When it comes to blogging, if there’s one success, there are a million failures. There’s no silver bullet when it comes to blogging success – it’s hard work through and through. And these 11 things you should know.
1. Ask Yourself If You’re In The Right Niche
Do you feel passion for your niche? Can you defend it, can you talk about it with ease, and can you write anything about it? It takes a little homework and some understanding of yourself and the market before you can fix on the right niche. Identify a potentially profitable niche.
2. Ask Yourself If Your Domain Name Is Worth Remembering
Do some research about domain names. Your site’s domain name should be easy to remember, and should be something different. It’s a good idea to use your blog’s name in your domain for easy recall and for creating your blog’s brand later.
3. Ask Yourself If Your Blog Is Worth Reading
Do you help your readers solve their problems? Is your content unique, does it stand out? Is your content infused with your personality? Does your content have ‘hooks’ to keep your audience coming back? Do you focus on what your audience wants? If every blog in your niche has similar content, then you don’t stand to succeed.
4. Don’t Let Your Blog Be Faceless
Your reader wants to know if you are worthy of their attention and what your background is. So start engaging people through a great About Me page. Let people know who you are, why you blog, and why anyone should read your blog. Make this page worth reading, worth commenting on. Be sure to share some pictures!
5. Make Sure Your Readers Can Contact You Easily
Accessibility counts! Create a Contact Me page with every possible detail you can imagine – your phone numbers, email addresses, Skype, AOL, Gtalk and Yahoo messenger IDs, social network Ids for Twitter, Facebook, and such and so on. Include a “Contact Me” form and make sure you get back to your readers in good time.
6. Don’t Pull Out The Stops To Market Your Blog
Most bloggers engage in random traffic generation methods without focusing on any. This results in a great deal of wasted time, effort, and definitely money. You have a product, your content – you need to market it to your consumer, who is your reader. Determine the best strategies and focus on one at a time.
7. Spread The Word Through Social Media
Start with a single social media network – build sufficient relationships with your potential audience and then move on to others. Don’t try to get in all the networks at once. It takes time to build the right image and it has to be done properly.
8. Create Your Own Commenting Tribes
There are traffic exchange type tribes that can promote your blog at a monthly cost. Forget them. Create a small Facebook Tribe of your own, where fans of different blogs can promote their blogs. Encourage cross promotion and make sure people share your post links. Sharing of your posts creates a viable social proof and makes your content more shareable. Plus, you get quality backlinks.
9. Start Commenting On Other Blogs
Your goals for commenting should be connecting with popular bloggers and networking within your peer group. Carefully select the blogs on which you want to comment. Connecting with popular bloggers will give you the push up you need and networking with your peer group will get you comments, feedback and return traffic. Most important, create a schedule for your commenting and stick with it.
10. Write Guest Posts
If you want quality traffic, then don’t ignore guest posting. You can get recognition, traffic, and one-way backlinks of high quality through this method. Select the blogs on which you want to guest post. These must be popular blogs in your niche, from which you can earn quality links. Do thorough research before you guest post – know the bloggers, their interests, and the kinds of guest posts they like and so on.
11. Optimize Your SEO
Don’t forget to optimize your site’s SEO. As far as traffic generation strategies go, the right SEO updates can bring a good amount of organic traffic your way. Understand the basics of on-page optimization, link building tips, keyword research, and all the other SEO tricks that are recommended. Work with an expert if you’re not sure how to implement them.
