series of posts as a roadmap for new bloggers.

Before we get started though, we want to demystify the word, "blog". A blog is simply a website. It is the name given to websites with a particular structure- it came from the term "Web Log" as content on these sites tend to be displayed in reverse chronological order. Blog platforms also include tools that make it easy to publish content to your web site with very little technical know-how or programming. Bottom line: it is an easy way to create a website and thus share your ideas to the world!

There are some folks at Zillow who know a bit about building and operating web sites. We’ve asked a few of them to share their knowledge on the areas they are experts in — applied to blogging of course. Over the next 5 days, we’ll cover the following topics related to starting a blog:

• Content is King, but the Voice is Queen: Finding Your Voice and Picking Topics
• Setting Up Your Blog: Picking a Blogging Platform & Basic Setup
• Avoiding Legal Pitfalls in Blogging: What to Keep an Eye On
• SEO & Syndication: Maximizing Search Engine Rankings
• Attracting a Conversation: Blog Comment Tips

Hope you enjoy the mini-series — and good luck blogging in 2007!