Blogs, blogs and more blog! Web space has been invaded by blogs. Be if a professional or a student or a housewife today everyone feels the need to jot down their thoughts, woes, joys in a blog. For someone it is a medium that help them stay connected with friends whereas for others it is a platform for their writing. Every blogger has a purpose behind creating a blog. So starting a blog is not hard but maintaining one and gaining readership is a tedious task. But all that is required is an understanding of the reader and a mix of effort and patience to keep the blog alive.
Blogging has become a buzzword these days. The reason being that creating a blog is not difficult at all these days. You need not to learn any computer language to create or maintain a blog. For example, Just visit wordpress.com or blogger.com and give any name to your blog and you are done. But if you are aiming to be a professional blogger then I would suggest hosting a blog on wordpress.org. Buy hosting space from bluehost or any other popular hosting service and host your blog. If you started on free blogger and wanted to move to wordpress then follow the article on how to move from blogger or any other blogging platform to wordpress. We have now understood that creating a blog is easy but ensuring that it has a lot of visitors can be challenging. Here are simple tips that can work for your space on the web.
What do you need to make your blog blazingly popular?
Topic and URL
This is the most critical decision you need to take. Choose the subject and URL wisely and very carefully. An interesting topic will attract readers whereas a simple URL will be easy on reader’s memory. With someone as popular as Michael Arrington, it’s easy to trace his blog. But a blog on tips should have something related to the subject in the URL itself like aboutonlinetips.com
Design
Try and have a design that is soft on eyes. This includes the background theme, color fonts and font size but all this should match with the subject of the blog. Designers suggest text in black or grey on a white background is the safest bet. Subtle colors should be used in sidebars. Avoid using black color or dark colors in background. Wisely choose the blog themes available on web if you are not acquainted with computer programming. If you are looking to monetize your blog with adsense, make sure you select adsense ready theme for your blog.
Blog Content
Plagiarism is a big no no. Do not steal the content from other websites or blog. Google Adsense and other big advertising networks take it seriously. Google bots are intelligent enough to judge your content. Whatever subject you may choose to write about try and offer something fresh to the reader. It can be an opinion about something or even an instance. Readers look for something new. Make sure you do not compromise with the quality of posts or articles. Quality content will drive the readers again to revisit your blog thus increasing traffic and thus your advertising revenue. Unique content will make your blog popular very quickly.
Blog Updates
Update your blog on daily or weekly basis. If possible twice a week. The blogs that are not updated for a couple of month are considered dead. The blogs which are updated on regular basis are ranked higher in search engines. I would suggest to post daily.
RSS feeds and newsletters
These are some ways to notify your reader about the updates of your blog. RSS feeds will help those readers who wish to keep track of your writing. Also send across newsletters or email to the readers once a week about the updates. Visit feedburner.google.com or feedblitz.com to create personalized RSS feeds and newsletters.
Social Networking, Blog Submission and Link Exchange
Social networking is the most important element once you create a blog. Submit your blog to the blog directories. Exchange links with blogs that fall under similar category. This will drive referral traffic to your blog. Submit or add your content to digg.com, mix.com, yahoo buzz, stumbleupon, Technorati etc. Make community on mybloglog will also drive substantial traffic to your blog.
Interaction with Readers
Comments work as a medium for communication between blogger and his reader. Whatever the comments may be try and revert. This will help the reader feeling important and he will recognize with the blog. If you do not reply the comments posted by your readers, they will search for some other blog to find the answer of the query raised in comment section of your blog. As a webmaster you should moderate your comments.
Search Engine
Search engine often pick up blogs that are popular. This might depend upon the various things such as number of hits, quality of content or the popularity of the blogger. Patience is the key here. To be ranked higher in search engines you need to make sure blog SEO compliant using right keywords, right URL structure, right title and much more.
Counters
Visit counters show the number of visits. But try and keep it invisible initially. Once you have a good number of visits, say 50k per month, make it visible. More visits or numbers are likely too influence the readers into thinking it is a popular blog as a lot of people keep coming. But it might as well work the other way round if the visits are less. Google Analytics is the best counter so far that provides detailed view of your visitors.
Money Making
You can make money from your blog starting from pew dollars per month to thousands of dollars per month. If you are interested in earning money from your blog, try writing on subjects such as technology, real estate, online marketing, social networking, online media et cetera. People are curious to learn about various topics without spending money. Therefore if you have the hits on your blog, advertisers are likely to come. Even the visit records generated by counters also works as a proof. You need to be wise enough to choose right keyword to increase adsense earnings.
Related posts:
- How to Transfer or Convert your blog from Blogger to Wordpress or any other Blogging Platform
- Wordpress and Blogger are hot choice for Bloggers – Google Trends
- Top 10 Ways to Add Google Buzz Buttons and Widgets
- 12 Most popular Analytic tools used for blogs
- Track missed out posts with Blog Search
- Add Blogroll to your blog
- Think before you blog!
- How to print your blog posts ?
- Detect Content Plagiarism from your Blog or Website
- How to increase CPC for a Blog? How to identify and Block MFA or Low Cost Ads to increase Adsense Earnings
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