24 Tips and Strategies on How Everyone Can Blog Right and Get
By the end of 2004
blogs had established themselves as a key
part of
online culture. "Blog readership shoots up 58% in 2004 6 million Americans get
news and information fed to them through RSS aggregators But 62% of online
Americans do not know what a blog is." - Pew Internet & American Life Project
Tip #1 - How and Where Should I Start?
You should begin your blog with a free blog hosting
service such as Blogger (http://www.blogger.com), or other similar free services
such as JournalHome.com, LiveJournal.com or Blog-City.com. The learning curve
for using such free services allow you to spend more on developing your content
rather than worrying about the advanced areas of scripting, hosting,
or programming.
Tip #2 - The Things You Should Decide to Write About
Although not a required prerequisite for you in order to
write a blog, it is highly recommended to try to find a topic to write about
based on your level of interest and knowledge. The higher your level of
interest, the easier it is for you to get your quality content posted on your
blog.
Always try to choose an area which you can
enthusiastically write about on a daily basis.Try to pay attention to a niche
which suites you well. A niche is basically a targeted product, service, or
topic.
Tip #3 - Always stay on topic.
Opinions are generally accepted but the content of the
items in the blog should all relate to a general theme. The
majority of your readers will be interested in the content
that relates to a specific defined theme or loosely defined area of interest.
Define a topic and try not to run too far away from it. This will ensure that
you create a loyal following of interested readers.
Tip #4 - Information is king, be informative.
If you are attempting to create the impression that you
are knowledgeable about a specific industry or sector, be sure that you stay
current on news. Checking your facts before you're giving out an opinion or a
product review is always a good idea, your reputation is at stake. If by any
chance you're utilizing other people's articles for you blog content, ensure
that you follow the terms of usage defined by the author.
Tip #5 - Old news is not news, but old information can
be recycled and made new.
While blogging everyday can be strenuous and time
consuming, it is important that the information presented is current and
accurate. Information, articles or any other archived resources can be recycled
/ modified to add more substance to your content. As long as they're relevant
and informative, there's no reason why it's not a good approach.
Tip #6 - Be disciplined and stick to a fixed postingschedule.
Realizing that blogging
requires time and effort,
don't create unrealistic expectations and be
unable to
deliver. If you have worked hard to
develop an audience and a community you don't want to lose them due to lack of
communication. If time is not on your side, take advantage of tonnes of
automatically updating contents which are available for your blog. Looking at
the constantly updating nature of RSS feeds, other RSS feeds from similar topic
can be inserted within your blogging post.
Tip #7 - Posting Frequency
If your blog content is
updated frequently, search engines will tend to spider the pages at regular
intervals. Updating your blog daily not only keeps your blog more interesting to
readers, but it also gives your blog fresh content on a day to day making it
more appealing to search engines. To keep your blog traffic and retain your
visitors interest it is a must to update your blog daily with multiple entries.
You should try to update your blog everyday with at least 2 - 3 or more daily
entries, depending on your daily schedule.
Tip #8 - Quantity matters.
In order to attract the
attention of search engines, you will need to produce a relevant amount of
content and information. A headline or simple sentence is not going to generate
the interest of readers or help with search engine ranking. Be sure to archive
old blog posts to develop a large portal of similarly-themed content.
Tip #9 - Clarity &
simplicity / Short & Concise
Keep your posts and blog
entries clear and easy to understand. Simplicity always produce better results
at the end of the day.
Aside from the lengthy article
a week for syndication and publication your blog entries should be short &
concise (if you can help it). Should you insist on partaking on the lengthy
road, try to maintain a clean paragraphing style,
proper spacing, use different
size, color and bold for your titles as well as the subtitles. Use bullet
points, go straight to the point and never run out of topic. Insert images to
spice up things if you're an avid fan of long posts.
Tip #10 - Utilize the
and
tags
Being one of the few most underutilized
blogging formatting tags, these 2 items can help you on emphasizing certain
points, in the most efficient and striking way. Formatting
is simple and straightforward.
Just
Hi
World!
and your message will apear
distinctively different from the rest of your
text, thus gets more attention which it deserves. Take note that the formatting
for these 2 tags differ from blog to blog depending on how the owner defines the
tag in the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Click the below link if you want to
read more about CSS.
http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp
Tip #11 - Keyword-rich.
If the goal of your blog is to increase your
visibility, include related keywords in the title of the blog. Use the title as
a headline to attract interest. Each item post should have a title that will
attract attention but still be relevant to the post. The title should be no
longer than 10-12 words. Experiment with the titles if you must, possibly try to
avoid general and ordinary titles. Try to include extraordinary and innovative
titles to grab the readers' attention.
Tip #12 -
Spell checking and proof-reading.
It only takes a few extra
moments and can save you from having to make embarrassing explanations. The
hazards of Internet is that if you're too late to correct your mistake, most
likely it's already been crawled by the search engines and read by many. It is
extremely essential to think / proof read carefully twice or even thrice, about
what you post before doing so. Take note of your language and grammar.
Tip #13 - RSS
Feeds
RSS to a blog is like fuel to
cars. Mostly every single free blogs or bloggin software out there will have an
automatic RSS feed generating feature. Although it's most unlikely that you'll
find one without a RSS feature, simply leave it
and find a new one, if you
happen to come across one without it.
Tip #14 - The essence of the
Internet - Traffic. It's no
secret.
You must have traffic to realize the
definition of a blog.. There are numerous ways to build traffic. Paid and free
advertising, viral marketing, search engine marketing,
RSS/XML feeds, word-of-mouth,
submitting to numerous blog and RSS directories, etc.
RSSBlogsubmit ( http://www.rssblogsubmit.com)
provides a submission service for your Blog & RSS feeds. You should always use
your blog URL address in the signature of your email, forum discussions, message
boards, or any other communication media. Never forget to share your blog to
your friends, colleagues, and any other invidious that you know of.
Tip #15 -
Track Your Blog
Tracking your blog does not
have to be overly sophisticated usually a simple free page counter like
StatCounter.com, ActiveMeter.com, Extremetracking.com or Sitemeter.com will do
the trick. Install (copy/paste) the code into the html of your blog template and
start tracking your visitors. Its better to use a service which 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.
Tip #16 - Make use of your
Blog's statistical and tracking
information.
Believe it or not, your visitors' information
from your tracking scripts will provide you
priceless
information on how you can attract more
readers. Keep note on the keyword terms used from search engines which bring you
traffic. You can identify relevant closely related topics which you can venture
into and add more variety into your blog, yet staying very much in topic. Simply
put, more topic coverage and more variety = more traffic. You may analyze your
tracking information further on how you can strategize your blog's content. You
can also apply some keyword optimization strategies here.
Tip #17 - The essence of
your Blog is your Audience, listen
to them.
Always interact with your readers who post
comments on your blog. Reply with a brief thank you note or just simply attend
to their questions if they have any. It's a proven fact when there's a direct
human interaction and
knowing the fact that there's a
"real human" at the other
end of the blog makes most of
them coming back. If your audience provide suggestions, comments or feedbacks,
take them constructively and inform them if you have any desires of implementing
such ideas on your next update. And of course, don't forget to thank them for
their ideas. If it's a great idea, why not throw in a free gift? Mention their
website in your blog?
Tip #18 - Create and
increase the "Why Must I Return" Value to Your Blog
Everyone knows the fact that
Blogs get a huge level of returning visitors because of its constantly updated
content. Why don't you add more interesting items to that return value by having
fixed periodical posts / offers, e.g.
Monday Top 10 Tips, Picture of
the Week, Free Bonus of the Month, Free Daily Wallpapers, etc. to give them the
absolute excuse to return to your blog. As long as you can efficiently and
appropriately increase that Return Value constantly, it is mostly guaranteed
that you'll be getting tonnes of repeated visitors, period.
An advance notice, prelaunch
announcement or anything similar to that also can act as a short term return
value strategy. Encourage readers to comment on your such notices / posts.
Experiment and play around with this idea.
Tip #19 -
Multiple blogs
It never hurts to use multiple
blogging accounts to attract more people. You can even have multiple blogs
within Blogger.com itself, but you may also want to try different free blogging
services such as JournalHome.com, LiveJournal.com, Blog-City.com, etc. Should
you have the urge to have multiple similar duplicates of your blog just to gain
more traffic, it is wise to avoid it as search engines / feed directories might
translate that as excessive redundant information which simply brings you
trouble, and you're tend to get penalized, banned or even accused of spamming.
Tip #20 - Digital Art,
Creative Graphics Another proven fact
- Monotonous and continous display of text
will make your readers run away! Try to include non- advertising graphics,
pictures, photos, and art in your blog entries, but try to keep them at a limit.
Too many graphics also mean slower loading time and messy text and graphical
combination. You don't want your blog to look messy. Most of the time, graphics
can bring your blog to life. Pictures can make boring texts interesting no
matter how long it is. Graphical elements are by far the fastest message
delivering element available on the net today. It may deliver various messages
by a split second of a look.
Tip #21 -
Maintain a Personal Blog
A blog is most successful when
it is kept personal. Try to include personal experiences which relates to the
topic of your blog entry. Stay away from the business style of writing. Write
with a more personal style and use first person narratives. Share product
reviews and personal endeavors, instead of trying to make it sounds like you're
selling.
Tip #22 -
Credibility & Popularity
As thing progresses, things
need to change in order to cope with the flow and nature of development. If your
number of readers are reasonably huge, and still using a free blogging service
to get your messages out, you may want to consider getting your own domain name
and hosting plan to have a more personalized Blog.
Domain names and hosting plans
are pretty much
straightforward. Research is
all what it takes to get the best of all the available options. For the most
highly recommended comprehensive listing of Free Blogging software out there,
drop by at
http://www.opensourcecms.com/.
This is by far the best place to drop by if
you want to get your research done about which blogging software to choose.
Reviews, ratings, public votes,
demos, etc are provided. And the best thing is, all of them are Open Source,
which means they are totally free. Try going through the server requirements for
each software before purchasing your web hosting.
Tip 23# -
Customize the look of your Blog
If you happen to be using one
of the Free blogging services out there, you might notice that most of us are
using the same template again and again for our blogs. It is well understood
that not everybody has the technical knowledge to change the layout as how they
want it to be, but if you have the knowledge, by all means try to customize it
and make it look DIFFERENT. You can grab that extra attention, if you're
different in certain ways. Create that image for yourself.
Get
Now beauty and free templates for your Blog from FinalSense !
Tip #24 -
Blog and Make Money
Once your blog has gained some
real momentum and your blog
traffic is increasing then it is time to start
thinking
if you want to turn your traffic into profit.
Some of the recommended income generating sources are as follow :
Google Adsense, Amazon
Associate program (www.amazon.com), Blogads.com, Crispads.com, Tagword.com,
Affiliate Programs and any advertising related text links can be your place to
start off. more...
Final #Tip -
Conclusion.
Following these blogging tips
should make your blogging experience much more rewarding. Blogging is generally
done out of interest and enthusiasm and sometimes for income generating
purposes. The flexibility of blogging will never cease to expand. Through time,
dedication, and persistence you will be rewarded with all the royalties of
blogging.
About the Author
John Teh is an internet blogger enthusiast, exposed to the fun and possibilities
of blogging on the net.
http://www.rssblogsubmit.com
