So you went out, got a nice domain name and set it up on your own personal Cpanel account and installed Wordpress with a few clicks. That's how much time it takes to setup a blog. Quick, simple and hassle free. Now the hard work begins.
You then go out and hire and gifted Wordpress template designer to design the very best blog template ever. Now that's a good move because it's always good to have a unique design to stand out from the crowd. Besides, search engines really hate sites with duplicated designs. It makes the sites too similar. What next?
Once the design is ready, it's now time to add content for the site. Question is, is it better to create a general blog or a niche blog? Most experienced bloggers would recommend going for the niche blogs. That's because the audience is definitely more specific, and it's easier to market the blogs and attract advertisers later on. Online readers hate confusion. They love to scan and have very little patience for confusing blogs, and general blogs have a higher tendency to appear confusing. For these reasons, it makes sense to decide on your niche early so that you can dish out content with depth.
Now that you've had your design ready and have decided on your niche, you need to ask yourself how often do you want to update your blog? One of the keys to maintaining a successful blog is to create valuable content on a consistent basis. Why is that so important?
That's because if you can create useful content on a regular basis, you create a following and people come back repeatedly for your content. It doesn't really matter if you blog two or five times a week. A few highly successful bloggers I know only post to their blogs one to two times a week. But when they do, it's almost always killer content.
So if they post only one to two times a week? What do they do with the rest of their time? Well, a lot of time is being spent on researching, coming up with new content for the next blog post, and more importantly, promoting the blogs. It'll take a book to be comprehensive about blog promotion but here are a few tips.
To ensure that your blog gets a constant stream of traffic, locate as many traffic sources as you can. For example, related forums, the big search engines like MSN, Yahoo and Google, Blog search engines, Blogger communities and so on and so forth. This takes a little bit more time initially but once you get hang of it, it gets easier.
Submit your blog feed to as many search engines as possible and link to other bloggers in your network. Don't be afraid of visitors leaving your site. If you've got killer content, they won't. In time to come, your blogger friends will return the favor and link back to you. This is one of the most powerful blog promotion strategy because it's long term, cost very little, and it's very easy to implement.
Now, that's how you go about creating and maintaining a highly successful blog. Don't worry if things tart a little slow in the beginning. Keep writing and promoting your blog, and you're on your way to blogging success.
| Darren Chow is a full time web developer. His latest project is an article distribution service where bloggers can promote their own blogs at affordable rates. |
0 comments:
Post a Comment