Blogs can be a very marketable and very profitable tool if used
correctly. Profiting from blogs is just a matter of grabbing the
attention of an audience and not doing any actual salesmen selling. In
this article you will learn the 13 most essential steps to successful
blogging.
1) Where to start?
You should begin your blog with a free blog hosting service such as
Journal Home. I don't say that because I'm the owner, but a free blog
host is very rewarding for a new blog. Starting 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 build an audience and buzz for your blog. It allows you to focus on
your content and not the internal maintenance of the blog. The best
benefit of starting with a free service, is in the case your blog
doesn't become successful you do not lose any money or are you left
holding the bill. The great thing about a blog is that they are
organized in chronological order, your latest entry is displayed first.
When your blog traffic grows greatly and you are ready to upgrade 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 new blog site, keeping your following, without a major
inconvenience to anyone. Upgrade as you need to...but only when you need
to!
2) Niche
A niche is a targeted product, service, or topic. You should first
decide on a product, service, or topic which interest you. Choose an
area which you can enthusiastically write about on a daily basis. 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 a 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
large or how small the audience 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, if there are people who are interested in hearing about your cat
or the species of the cat family, then you have a niche...you can even
choose to build your audience for a market which an audience does not
exist, but first you must build your blog.
3) Update Daily (nothing less)
This step is a must and not a suggestion. 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. Not updating your blog on an occasional holiday or one day here
and there is understandable to most, but missing days at a time or
weeks is unacceptable and will most likely result in your blog being
unsuccessful. To keep your blog traffic and retain your visitors
interest it is a must to update your blog daily with multiple entries.
Though, I am seeing a growing trend of successful blogs that are not
being updated daily, but they are successful and have a stable audience
who continue to visit their blog daily. Regardless, these blogs are
still updated weekly with multiple entries. Until you have a steady
audience you should try to update your blog everyday with at least 3 or
more daily entries. The best way to accomplish this is to set aside 1-2
hours a day for tending to your blog and adding new entries. It may 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 a job, what happens
if you don't come to work for days or weeks...you lose money or worse
you get fired! Same applies here...if you don't update your blog for
days or weeks you'll lose visitors.
4) Traffic
It's no secret. You must have traffic to profit from blogs. There are
numerous ways to build traffic. Paid advertising, free advertising,
viral marketing, search engine marketing, RSS/XML feeds, and
word-of-mouth. You should always use your blog URL address in the
signature of your email, forum discussions, message boards, or any other
communication media. You should submit your blog URL address to search
engines and blog directories. You should 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 it relates. Many blogs can
be considered as a collection of articles, for this purpose you should
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 published by others. The
trick is to make sure you include your Blog URL address in the "About
the Author" passage. What this does is create link popularity and
backlinks for your blog, when someone picks up your article from the
syndication then publish the article 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 produce
10,000 publications across the web. The search engines is bound to find
your blog in no time with that many publications and credit you a
authority on the topic, in return increasing your rank on search
engines. The small effort of writing a well written article is
rewarding. You should 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 do you know if your blog has traffic? Just because no one is leaving
comments doesn't mean your blog isn't growing. Many visitors do not
leave comments but they are returning 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 1st, 2nd, or 3rd time. Some do not
comment at all, but are active daily visitors.
Tracking your blog does not have 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 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.
6) Listen to Your Audience
When using the proper 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 found
by 1 or more keywords then focus your blog around those keywords to
make it even more powerful. When writing entry titles and entries use
the keywords as often as possible while keeping the blog legible and
interesting.
7) Multiple blogs
Use multiple blogging accounts (free) to attract more people. This means
you should have a blog with JournalHome.com and others. The more blog
accounts the better (be sure to read and adhere to the Terms of Service
for each site). You can copy/paste from 1 blog to all others. Having
different blog accounts is like having a publication in different
newspapers. This enables 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.
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