Blogs are often a very marketable and very profitable tool if used correctly. Taking advantage of blogging or blogs is just a matter of grabbing the attention of an audience and not doing any actual salesmen selling. During this article you will learn the 13 most essential steps to successful blogging.
1) Where to start?
You should start your blog with a free blog hosting service such as Journal Home. I do not say that because I’m the owner. But a free blog host is extremely rewarding for a new blog. Beginning with a free blog hosting service allows you to begin blogging instantly without having any advance knowledge of scripts, hosting, or programming. It allows you to generate an audience and buzz for your blog.
It allows you to specialise in your content and not the internal maintenance of the blog. The simplest benefit of starting with a free service is within the case. Your blog doesn’t become successful. You do not lose any money or are you left holding the bill.
The good thing about a blog is that they are arranged in chronological order, your latest entry is displayed first. When your blog or blogging traffic grows greatly and you’re ready to upgrade to your own domain. Then you can simply make your last blog entry the announcement of your “move”.
Simply add a final entry beginning that your blog has “moved” and type the new blog URL address. Which directs visitors to your new blog site, keeping your following, without a serious inconvenience to anyone. Upgrade as you would like to…but only you need to!
2) Niche
A niche is a selected product, service, or topic. You ought to first decide on a product, service, or topic which interest you. Choose a neighborhood which you can enthusiastically write about on a daily basis. You’ll use keyword research services like Google Zeitgeist or Yahoo! Buzz Index to find popular searched topics.
Please check my Niche blog post
It doesn’t matter if your topic is popular as long as there is a audience for your topic and the topic is precisely focused then your blog should be successful. Anything are often considered a niche as long as it has a target audience. No matter how large or how small the audience is.
A blog about your cat are often a niche or a blog about the species of the cat family can be a larger niche market. If there are people that are interested in hearing about your cat or the species of the cat family, then you’ve got a niche…You can even choose to build your audience for a market. Which an audience does not exist, but first you want to build your blog.
3) Update Daily (nothing less)
This step may be a must and not a suggestion. Updating your blog daily not only keeps your blog or blogging more engaging to readers. But it also gives your blog fresh content on each day to day making it more appealing to search engines. Not updating your blog on an occasional holiday or at some point here and there is understandable to most. But missing days at a time or weeks is unacceptable and can most likely outcome in your blog being unsuccessful.
To stay your blog traffic and retain your visitors interest. It is a must to update your blog daily with multiple entries. Though, I’m seeing a growing trend of successful blogs that are not being updated daily. But they’re successful and have a stable audience who continue to visit their blog daily.
Anyhow, these blogs are still updated weekly with multiple entries. Until you’ve got a steady audience you should try to update your blog everyday with at least 3 or more daily entries. the simplest way to accomplish this is to set aside 1-2 hours a day for tending to your blog and adding new entries.
It’s going to even be wise to schedule a set time which you dedicate to your blog each day. Give yourself work hours and treat your blog as employment , what happens if you do not come to work for days or weeks…you lose money or worse you get fired! Same applies here…if you do not update your blog for days or weeks you’ll lose visitors.
4) Traffic
It’s no secret. You want to have traffic to profit from blogs. There are numerous ways to create traffic. Paid ads, free ads, viral marketing, program marketing, RSS/XML feeds, and word-of-mouth. You ought to always use your blog URL address in the signature of your email, forum discussions, message boards, or the other communication media.
To submit your blog URL address to search engines and blog directories. You have to submit your RSS/XML URL feed to blog ping services like Technorati, Ping-O-Matic, and Blogdigger.
Confident
You have to confidently share your blog with family, friends, co-workers, associates, and business professionals when it relates. Many blogs are often considered as a collection of articles, for this purpose you ought to submit your blog entries (those that are valuable and lengthy articles) to content syndicators like GoArticles.com or ZapContent.com. Once submitted your articles are often take up and published by others.
The move is to form sure you include your Blog URL address in the “About the Author” passage. What this does is generate link popularity and backlinks for your blog, when someone picks up your article from the syndication then publish the article on their site the “About the Author” passage is inserted with each publication and therefore the link you included is followed, crawled, and indexed by search engines.
Assume if your article is popular enough or controversial enough to supply 10,000 publications across the online . The search engines is sure to find your blog in no time with that many publications and credit you a authority on the topic, reciprocally increasing your rank on search engines. The tiny effort of writing a well written article is rewarding. you ought to try to write at least 1 full length article every week for syndication and submit your article to at least 10 article syndicators.
5) Track Your Blog
How does one know if your blog has more traffic? Just because no one is leaving comments doesn’t mean your blog isn’t expanding. Lots of visitors don’t leave comments but they are returning visitors. I do know it sounds crazy but with blogs people are more liked in what “you” have to say!. Lots of visitors do not comment their 1st, 2nd, or 3rd time. Some people don’t comment at all, but are active daily visitors.
Tracking your blog doesn’t have to be unduly sophisticated usually a simple free page counter like StatCounter.com or Active Meter will do the trick. Install (copy/paste) the code into the html of your blog template and kick off tracking your visitors. Its better to use a service which provides you advanced traffic analysis, like keyword tracking information, referral information, and program information. Visitors, returning visitors, and distinctive visitors should be standard for any page counter service you select .
6) Hear Your Audience
When using the right page counter you should begin to see how others are finding your blog and if through search engines then which keywords are being used to find your blog. If constantly your blog is being ranked by 1 or more keywords then focus your blog around those keywords to form it even more powerful. When writing entry titles and entries use the keywords as often as possible while keeping the blog legible and engaging.
7) Multiple blogs
Utilize multiple blogging accounts (free) to draw in more people. This suggests you should have a blog with JournalHome.com et al. . The more blog accounts the higher (be sure to read and adhere to the Terms of Service for each site). You’ll copy/paste from 1 blog to all others. Having different blog accounts is such as having a publication in several newspapers. This permits you to attract more visitors and this also increases the chance that 1 of your blogs will be in the search engine results for your focused keywords.
8) Short & Concise
Beside from the lengthy article a week for syndication and publication your blog or blogging entries should be short & concise (if you can help it). Sometimes there are exceptions to the rule and you’ve got no choice but to blog lengthy entries, but attempt to avoid this as much as possible. You are doing not want your blog entries to become hours of reading. Visitors wish to easily find data and skim through your entries. it’s good to be detailed and provide useful information, but don’t include useless information or run away sentences that veer away from your topic. Stay keyword-focused.
9) Digital Art
Try to add non-advertising graphics, pictures, photos, and art in your blog or blogging entries. Not an excessive amount of . Once every week is fine. Graphics can sometimes lead your blog to life. Of course, the content of the blog is that the most important aspect and you do not want to overshadow your content with graphics, but displaying graphics can add a touch of spice to the blog. Be choosy about your graphics and ensure they fit your entry topic. you ought to add content with the graphic, a minimum of a caption. Original graphics, photos, pictures, and art is suggested .
10) Keep it Personal
A blog is most successful when it’s be personal. attempt to include personal experiences which relates to the topic of your blog entry. Stand back from the business style of writing. Write with a lots of personal style and utilize first-person narratives. Don’t write any of your entries as sales letters, instead share product reviews and private endeavors.