The Internet has made it exceedingly easy for anyone to start a web log (blog) and use it to capture attention. Even teenagers and Fortune 500 companies have discovered the magic of writing a blog to attract attention and generate a consistent readership. Blogs are excellent vehicles for communicating news, keeping in touch with many people at one time, highlight your expertise, act as an introduction to a larger website, and keep fresh content constantly available to the search engines and everyone visiting your blog.
Familiarize Yourself With Blogs
If you've never actually done a blog, you will be surprised at how easy it is to set up an account. You can use any of the blogging portals out there like Wordpress.com or Blogger.com. They allow you to set up a targeted account and put up a blog simply by registering with them. They offer design templates that you can choose by clicking on your favorite design. They give you an administration panel that makes it easy to add features or remove them. It really is one of the simplest ways to start getting a web presence out there completely targeted! You don't pay for the account, the storage, or anything else. In return, the site might put up some advertising on your blog, but when you're ready to take it up a notch, you can always pay to get that removed.
So, don't be intimidated by a lack of knowledge of computers or the Internet. You don't have to be technically talented at all to start a blog! Later, as you continue to use the blog, you may want to add pictures and videos, and that may take some learning, but it still is nothing to break out in a heavy sweat over.
Write Great Content
At first, all you will need to do to start generating traffic is to make sure that you have great content on your blog. Your blog should have a specific niche that you've researched and that can be sure to draw crowds. Many first-time bloggers make the mistake of using the blog as a personal diary, with random posts on various subjects. This may prove interesting to a few people, but it's not sufficient to draw traffic from the major search engines that like targeted content better. So, pick a niche, and develop interesting content around that niche.
Try to review your posts before publishing to make sure they are relatively targeted of misspellings and grammatical errors. Try to include titles, subheadings, bulleted lists, and white space to make the copy easy on the eye. Many readers do not want to come into a blog and see a single paragraph written in poor English, no matter how interesting the subject. It's just too hard to read.
Understand SEO
Once you have a good schedule going for blog posts, you will want to start to research Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It seems a very technical term, but it only has to do with how big search engines rate content to decide how far up the results page it will show when someone does a search on that particular topic or keyword. Well, knowing that the search engines do have rules they follow to rank content, you should use that knowledge to create posts that automatically rank higher and get a heck of a lot more attention that way.
You can index your posts with keywords that have a high search volume within the search engines. You can add keywords throughout the copy to get a good rating for that keyword. Research potential keywords using Adwords Keyword tool to locate words that might be of benefit for you to use. Then, include them in your copy being careful to not exceed 2% for word density. So, if you have a 500 word post, and you have a single keyword, it should not appear more than 10 times (.02 X 500). If you have a density somewhere between 1% and 2%, you won't be penalized for overusing the keywords in your copy by the search engines, which can blacklist these sites. Or you can use plug-ins to help with SEO too.
Plug-Ins
Blogs offer plug-ins, small applications that are programmed separately and installed separately, to let you do a number of additional things on your blog. Wordpress has numerous plug-ins that allow you to add features like spam control and even monetize your blog. You can explore these plug-ins to help augment the features that you can provide for your audience and gradually make your blog more and more interesting. One of the ones that can help you optimize your blog for SEO is called All In One SEO Pack. See the resources section for more information on this plug-in.
Network
Whether you are a newbie or an old hand, you want to continue to network with other bloggers, particularly those in your core niche. Pay attention to the strategies they are using to gain attention and when you see them being successful, emulate them. Maybe they've added some feature to their site and now you see many more comments. Maybe they are discussing a particular topic that has landed them on a front page of a news outlet. Whatever it is, keep a sharp eye out for not only the ways they are operating their blog, who they are associating with, but also the topics and posts that generate the most eyeballs. Then, simply copy that strategy.
Another way to network successfully is to be a part of a blogger group like Wordpress or a circle of bloggers who regularly post on each other's blogs. You can even create groups of writers who are willing to contribute posts to your site to generate interesting content without you having to do all the work. Since these bloggers come in with their own audience and network, your traffic will climb up as they advertise their post on your blog.
Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article writing success, 'Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide' Download it free here: Secrets of Article Writing Do you want to learn how to build a big online subscriber list fast? Click here: Secrets of List Building Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 9034 articles in print and 14 published ebooks. |
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