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Although starting a blog isn’t really a complex undertaking, it’s still a good idea to do some research so that you know you’re presenting the best site possible. You want to drive as much traffic as you can to your blog in order to keep your internet rankings climbing.

It’s also important to keep in mind that blogging involves more than just writing the posts. You have to consider such factors as user experience, site design, and the software you’ll need to get your blog running.

Here are a few resources you can check out that offer great information for starting a blog.

www.IncomeDiary.com. This is the site where Michael Dunlop, blogging entrepreneur, offers a free e-course that details his process.

www.WordPress.com. WordPress offers the software you’ll need to get started. One of its strongest selling points is the ability to customize features to suit your own needs. There are also many free features you can use to get started in a matter of minutes. It also allows you to track statistics and block spam.

www.UXBooth.com. You want visitors to your site to have a good experience; this is what will bring them back again and again. This site offers tips for creating the best experience for your readers.

www.SmashingMagazine.com. This design site presents the latest in web design and development. While you won’t need to study design in order to launch a blog, this site can be a useful resource for getting ideas about how your site should look.

www.CopyBlogger.com. This is a good resource for learning how to write blogs that will drive traffic to your site as you build your list and market products.  It offers courses on copywriting, SEO, headline writing and keywords, among other topics.

www.ProBlogger.net. Visit this site to learn about the more technical side of having a successful blog. You’ll find information about blog design, advertising, tools and services, and much more.

www.WarriorForum.com. A forum where Internet marketers talk about their trade, this site can provide useful information about sales techniques. You might even find tips for marketing methods that apply directly to your niche.

www.TaskUS.com. Although this is technically a virtual assistant site, you can use the service to create custom ranking lists and other useful information that you can post in your blog.

Once you’re comfortable with the technical and writing aspects of blogging, you can start drawing visitors to your site.

Remember that if you want to become a great copywriter, you should first be a great copyreader. You can learn so much from reading other people’s copy and applying what you learn to your own niche.

These resources are sure to give you tips and tricks that will help make your blog successful.

Bernadette Doyle specializes in helping entrepreneurs attract a steady stream of ideal clients. If you want to get clients calling you instead of you calling them, sign up for her free weekly e-zine at http://www.clientmagnets.com

You’ve heard the expression, “Choose your words carefully.” That’s particularly true in copywriting.

Now that doesn’t mean you need to go back and restudy primary school grammar. In fact—and this may surprise you—some of the most effective copy is often full of grammatical errors that would have been red-penned by your English teacher. Perhaps the most famous example is “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.”

If you want to be a strict grammarian, the tobacco company’s choice of the word “like” has to be replaced by “as.” When editors started pointing this out, Winston’s advertising people put a new spin on it, retorting in their commercials, “What do you want, good grammar or good taste?”

So feel free to throw out the rules of grammar. You don’t have to be grammatically correct to write effective copy. That doesn’t matter. Nobody is issuing marks for who has the best grammar. The marks are for who gets the results, and that’s measured in how many people take the action you want them to and in how many sales you make.

Be Active, Not Passive

So word choice is not about grammar. It is about evoking a response with your words. For that reason, one thing that you’ll want to do in your copy is make your language as specific as possible. You’ll want to choose words that create visual images, words that intrigue, arouse, excite, motivate and compel.

Along those lines, active verbs tend to do much better than passive verbs. Instead of writing, “This product is better than that product in value,” you might write “This product surpasses that product in value” or “This product’s value exceeds that product’s.” Instead of saying, “You need to have motivation,” you can write, “Get motivated.” That’s an active expression.

Passive writing relies too much on “to be” and “to have” verbs. Active writing uses “to do” verbs. Look through your own copy and count the number of times some form of the word “is” shows up. Find ways to replace “is” with verbs that indicate activity. “Doing, not “being,” gets the job done.

Be Concrete, Not Abstract

Verbs are not the only words you need to choose carefully. Your choice of nouns can have a dramatic impact on your results, too. In most instances, concrete nouns will serve you much better than abstract nouns.

What’s the difference between concrete and abstract? It’s the same as the difference between ideas and things, mental concepts and physical reality. You can’t imagine abstract words in a wheelbarrow. Because abstractions can’t be clearly pictured in the mind, they are harder for people to grab onto and act on.

As an example, “a list of the top three financial goals for our company” is a specific and concrete way to describe the abstract concept “our financial objectives.” The vague and abstract idea “our strategy” can be made concrete by calling it an “our action plan” or, even better, “ten steps to reach our goal.”

That’s why, where possible, you want to use more tangible language. When you start to use active verbs, concrete nouns and tangibles, it’s much easier for people to relate to. You will get better results, too.

One question people always ask me is, ‘How long should my copy be?’ They ask this about brochures, sales letters and even web sites. Along the same line, when they see or receive those long sales letters, or scroll down lengthy web pages, they also ask, ‘Do you really have to have so much copy?’

Some ‘experts’ answer this by saying, ‘long copy gets better results than short copy.’ Like most truisms, you need to take that with a grain of salt. Long copy doesn’t get good results just because it is long. It works because it does everything it has to do, and nothing more. In fact, high-quality short copy will out-pull poorly written long copy every day of the week.

So in my opinion, the right length for every piece of copy is the exactly the same. It should be as long as it needs to be to get the job done. If it takes eight pages to get the response you want, then that is the length it should be. If you can get as many readers to take the same action in a single page, then one page is sufficient.

Avoid The Pressure of Squeezing It All In

My original job was as a salesperson. In all the time I sold face-to-face, I never had a sales manager say to me, ‘Bernadette, I want you to go into that office and get the order. Oh, and by the way, I’ve got you on a stopwatch. You have to do it in five minutes.’

No sales manager would ever do that. A few might feel the urge from time to time, but it would be very rare to find a sales manager that would actually put a sales team or their customers under that type of pressure.

And yet, you do hear people saying things just as impractical when it comes to sales materials, such as ‘I need to write this letter, and I’ve only got two sides of an A4 sheet to cover it.’ Why would you deliberately put yourself under that kind of pressure?

Length Is Not Really The Issue

A better approach is to forget about length entirely. You need to write the copy first, using enough words to convince the reader to do what you want. Once it is written, then you can see how long it is.

This is true not only when you are writing for a web page, but also when you are getting something printed. You have got to first see how long it needs to be, and then make the decision about how many pages you are going to get printed.

Yet how many marketers go to a printer first, get a quote for a certain brochure size, and then try to squeeze all of their sales messages into the available space? They have simply got it the wrong way around. It really is putting the cart ahead of the horse.

So if you remember only one thing about how long copy should be, let it be this: Your copy needs to be as long as it takes to get the job done—not a word more and not a word less.