Secrets of Successful Blogging Revealed

Blogging redefines the future of the web and the internet. In fact, whether you like it or not, it gradually and continuously sets the trend in the websphere. Why do these happen? Well, hundreds of thousands of web sites today contain “blog” pages. Besides, another hundreds of thousands of web sites in the websphere are “dedicated” blog sites. With this overwhelming figure, it will be inevitable that in the future, blogging would become a widely accepted and highly paid profession.

Successful blog sites

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Since the early conception of a web log (blog), several websites and content editors adopted the dynamic and challenging concept of putting a seemingly personal activities, communication threads, ideas and ideology, concepts and visions, and all related personal experiences and stuff for a public view.

Successful blog sites are definitely “dedicated” blog sites. This means that the websites’ contents and media are purely regulated and maintained by an individual or a group of individuals. The contents of these sites are by majority, concentrated and strategically categorized.

Other non-dedicated blog sites are basically corporate sites or even sites for web services and other stuff with a special link for blog sections. This further explains how blogging affects the corporate sector in terms of web contents.

Why blog anyway?

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Generally, there is no finite measure for the success of a blog site in particular or for any website for that matter. However, goals can be set prior to designing, conceptualizing, building, and putting a website to life. Thence, achieving these preset goals will eventually measure the blog site’s success.

These preset goals can certainly vary from one blogger to another. However, there are several goals why we need to build a blog site that is worth considering here:

Gain Popularity

The internet is a global opportunity for maximum exposure. This is the ultimate media where possibility for extreme popularity is boundless. Gaining the so coveted online appreciation is basically a measure of success especially for a blog site where the expected audience or visitors are not limited to gender, age or location. The more popular your site is, the more successful and effective blogger you are. Thus, bloggers aim to be popular among their respective trend or industry.

Online popularity however is so elusive and there are no definite criteria to measure when you actually achieved it or not. Moreover, several programs and web services are available to help a blog site gain so much popularity.

Build Reputation

Television broadcasters and channel newscasters in various stations that are known internationally, like CNN for instance, undeniably built a good worldwide name while performing their job with excellence. This is true with bloggers as well.
For instance, you are a skilled engine mechanic. You have gained several years of shop experience in your local community where you achieved excellence basically on engine repair. With just a simple blog about how you do things, how you diagnose engine problems, and how you successfully fix them and prevent them from reoccurring, thousands of people from all over the world who might come across your site may find your information very helpful.
From time to time, they will definitely visit your site in the hope of getting some help every time they get in trouble with their car engines. As a result, you will no longer be a local celebrity for engine repairs but a self-made authority as well when it comes to engine troubles.

Generate Income

Having a blog site is precisely an opportunity to build a passive income system. Basically, this income comes from advertisers in many forms.
Direct advertisers pay you in order for their ad to be placed on specific part of your site. On the other hand, several ad networks like Google, Yahoo and many others, can dynamically place relevant ads based on the content of your site by using their ad-generating script. With this scheme, your earnings will be based on ad impression and ad clicks.

Extend Help

One noble motive for a blog is simply to extend some sort of help to the online community. By spending a lot of times writing articles detailing a particular helpful procedure, thousands and even millions of people who ever come across your site facing the problem that you are blogging about, may be relieved of their pains and frustrations by simply following your instructions and stop their tiring and risky trial-and-error attempts. Posting self-made videos in your blog site describing how things are done are even greater ways in helping others who are faced with similar scenarios.

Whatever your goals in your blogging are, achieving those goals is every blogger’s ultimate goal. But in order to realize your goals, here are some tips that will surely help you achieve success in your blogging course.

Major Keys to Blogging Success

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Know your purpose

Prior to setting up your site with all your preferred design in mind, the very first and crucial part to decide is the purpose of the entire blog site. Will you be blogging about politics, health concerns, environmental consciousness, safety practices, IT trends, gadgets, entertainment, or any subject of your expertise?
These things define your purpose. This purpose defines everything. In order to be successful, your site should not talk about all these things at once. Focus on something that you are an expert of. Your purpose will serve as your key guide in everything that you do with your site: from selecting a domain name, drafting a tagline or a site slogan, choosing the site mood, defining color swatches for your theme, or even in listing terms or keywords in your blog site’s taxonomy.
With a clearly defined purpose, you are on the right path towards blogging success.

Know your audience

You are blogging for other people and not for yourself. This is one major fact that should guide you while creating the contents of your site. However, the online community is composed of people with diverse interest and background. Sure enough, they differ not only in their geographic locations; they also vary in many areas like language preference, age, gender, culture and beliefs.
It is hard to serve this online community of total diversity. This is the major reason why you should blog for the right audience. You can then plan for the right target. Thus, if you clearly know whom you are blogging for and only consider them in writing your site contents, you can definitely play with their interests and feed them with the right information.
You cannot please everybody as the saying goes. But serving the selected few among the vast online audience is quite measurable.

Categorize

The internet is so full of information. With almost everything that pops out of your mind, try to ask a search engine about it and you will certainly be amazed on what the internet has to offer you. These search results are definitely influenced by how you build your site and write your contents.
Categorize the contents of your site. This would help you in building trust and confidence among your visitors. Don’t mess up. With the use of categories in organizing your site’s contents, your visitors will surely enjoy lingering in your blogs while navigating with your links.
Categories also help with search engine optimization. Like human beings, search bots find it easier to crawl and index your site especially when their algorithm can predict which data are placed where. As a rule, exerting extra efforts in building a highly categorized blog site pays off since your visitors would definitely have a better user experience.

Be interactive

With the advent of the new web technologies, it is now easier to manage a dynamic blog site. Today, content management systems offer bloggers a wide array for interactivity.
An interactive blog site fully engages its visitors. This would mean success from the blogger’s point of view since an engaged visitor simply means guarantee for future revisits. Interactivity in a site means keeping visitors for a longer stay and keeping them from coming back in the future.
If your blog site has these interactive features, it is not enough though. Putting a bunch of contents and leaving them for your visitors is not a good practice. If your site is interactive, you should be interactive as well. This is to keep your site appear alive and up-to-date. How? Well, there are many simple ways:
• moderate your forum sections regularly
• answer inquiries promptly
• Feedback on comments promptly and regularly

Be specific

Blogs are built to inform. This information could be persuading, enhancing, teaching or entertaining. However, you would lose its essence when you wander. Hence, effective blogging should be precise and specific.
Blog entries or article contents should speak only about a single subject. This is to avoid misleading visitors from one point to another. This is also to prevent them from being bored that would eventually lead them to the exit door.
So the rule is: be specific so your visitors will be engaged with your blogs and they will keep visiting your site from time to time.

Be on time, all the time

The world is changing fast. So are the areas or subjects you are blogging about.

One way of getting a high ranking for search engines is to have regular posts at seemingly regular intervals. This is because search bots are logging your blog site’s activities in their every crawl. The more active your site is, the more frequent these bots crawl and re-index your site’s contents, and the higher your site’s ranking is among search engines.

Increase your buffer

In order to post blog contents at a regular interval at all times, you should consider having a content buffer. This is especially useful for blog sites that are maintained by a single blogger.
A content buffer is a set of blog entries ready for posting at a scheduled interval. This is to ensure that content is posted regularly in order to keep your site’s activity index high. For instance, if you normally post 5 blog entries every day, then raising your content buffer to 10 blog entries is achievable and reasonable enough. This is a two-day buffer. Thus, in unwanted cases when you fail to write contents, you still have 2 more days to spare.

Design matters

A plain text filled site is dull, boring, and dead. This is because out there in the websphere are plenty beautifully designed websites waiting to be explored.
When a person surfs the internet, it is likely that he or she prefers to browse beautifully crafted sites over those that are plain and ugly. Your site may be full of informative and highly engaging contents but it will lose its value when it is not coupled with a catching design.
Explore with colors in your themes. Utilize engaging photos to attract visitors. Indulge in handy flash animations to promote dynamism. Present your blog site beautifully to stay competitive.

Know SEO

It is impossible to reach everyone online and ask them to visit your blog. Generally, majority of your unique visitors will be coming from a search engine like Yahoo or Google searching for some keywords that literally lead to your site link. Thus, the higher ranking your site gets from leading search engines, the higher your chances are from getting people to visit your site. This is why you need to consider Search Engine Optimization.
In order for your site to be optimized for search engines, you should consider the following:
• choose the right combination of keywords for your contents
• use descriptive tags in all posts
• always provide an alternate text for your images
• post your blog site’s links in different websites and forums
• don’t spam

Build Lists

Email Marketing is a common way to promote a site. Your blog site is not an exception. Try building a mailing list for your site updates. This is normally in the form of newsletters where visitors can subscribe to keep them updated.
Every time you create a newsletter issue and send them to your mailing list on a scheduled basis, it is guaranteed by Pareto’s Principle that 80% of the subscribers will take a peek of your site updates and 20% will ignore them. Or it could also be the opposite. But nevertheless, you get visitors back on your site.

Social networks can help

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Email Marketing is a common way to promote a site. Your blog site is not an exception. Try building a mailing list for your site updates. This is normally in the form of newsletters where visitors can subscribe to keep them updated.
Every time you create a newsletter issue and send them to your mailing list on a scheduled basis, it is guaranteed by Pareto’s Principle that 80% of the subscribers will take a peek of your site updates and 20% will ignore them. Or it could also be the opposite. But nevertheless, you get visitors back on your site.