13 Steps to Successful Blogging

Websites can be a very marketable and very profitable tool if used properly. Profiting from blogs is just a matter of grabbing the attention of an audience and not doing any actual salesmen selling. Within this article you will learn that the 13 most essential measures to successful blogging.

1) Where to begin?

You should begin your blog with a free blog hosting service such as Journal Home or Blogger. Beginning with a free blog hosting service lets you start blogging instantly without having any advance knowledge of scripts, hosting, or programming. It permits you to concentrate on your content and not the internal maintenance of the website. The best benefit of starting with a completely free service is, if your blog does not become successful you don’t lose any money or are you left holding the bill. The wonderful thing about a website is they’re arranged in chronological order, your most recent entry is displayed. If your blog traffic grows greatly and you are ready to update to your own domain then you can simply make your last blog entry the announcement of your “move”. Simply add a last entry stating that your blog has “moved” and type the new blog URL address. Which directs visitors to your blog site, keeping your following, without a significant inconvenience to anybody. Upgrade as you will need to. . .but just once you will need to!

2) Niche

A niche is a targeted product, service, or subject. You should first choose a product, service, or topic which interest you. Select an area which you can enthusiastically write about on a daily basis. You can use keyword research services like Google Zeitgeist or even Yahoo! Buzz Index to find popular searched topics. It doesn’t matter if your topic is popular as long as there’s a audience for your topic and the topic is precisely focused then your blog ought to be successful. Anything could be considered a niche as long as it has a target audience no matter how big or small the crowd is. A blog about your cat can be a niche or a blog about the species of the cat family can be a larger niche market, in case there are those that are interested in hearing about your cat or the species of the cat family. . .you may also choose to construct your audience for a marketplace which an audience doesn’t exist, but first you must build your blog.

3) Update Daily (nothing less)

This measure is essential rather than a proposal. Updating your blog daily not just keeps your blog more interesting to readers, but in addition, it gives your blog fresh content on a day to day making it more attractive to search engines. Not updating your blog on an occasional holiday or one day here and there’s understandable to many, but missing days at a time or weeks is unacceptable and will probably cause your blog being unsuccessful. To keep your blog traffic and retain your visitors interest it’s essential to update your blog daily with multiple entries. You need to attempt and upgrade your blog everyday with at least 3 or more daily entries. The very best approach to achieve this is to set aside 1-2 hours a day for tending to your blog and adding new entries. It could even be a good idea to schedule a set time that you dedicate to your blog every day. Give yourself work hours and treat your blog as a job, what happens in the event that you do not come to work for a couple of months. . .you drop money or worse you get fired! Same applies here. . .if you do not update your site for days or months you will lose visitors.

4) Traffic

It is no secret. You need to have traffic to profit from sites. There are many ways to construct traffic. Paid advertising, free advertising, viral marketing, search engine advertising, RSS/XML feeds, and word. You must always use your blog URL address in the signature of your email, forum discussions, message boards, or any other communication media. You need to submit your blog URL address to search engines and site 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, partners, and business professionals when it relates. Many sites can be regarded as a selection of articles, for this purpose you must submit your blog entries (those that are valuable and lengthy articles) to content syndicators like GoArticles.com or ArticleCity.com. Once submitted your articles can be picked up and printed by others. They key is to be certain to include your Blog URL address in the “About the Author” passage. This really does is create link popularity and backlinks for your blog, when someone selects your article from the syndication then publish the content on their website the “About the Author” passage is included with each publication and the link you included is followed, crawled, and indexed by search engines. Imagine if your article is popular enough or controversial enough to create 10,000 books throughout the internet. The search engines is bound to find your website in no time with this many publications and credit you a authority on the subject, in return increasing your rank on search engines. The small effort of writing a well written article is rewarding. You need to attempt and compose at least 1 full length article every week for syndication and submit your essay to 10 article syndicators.

5) Track Your Website

How can you know if your blog has traffic? Just because nobody is leaving comments does not mean that your site is not growing. Many people don’t leave comments but they are returning visitors. I know that it sounds crazy but with blogs people are more interested in what “you” have to say! Many people don’t comment their 1st, 2nd, or 3rd time. Some don’t comment in any way, but are active daily visitors.

Tracking your blog doesn’t need to be overly 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 start tracking your traffic. Its best to work with a service that provides you advanced traffic analysis, such as keyword tracking information, referral information, and search engine optimization. Visitors, returning visitors, and special visitors should be standard for any page counter service you choose.

6) Listen to Your Audience

When using the proper page counter you should start to observe how others are finding your blog and if through search engines then which keywords are used to locate your blog. If constantly your blog is being found by 1 or more keywords then focus your blog around those keywords to make it even stronger. When writing entry titles and entries use the keywords as often as you can whilst keeping the blog legible and interesting.

7) Multiple sites

Use multiple blogging accounts to attract more people. As a consequence, that you need to have a blog with JournalHome.com, Blogger.com, LiveJournal.com, Blog-City. com, tBlogs.com, etc.. The more blog accounts the better. It is possible to copy/paste from 1 blog to all others. Having different blog accounts is like having a publication in various newspapers. This allows you to attract more traffic 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

Besides the lengthy article a week for syndication and publication your blog entries should be short & concise (if you can help it). Occasionally there are exceptions to this rule and you don’t have any option but to blog lengthy entries, but try to prevent this as far as you can. You don’t want your blog entries to become hours of reading. Visitors like to easily find information and skim through your entries. It’s good to be detailed and provide useful advice, but don’t include useless information or run away sentences that veer away from the subject.

9) Digital Art

Attempt to add non-advertising images, images, photos, and art in your blog entries. Not overly much. After a week is good. Graphics can sometimes bring your blog to life. Obviously, the content of this blog has become the most important aspect and you don’t want to overshadow your content with graphics, but displaying graphics can add a little spice to the website. Be choosy about your graphics and be sure they fit your entry topic. You need to add content with the graphic, at least a caption. Original images, photographs, movies, and graphics is suggested.

10) Keep it Private

A blog is most effective when it’s kept private. Try to include personal experiences which relates to the subject of your blog entry. Avoid the company style of writing. Write with a more personal style and utilize first-person narratives. Don’t write some of your entries as sales letters, instead share product reviews and personal endeavors.

11) Interact With Your Visitors

You now have the traffic you deserve. You should start interacting with your customers. Create a regular theme such as: “Monday Money Tip” or “Picture of the Week” which entices your readers to look forward to every week.

Give your readers advance notice about a product, service, or topic that you’re going to review and then discuss later. When the President was scheduled to provide a speech then in your blog you should say that you “will discuss the speech and give your opinion after the speech airs. Comments will be appreciated”.

Do to do your very best to find exclusive information that not many have. Don’t disclose any secret or confidential information that is deemed illegal or can potentially get you into trouble, but try to get the scoop before everyone else can. Such as: If your blog was about Paris Hilton (the socialite) and you also had a blog entry about “Paris Hilton Getting Married” then it’d be interesting to your readers if you had a actual picture of Paris Hilton engagement ring. Give your very best effort to dig and search the web for exclusive information and you’ll possibly produce something helpful. Your subscribers will appreciate this and they show their appreciation via word-of-mouth referrals. Imagine how many readers will tell their friends, family members, and others about information they only can find in your site.

12) Earn Cash

Once your blog has gained some real momentum and your blog traffic is increasing then it’s time to begin considering turning your traffic into profit. You should use contextual advertising, like Google AdSense or Chitika. Contextual advertising is usually text links which use the content of your blog to publish targeted ads to your own site. The payout is usually based on a pay per version, meaning for ever click an ad receives you are paid a small proportion of their profits. In addition to contextual advertising it is good to also use graphical advertising such as: BlogAds.com, Amazon.com, MammaMedia, or General Sponsored Advertising.

13) You Are a Professional

You’re an expert now! What are you doing with that free blog hosting service? It’s time to update to a domain hosted solution. You want to find a web host and choose a domain name on your blog then check its availability. Pick the blogging software you want to utilize, for example: Squarespace.com, WordPress.org, MovableType.org, etc.. Whenever you have your new blog domain setup and ready for traffic then it’s time to announce your move on all of your previous blog accounts. Your last entry to the site should be a “move” statement. The name must be “Moved” and the blog entry should state something like “Old Website was transferred to New Blog please follow and bookmark this link for future reference. This way all returning visitors and new readers should have no trouble finding your new blog domain name.

In the level of a professional blogger you might choose to team up with a couple of other bloggers. This will make a more interesting and more powerful blog. The old saying “two heads is far better than one”, more authors mean more advertising and exposure because each author will have a vested interest in the site. The concept of a team blog is to make it profitable and rewarding for all authors, while continuing to target the blog topic and keeping the blog interesting for visitors.

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