Be a Better Blogger in 13 Steps
August 28, 2007 | Author: Eve Lester | Filed under: Blogging
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Blogs are a powerful marketing channel if used right, if you sell jewelry, start a blog about it, with links and reviews to products on your jewelry site and links from the jewelry site to yours. To be a successful blogger you need to be able to do more than just write about your day. The 13 tips below will help you become a better blogger.
1) Get a blog.
While I highly recommend starting out on your own hosed site, I know that may not be possible, either way, here are the hosts I use, StartLogic, they start at 5.95 a month and a domain name is only 6.50, you are able to pay by the month here, which is why I went with them, I couldn’t afford a years worth of hosting all at once. (the have the ability to point up to 9 domains to different folders) So I have this blog, my husbands blog, and my personal blog on this one hosting account.
I just recently got hosting for another blog, EmbellishYourSpace, it isn’t ready for the public yet though :-) For that one I tried out www.EasyCGI.com, So far they have been great, but they do not offer a ‘one click’ install of wordpress, you have to install it yourself, but it is suprisingly easy.
2) Niche
Choosing a Niche shouldn’t be hard, do you like to fish? Make a blog about fishing, same with any other hobby or career experience and write about it. Whatever you do, make sure that the topic yo choose is something you are experienced with and will enjoy writing about everyday.
3) Post Daily
This is very inportant, but do not just post a sentence and call it that- if you REALLY cant come up with a good article, don’t write for the sake of posting daily. You should aim for atleast one a day, but two to three are much better, and try to make one a ‘pillar article’.
4) Promotion
Promoting your blog is something you never stop doing, be it on Social Networking sites like FaceBook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc. Try out several methods to find the one that works the best, some options are responding to comments (which you should ALWAYS do by the way), submitting to directories, and posting times.
5) Blog Stats
From day one you should sign up at feedburner and choose to activate the free site stats option, I have found Feedburner and Google Analytics to be the most accurate and easy to use- and both are free.
6) What are they looking for?
When using a program like FeedBurner or analytics you will be able to see what search terms your visitors are searching for that led them to your site. Take advantage of that, on my personal blog ‘Confessions of a Housewife’ I get a lot of searches on how to catch a cheating wife… about 15 a day, so I wrote a post on cheating housewives with some amazon books and e-books and posted it, now the people that come in from that keyword will be landing on that page and hopefully buy a book!
7) Multiple blogs
It is ok to have multiple blogs, if you don’t treat them both the same. The biggest complaint I hear for bloggers with multiple blog is content creation and division. While both blogs may be on separate topics, if something happens to be in the middle, you cant just post it on both blogs, Google likes to call that duplicate content and will penalize you and your site rankings. To fix that you may write the same thing on both blogs, only in a different format, or you just pick one and go for it.
8) KISS - Keep it Simple Stupid
While you don’t have to keep your posts short, you do need to make the longer ones easier to read, visitors do not like to read big ugly blogs of text. Separate paragraphs, use title tag through the article, use the bold option (like I did here.)
9) Images
This is something I do daily, wit every post, I pick out a image from Stock Exchange and use Snagit to get it quickly edited and uploaded. I did a SnagIt tutorial screen cast for you to see more of what Snagit is good for!
10) Personal Data
If your blog is always about you, than skip this part. I am talking about people like me that run a niche professional blog, I try to keep posts here business like, with some of my personality in every post, but I would not write a post here about my cat, it just does not make sense. While adding in anecdotes of your self in every post, be careful not to get too personal.
11) Comment Control
Respond to comments, not just in the post itself, but via email. And while this seems like it would take a long time, you need to respond via email and on the post itself, so others see you are active in the community and will come back. A great time saver is this plugin- Comment Email Responder, it lets you reply once, in the post and it emails the original commenter. I make it a habit, every morning when I wake up, I site and respond to every comment, it is time consuming but bring back a lot of visitors.
12) Money
Once your blog is established, a few months of regular posting, marketing and working out well, you can monetize it, you have several ways to do this, including Adsense, Yahoo Publishing Network, PayPerPost, Review me, etc. You can even directly sell ads your self.
13) Blog Carnivals
Check out BlogCarnival.com, submit some of your best posts to upcoming carnivals, but please please read what the contest is about before you submit something. On my Housewife blog, I asked for blog posts about being a wife, cleaning, etc. I ended up with 2 articles that I could use, the rest were financial and business related.
Following some of these should help your blog become more active, and if your looking for it, then profitable. Just remember promotion is never done, you may slow down after a while, but you still need to promote.
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7 people have left comments
MyBlogLog is one of the largest social networks for bloggers. When starting a new blog I would suggest registering it with MBL. Interacting with other bloggers is a great way to stay current in your niche as well as on blogging topics.
BeachBum
Thanks! I had forgotten all about that one!
Hi! A nice blog and good to read. Thx for some good informations!
Good and comprehensive list. Although I do not necessarily agree with the multiple blogs thing. One is already more then enough for me… ;-) I have been blogging for 5 months now: I own a Dutch blog in the field of B2B Marketing & Sales. A great way for me to attract new visitors has been to submit my articles to social news & bookmarking sites. Furthermore I have developed a few WordPress plugins and some custom Google Toolbar buttons which have also attracted quite a large number of people.
Don’t you love how the good old KISS theory seems to apply to almost everything in life! Great list. I would second the MyBlogLog comment as well.
so true! Thanks!
Hello
Very interesting information! Thanks!
Bye