Tips for Bloggers
Blogging Tips:
Write the Best Possible Content even if it is not every day
Writing often is advice that most bloggers come across on other sites. The reason why it is popular advice is due to the fact that it is based on the assumption that posting often demonstrates that you are committed to what you do. This results in visitors and readers coming back to your blog to see and read about what you’re up to. Posting too often may sometimes have the opposite effect. Visiting a blog for the second time, readers might be looking for the same post to re-read or something similar. Forcing your readers to go through a bunch of new posts, 1, 2 sometimes 3 a day might be a deterring factor. In these cases I will just use a search engine to find what I am looking for. Furthermore, the 2nd and 3rd posts of the day are usually of lesser quality due to writers fatigue and therefore less interesting. Instead of posting several times a day just post once a day or just whenever you think you have something interesting or useful to write about. Put some thought in your posts, give your readers a reason to come back and always avoid bombarding them with clutter. Focus your effort on a few good topics.
Optimize your Blog for Search Engines
Most bloggers out there start blogging the wrong way. After they start blogging they do so by relying primarily on social networks for traffic. Social network traffic is great but it rarely converts into money. The best traffic to make money is search engine traffic. A blogging tip everyone should get a chance to read and re-read is that search engine traffic will be the most profitable kind. Although Social networking is an easy way to generate traffic you should always spend some time to make sure your blog and posts are properly optimized to rank well in search engine result pages. Take a few hours a week and perform a few scheduled and simple search engine optimization tasks.
Blogging SEO
In your blog
Make sure your titles are relevant to your topic, make sure you refer to your topic keywords throughout your posts, and make sure you tag your posts properly. Also make sure to interlink your posts with older relevant posts. Always use keywords you are interested in ranking high for and keep these keywords concentrated around a specific topic.
From other sites
Get as many one way inbound links with anchor text as you can; by many I mean thousands. Think of your site or your blog as a property you acquired in the country side. After you start building you will need to make a road, get it hooked up with power and so one. Backlinks are the essentials your blog or site will need to prosper. Don’t only rely on other bloggers to link to you. Create backlinks to your blog by submitting articles in databases. Write a few 500 word articles on similar topics you write about in your blog, add back links with ancor text and start submitting. Ideally you should submit a few articles to thousands of directories for every post you write. There is software available to help you do this. Do the same thing for every post. You can easily create thousands of one way links your blog and particular posts in less than a few hours.
Social bookmarking also works great for this purpose. Make sure you get your posts bookmarked at as many bookmarking sites as possible.
Once a week or once every two weeks, use Google Webmaster Tools and see which posts of yours showed up in search engine result pages. Go back to them and optimize them. Add more keywords, make the title catchier, tag them better or even elaborate on certain things you wrote and think will help them rank better in searches.
Tips For Getting Those First 100 Monthly Blog Visitors
I monitor a lot of blogs, forums and news sites with my trusty RSS reader. One of my favorite sites is SitePoint, which is a terrific discussion forum for webmasters, programmers and domain name investors.
I’ve had some great conversations on the forums and via IM that have been very enlightening.
In a recent post, one of the SitePoint forum guys was lamenting the fact that he was having trouble getting to 100 unique visitors per day.
There was some good, solid advice that I would like to share and build upon:
1. Make sure your posts are optimized with popular keywords. I would be careful with this one because you don’t want to lose your blogging voice or make your pages read awkwardly by jamming in as many keywords as you can. Do check for the most popular keywords in your universe, though, using a tool like WordTracker. As a poster on SitePoint said, using the competition values in WordTracker allows you to pick keywords that haven’t soaked the web yet.
2. Use a service like PinGoat to ping blogger indexing sites every time you change your site. Pinging is basically extending an invitation to indexing services like Technorati, IceRocket and Feedster to come to your site and index it. The more indexing you get, the more exposure you get. PinGoat is a terrific service that pings them all at the same time.
3. Update your Google Sitemap every few posts and resubmit it. A Google Sitemap is an interesting and amazing phenomenon. Here is how Google explains it:
The Google Sitemaps program is two-way communication between webmasters and Google. You can give us information about your site so we can index it more effectively, and we can show you how we see your site and tell you about any trouble we’ve had crawling it.
Basically you create a special xml file and tell Google to go look at it. It uses the file to better index the site. And it definitely works. There’s even a Plugin for WordPress that will build the perfect sitemap for Google. You can read more about sitemaps by visiting the Google Sitemapspage.
4. Post relevant comments on blogs related to your content area. Look around, find people blogging about the same stuff as you. Monitor their blog sites and participate in the discussion. Be sure to include a link to your site in all of your comments. It’s a great way to correspond with like-minded people and get your name and site name out there.
5. Search for link partners and link exchanges at least once a week. If you find a site you like, include it on your link page and drop the site owner an email. He or she will most likely list your site as well. Join a couple of free or cheap link exchange sites and stick to your subject area when exchanging links. Always visit the prospective link exchange site and ask yourself if you would be doing your readers a service by sending them to that site. If not, don’t link to the site.
6. Write great content, and don’t plug stuff unless you are familiar with it and approve of it. If you write interesting content about subjects that interest people they will always find you. Don’t hustle your readers — if you are going to plug something for money, make sure the product or service is something you would use and recommend. If people sense a hustle they will not convert and they will not come back.
7. Watch your keywords and make sure they are performing. DigitalPoint has a terrific tool that will help you track your keyword placement over time so you can see how your efforts are doing.
8. Perform some basic Search Engine Optimization. Learn how to not only optimize your posts, but optimize your entire site. You can get some great tips and tools at SeoChat.com
9. Shake loose a couple of bucks and buy some ad space. Once you’re certain your blog looks and operates perfectly, spend $100 on Adsense ads and see how that helps.
10. Be patient. It isn’t going to happen overnight. It will take weeks or months to get things rolling.
