Have a blog ? Make it a successful one !

I have been writing about the basics of finding a domain name and creating a blog on that domain name. It can be quite frustrating however if you are full of ideas and write great articles but either no visitors show up or the earnings are not worth mentioning. Not every blog has to be monetized. I know of some that use their blogs purely for reasons such as publicity, discussion or for a reference in their resume.

I assume that you want to have a successful blog with great visitors, great comments that add to your knowledge and some money that you would earn from all of this. It does not really matter if you just created a blog or want to improve of what you already have achieved. The first thing would be to write down your goals. What is the purpose of your blog ? Money ? Fame ? Women / Men ? Fun ?

It was very helpful for me to write down certain goals I had for ghacks such as reaching a certain visitor level, a pagerank or a amount of money that I wanted to earn. Write that down but be realistic. I wrote down goals that I wanted to achieve every quarter. It is for instance not possible to say when the next pagerank update will start which means that it does not make sense to have the goal of a certain pagerank in the next 3 months.

After you have written down achievable goals you should take a look at what is already there. How many visitors do you get per day ? What is your pagerank, your income ? The most important aspect in my opinion is the amount of visitors that pay your blog a visit every day which means one of the first priorities should be to increase the amount of visitors.

To do this you have several options. Use a sitemap plugin to submit the blog to google. Once that is done search technorati and sites like blogtopsites for similar blogs. Add the ones that you find interesting to your feed reader. If you have none try a web service such as netvibes to have a overview of all your subscribed feeds. Read the feeds and if you find something interesting write about it on your blog and add a trackback.

This has some advantages. First your link appears on the other blog (if not considered spam) which could mean a backlink and visitors from that blog. The blog owner might take a look at your blog as well and in the best case add it to his feed reader. You should also become a regular visitor to some of those blogs and comment on articles which leads to the same effect. Just make sure you do not spam the blogs with stupid comments.

You could also email some of the webmasters and ask for a link exchange. Don’t expect a link from a pagerank 6+ website if you have a pagerank of 0. This does not happen, take a look at sites with a lower pagerank at the beginning. Some webmasters will link to you even though you have a low pagerank. Quality of articles is almost as important as visitors or pagerank. Play that card. Every knowledgeable webmaster knows that sites with high quality articles will sooner or later receive a good pagerank.

It is also important that you write regular. You do not have to write three times a day but once a day would be fine. You could increase the output once the ball gets rolling or you see a stagnation of visitors. More articles means most of the time more traffic as well.

Talking about advertising. You surely are using adsense on the blog. If not this should be the first to add to it. If properly added to your blog you should make a decent income from adsense. This is highly hypothetical but a figure of 4-10$ per 1000 pageviews can be achieved with some customization. Everton from connectedinternet compiled a nice list of adsense tips. The best ad unit should be near the main content of the individual page.

Adsense is not the only way to make money with your blog. You could try to sell links using services such as text-link-ads which have requirements that your blog has to meet before they accept it. I do not want to get into to much detail at the moment, if you are interested in additional methods let me know and I give you some information.

Last but not least we have the pagerank. I like the pagerank of my website because it makes it so much easier to sell links on my site. You need links from other sites that have a pagerank to increase yours. The best way is to let it grow over time but you could speed it up a little bit by submitting your website to directories for instance. I think the best way is to get mentioned on other blogs.

The best advise that I can give each and everyone would be to keep the ball rolling. It will take time but to see that your blog reaches a goal that you set is a wonderful thing. Better than sex