13 steps to successful blogging

 13 steps to successful blogging

 13 steps to successful blogging

Blogs can be a very marketable and very profitable tool if used correctly. Profiting from blogging is just a matter of grabbing the attention of an audience and not selling to any real marketers.

In this article, you will learn the 13 most essential steps to having a successful blog.

1) Where to start?

You should start your blog with a free blog hosting service like Journal Home. I'm not saying this because I own it, but a free blog host is very rewarding for a new blog.

Getting started with a free blog hosting service allows you to start blogging instantly without having any prior knowledge of scripting, hosting, or programming. It allows you to build an audience and buzz for your blog.

It allows you to focus on your content and not on the internal maintenance of the blog. The best benefit of starting with a free service is that in case your blog is unsuccessful, you won't lose money or have to foot the bill.

The best thing about a blog is that they are organized in chronological order, your latest entry is displayed first.

When your blog traffic grows significantly and you're ready to upgrade to your own domain, you can simply make your latest blog post your "change" announcement.

Just add one last entry stating that your blog has been "moved" and type in the new blog URL. Which drives visitors to your new blog site, keeping your following, without major inconvenience for anyone. Update when you need it... but only when you need it!

2) niche

A niche is a specific product, service, or topic. First you need to decide on a product, service or topic that interests you Pick an area that you can enthusiastically write about every day.

You can use keyword research services like Google Zeitgeist or Yahoo! Buzz Index to find popular searched topics.

It does NOT matter if your topic is popular, as long as there is an audience for your topic and the topic is precisely focused, then your blog should be successful. Anything can be considered a niche as long as it has a target audience, no matter how big or small the audience is.

A blog about your cat can be a niche or a blog about cat family species can be a larger niche market, if there are people interested in hearing about your cat or cat family species then you have a niche.

you can even choose to build your audience for a market where there is no audience, but you need to build your blog first.

3) Daily update (no less)

This step is required and not a suggestion. Updating your blog on a daily basis not only makes your blog more interesting to readers, but it also brings you fresh content on a day-to-day basis, making it more attractive to search engines.

Not updating your blog on the occasional holiday or day here and there is understandable to most, but losing days at a time or weeks at a time is unacceptable and will most likely result in your blog not being successful.

To maintain your blog traffic and retain the interest of your visitors, it is imperative to update your blog daily with multiple posts.

However, I am seeing a growing trend of successful blogs that are not updated daily, but are successful and have a stable audience that continues to visit their blog on a daily basis.

Regardless, these blogs are still updated weekly with multiple entries. Until you have a stable audience, you should try to update your blog every day with at least 3 or more posts daily.

The best way to achieve this is to set aside 1-2 hours a day to take care of your blog and add new posts.

It may even be convenient to schedule a fixed time that you dedicate to your blog each day.

Give yourself hours of work and treat your blog like a job, what happens if you don't go to work for days or weeks... you lose money or worse, you get fired! The same applies here... if you don't update your blog for days or weeks, you will lose visitors.

 

4) Traffic

It's no secret. You must have traffic to benefit from blogging. There are numerous ways to generate traffic.

Paid advertising, free advertising, viral marketing, search engine marketing, RSS/XML feeds, and word of mouth. You should always use your blog URL in your email signature, discussion forums, message boards, or any other means of communication.

You should submit your blog URL to search engines and blog directories. You need to submit your RSS/XML URL feed to blog ping services like Technorati, Ping-O-Matic, and Blogdigger.

You should confidently share your blog with family, friends, co-workers, associates, and business professionals when you interact.

Many blogs can be thought of as a collection of articles; for this purpose, you should submit your blog posts (those that are long and valuable articles) to content syndicators like Go Articles,com. Once submitted, your articles may be picked up and published by others.

The trick is to make sure you include your blog's URL in the "About the author" passage.

What this does is create link popularity and backlinks for your blog, when someone selects your article from syndication and then posts the article on your website, the "About the Author" passage is included with each post and the link you included is followed, crawled and indexed by search engines.

Imagine if your article is popular or controversial enough to produce 10,000 posts across the web.

Search engines will surely find your blog in no time with so many posts and credit you as an authority on the subject, which in return will increase your search engine ranking.

The small effort of writing a well-written article is rewarding. You should try to write at least 1 full length article each week for syndication and submit your article to at least 10 article syndicators.

5) Track Your Blog

How to know if your blog has traffic? Just because no one leaves comments doesn't mean your blog isn't growing. Many visitors do not leave comments but are repeat visitors.

I know it sounds crazy but with blogs people are more interested in what "you" have to say! Many visitors do not comment their first, second or third time. Some don't comment at all, but are active daily visitors.

Tracking your blog doesn't have to be too fancy, usually a simple free page counter like StatCounter,com or Active Meter will do the trick.

Install (copy/paste) the code into your blog template html and start tracking your visitors.

It is better to use a service that gives you advanced traffic analysis, such as keyword tracking information, referral information, and search engine information. Visitors, returning visitors, and unique visitors should be standard for any page counter service you choose.

6) Listen to your audience

By using the right page counter, you should start to see how others are finding your blog, and if through search engines, what keywords are being used to find your blog.

If your blog is consistently found for 1 or more keywords, target those keywords to make it even more powerful. When writing post and entry titles, use keywords as often as possible while keeping the blog readable and interesting.

 

7) Multiple blogs

Use multiple blog accounts (free) to attract more people. This means that you must have a blog with JournalHome.com and others. The more blog accounts, the better (be sure to read and adhere to each site's Terms of Service). You can copy/paste from 1 blog to all the others.

Having different blog accounts is like having a post in different newspapers. This allows you to attract more visitors and also increases the chance that one of your blogs will be in the search engine results for your focused keywords.

8) Short and Concise

Aside from the week long article for syndication and publication, your blog posts should be short and to the point (if you can help it).

Sometimes there are exceptions to the rule and you have no choice but to post long blog posts, but try to avoid this as much as possible. You don't want your blog posts to turn into hours of reading.

Visitors like to easily find information and browse through your entries. It's good to be detailed and provide useful information, but don't include useless information or stray phrases that stray from your topic. Stay focused on keywords.

9) Digital art

Try to include non-advertising graphics, images, photos and art in your blog posts. Not too much. Once a week is fine.

Graphics can sometimes bring your blog to life. Of course, the content of the blog is the most important aspect and you don't want to overshadow your content with graphics, but displaying graphics can add a bit of spice to the blog.

Be picky about your graphics and make sure they fit the theme of your post. You must add content with the chart, at least a title. Original graphics, photos, images and art are recommended.

10) Keep it personal

A blog is most successful when it is kept personal. Try to include personal experiences that relate to the topic of your blog post. Stay away from the business style of writing.

Write in a more personal style and use first-person narratives. Do not write any of your entries as sales letters, instead share product reviews and personal efforts.

11) Interact with your visitors

Now you have the traffic you deserve. You need to start interacting with your visitors. Create a regular topic like: "Monday Money Tip" or "Picture of the Week" that entice your readers to look forward to each week.

Let your readers know ahead of time about a product, service, or topic you're going to review and then talk about it.

If the president was scheduled to give a speech, then his blog should indicate that he "will discuss the speech and provide feedback after it airs. Feedback would be appreciated."

Do your best to find exclusive information that not many have. Don't divulge any confidential or secret information that is considered illegal or could get you in trouble, but try to get the scoop before anyone else.

For example: If your blog was about Paris Hilton (the socialite) and you had a blog post about "Paris Hilton Getting Married", then it would be interesting to your readers if you had a real picture of Paris Hilton's engagement ring.

Do your best to dig and search the Internet for exclusive information and you may find something useful.

Your readers will appreciate this and show it through word of mouth referrals. Imagine how many readers will tell their friends, family, and others about information they can only find on your blog.

12) Earn money

Once your blog has gained real momentum and your blog traffic is increasing, then it's time to start thinking about turning your traffic into profit. You must use contextual advertising, such as Google Adsense or Chitika.

Contextual advertising is usually text links that use your blog content to serve targeted ads on your blog. Payment is usually based on a pay-per-click model, which means that for every click an ad receives, you are paid a small percentage of the earnings.

In addition to contextual advertising, it is good to also use display advertising such as: BlogAds.com, Amazon.com, MammaMedia or General Sponsored Advertising.

13) You are a professional

You are already a professional! What are you still doing with that free blog hosting service? It's time to upgrade to a domain-hosted solution. You need to get a web host and choose a domain name for your blog and then check its availability.

Select the blogging software you want to use, such as: Squarespace.com, WordPress.org, MovableType.org, TypePad, etc.

When you've set up your new blog domain and it's ready for traffic, it's time for you to announce your change. on all of your previous blog accounts. Your last blog post should be a "moving" announcement.

The title should be "Moved" and the blog post should say something like "I have a new home for my blog, bookmark and follow the link: http://www.YourNewBlogDomainName.com".

This way, all returning visitors and new readers should have no problem finding your new blog domain. Also, search engines can easily index and crawl your new blog as your old blog should already be popular with search engines.

At the professional blogger level, you may want to team up with 1 or more bloggers. This will create a more interesting and powerful blog.

The old saying "two heads are better than one", more authors means more publicity and exposure because each author will have a personal interest in the blog. The idea of a team blog is to make it profitable and rewarding for all authors, while still focusing on the topic of the blog and keeping it interesting for visitors.

Following these blogging techniques should make your blogging experience that much more rewarding.

There's no guarantee that your blog will become popular or a household name, but the effort should at least get you one step closer. Making money online is not an overnight experience as many may think, but making money online is definitely a foreseeable possibility.

Also, growing popularity on the web is not an overnight experience, but with time, dedication, and persistence, you will be rewarded with all the blogging royalties.