Have a blog? Make it a successful one!
I have published guides on finding a domain name and creating a blog on that domain previously here on Ghacks. It can be quite frustrating however if you are full of ideas and write great articles but realize that your blog is just a tiny wheel on the Internet that no one is visiting. And while it may not be important to you, you also notice that your ads do not earn you a lot of money, if any at all.
I assume that you want to have a successful blog with great visitors, great comments that add to your knowledge and money that you earn from all of this. It does not really matter if you just created a blog or want to improve 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 helped me a lot in getting this site on the right track and it certainly will help you as well. Goals like reaching a certain visitor level, a page rank, earnings, or mentions on other sites are all possible goals to consider.
It should be a realistic goal though and nothing that you won't likely achieve. So, do not set a goal to earn a million Dollars per month from a one month old blog. You need to write down the goals and the time in which you want to reach them.
A simple goal would be to raise the pagerank of your blog to a certain number. It does not make sense to set the goal to a date that cannot really be achieved considering that Google is updating the pagerank only a couple of times per year.
It does not hurt to add "end goals" to the list as well. Say, you want to earn at least $500 per month from the blog. That's ok and helpful as well as it does away with the pressure that you may feel when you set dates for goals.
You should look at what you are having right now as well. How many visitors and pageviews do you get per month? How much money, if any, do you earn? What is the site's current pagerank?
You do that so that you can compare what has been on day one to the status at a later point in time. I suggest you collect the stats on a monthly or bi-monthly basis to see if the trend is going up or down, or if you are stagnating.
Probably the most important thing to do afterwards is to get the word out there that your blog exists. You have a couple of options to do that:
- Add your blog to all major search engines if you have not done so already.
- Add it to Technorati and other respected websites that allow you to do so.
- Be active on sites like Reddit or authority blogs in your niche. Mention your site if it fits or is appropriate but do not overdo it.
Another interesting option is to write a comment on a blog post or news that was posted elsewhere. Make sure you link to relevant sites and the source. Why? This serves two purposes. First, it provides readers of your blog with options to visit those sites to access additional information about the topic that you have published an article about.
Second, it often pops up in the admin dashboards of those sites that you linked to them. Some sites displays so called trackbacks on their pages, others do not. Even if they do not, it may still benefit you as the admin or writer on the other site may visit your blog to check it out.
Link exchange is not really something that should be done anymore these days. While it is unlikely that you will run into issues if you do, overdoing it can be counter-productive. If you do, make sure you nofollow those links.
I think it is important that you write on a regular schedule. It does not really matter if you post one article per day or per week, only that you do it regularly. Note that you need to put more care into a blog that you update once a week only because you only have one option to provide visitors with good content.
You can increase your output as you see fit though in the future once your blog becomes popular.
Talking about advertising. Adsense is still the way to go for most blogs as it is easy to setup and works on its own afterwards. It may not be the highest paying option though. Affiliate systems are another option but they do require more work on your part.
You need to find suitable programs to join and keep an eye on them as they may change over time. There are other advertising options, like using banner ads. You have lots of choice here but the high paying ones usually require you to have a certain minimum amount of visitors per month before you are allowed in.
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 :P
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An excellent post! Excellent! Apparently, I agree too :)