This is a question which almost every budding blogger tries to find out. I am not saying that I am a very success blogger, but I have learned a lot from my experience. I do go through a number of blogs and bloggers work. These days many novice bloggers are trying to build blogs and get some earning by doing some posts and getting some traffic. For a blog to be success the final question to be answered is “Whats the traffic or your subscriber number?”.
Even to get private ads on your blog which is more rewarding than PPC programs like Google Adsense or Bidvertiser, you need to have good number of page views, visitors and other important factor which influences traffic from search engines is Google Pagerank.
I have some tips which should be useful for budding bloggers. These tips worked for me and I do not claim that this will be giving you the desired results instantly
1. Domain Name
This is something important, if you are planning for a long term blogging. You get free blogs hosted with portals like freewebs, blogger, wordpress etc, but you have lots of restrictions for that. If you register a domain, make sure you select a good domain name and preferably a .com tdl domain. Domain name should not be too big and difficult to remember. Every time your visitor may not be able to bookmark your blog, but if the domain name is something memorable then its an added advantage. For example my domain name is my full name which I had registered 9 years back. I do not want to change this but this is not something which everyone can remember easily. So my first point is Domain Name
2. Update Frequency
Make sure that you do at least 1 post a day, so that if you have regular readers, they get something new when they visit the next time. Every visitor needs something new when they come everytime
3. Descriptive posts from reliable sources with catching Title
Your posts should be descriptive and information provided should be from reliable sources so that other sites do link to your posts which will give you new visitors, backlinks and traffic. You should have a right title which should explain what is in the post. Good title helps in search engine ranking also. The content should be unique and not just copying from any other website and posting in your blog. Search engines will not index or rank such kind of websites
4. Get users to subscribe
Now you can offer great subscription features to your visitors. You just need to get the visitors to subscribe, You can create a subscription page and explain the details of the subscription. You can sign-up for a subscription service provider like Feedburner, which does all the work for you, you just need to create a free account and set up your RSS feeds
5. Comments and trackback
You should keep commenting option open and make sure that you read all the comments and reply to the visitors comments. You should try to be close to your visitors by addressing them by their name and even visit their blogs and post some comments on their blogs
6. Pictures / Videos in your blog posts
Pictures and videos are very effective and widely used by many successful bloggers, its believed than 1 picture can say more than 100 lines
7. User Interactive Posts
Post contests, polls which will make your visitors in participating in your blog activities. This will make your visitors to refer your blog their friends and build your regular visitors number
8. Visibility
This is a very important factor that impresses the first time visitor and makes him / her to bookmark your blog and come back. You should select a nice theme which has good fonts and color. The posts should be clear and readable. I see lots of blogs which are really difficult to read with lots of ads floating in between the text. Many bloggers just have more text ads than the description of the post. If a visitor comes to your blog and clicks on a Google adsense ad believing that its some information on you blog. Do not make your visitors feel that your site is a MFA Site. I know advertising is important, but you are losing a visitor without the knowledge of the visitor who clicks on a text links thinking that its a page of your blog. If you are linking to other sites or page, make the link open in another window using the target frame to _blank, but Google Adsense does not allow this. The fonts you use should be clear, I would prefer Arial, Tahoma, verdana which are very clear and readable.
9. Topic
You should decide a topic for your blog and should concentrate on that topic. When you select a topic, it should be something that you should be able to do some research and write good posts. The posts should be interesting for others to read
10. Bit of Programming knowledge
This is not mandatory and its not possible that every blogger knows web programming or languages like PHP, Mysql. Now a days, there are lots of CMS like WordPress, Typepad, Drupal Joomla available which are open source and easy to use for anybody. I do work with PHP and MySql and do some tweaks and extra work on templates or any needed functions
11. Bit of Advertising
This is something which is needed to promote your blog or to start off. Send emails to your friends about your blog, add the URL with your email signature and forum post. Never try to promote your blog by spamming. Spamming is a crime and always use some third party softwares to manage bulk mailing. Add provision to unsubscribe to every bulk mail that you send. You can use some PPC programs like Google Adwords to promote your blog which is not very expensive if your are able to manage your campaigns cleverly
12. No link selling or buying
Google is a very powerful source of traffic. 80% of my traffic comes from Google and you should keep your blog optimized for search engines too. You should not write posts for search engines by dumping keywords, just write usual posts and use key phrases that a person will use to search for a post that you are doing. Once you get a good pagerank, you will be contacted by many SEO’s for link trading, I get very often, just ignore those offers as this will ruin your pagerank and get buried in search engine result pages
Hope these tips will be helpful to you. Please post your comments and queries, I will be more than happy to reply
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