With over 1.4 million blog posts being written each day and over 57 million Americans reading them, it’s safe to say that blogging is no longer just for the ultra-techie. In addition to being an efficient way to get the news, it’s also a great tool to help you grow your business.

However, the more teachers I talk to, the more I realize that blogging is not something that many teachers are familiar with. So in light of several conversations I’ve had in the last week or so, I thought I’d share a couple resources on the subject.

What’s the best feed reader?

• You don’t need a feed reader to have your own blog, but reading good blogs will only help you write better blogs yourself.
• Before creating your own blog, get familiar with what other teachers are blogging about, as well as what your students, or prospective students, are reading.
• Once you start writing your own blog, don’t be afraid to provide links to industry related blogs if they’re relevant. If you give your reader what they’re looking for, they’ll keep coming back.
• Though I like my Google Reader, I also don’t have a strong opinion on the matter. There are a number of good readers out there, including FeedReader, Bloglines, NewGator, just to name a few.

How do you set up your blog?

• You’ll need two things: weblog software and a host. The weblog software is where you’ll write and manage your blog posts; the host will provide you with the server space and your other technical needs.
• If you choose a developer hosted route, your weblog software and host will be the same provider. Another option is to get an open source weblog software and pay for your host separately. Either one works.
• If you want to go the all-in-one route, WordPress, Blogger, b2Evolution, Serendipity, and MySpace all have hosted solutions you can look into.
• Wherever you decide to host your blog, when it comes to weblog software, WordPress is great. It’s what we use for the blog here at TeachStreet. In addition to being easy to use, it has a number of good plugins that’ll really make your life easier.

What to blog about?

• The answer to this question is likely the same answer to the question “why do you teach?”
• If you were selling a product, you’d want to keep your messaging consistent with your brand. Think of what you teach as your product and yourself as the brand and keep the blog consistent with your core teaching values.
• Blogs as conversations, not as commercials. If you say something interesting students will want comment, tell their friends, and most importantly, come back. If you make your blog into a commercial, people will simply change the channel.
• Address things you teach, sure, but also be creative. For example, if you’re a golf coach you don’t always need to give swing tips. Perhaps write a post about a favorite local course, upcoming tournaments to play in, or anything else that your golf students might be interested in.

How do you measure subscriptions?

• One of the best tools to measure how many people subscribe to your blog is by using a site called FeedBurner. FeedBurner, now owned by Google, is a free, easy to setup blog analytics tool that will tell you, among other things, how many people are subscribed to your RSS feed, either via email or feed reader.

• Though FeedBurner is probably the best tool out there for this, it’s important to note that subscriptions alone will not tell you the total number of people reading your blog. Subscriptions only take into consideration the number of people who consume your blog via RSS. In other words, if someone types in the URL of your blog and reads your blog this way, it will not be a reflected in the subscription metric.

• Another great tool to use for measuring the success of your blog is Technorati. Technorati tells you two useful things about your blog: rank and authority. Rank tells you where you stack up in relation to the millions of other blogs out there, while authority tells you how many other sites are linking to your blog.

• There are a number of other tools out there, too. If you want to read more, Google’s Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik, has a great blog post on blog metrics where he goes into greater depth on the issue.