Blogger is often a marketable and profitable tool if used correctly. Profiting from blogs is simply a matter of grabbing the eye of an audience and not doing any actual salesmen selling. In this article, you’ll learn the 13 most essential steps to successful blogging.

Where to start as Blogger?

You should begin your blog with a free blog hosting service like Journal Home. I don’t say that because I’m the owner, but a free blog host is extremely rewarding for a replacement blog.

Starting with a free blog hosting service allows you to start blogging instantly without having any advance knowledge of scripts, hosting, or programming. It allows you to create an audience and buzz for your blog. It allows you to specialize in your content and not the interior maintenance of the blog.

The best advantage of starting with a free service, is within the case your blog doesn’t become successful you are doing not lose any money or are you left holding the bill. The great thing a few blogs is that they’re organized in chronological order, your latest entry is displayed first.

When your blog traffic grows greatly and you’re able to upgrade to your domain then you’ll simply make your last blog entry the announcement of your “move”. Simply add a final entry stating that your blog has “moved” and sort the new blog URL address.

This directs visitors to your new blog site, keeping your following, without a serious inconvenience to anyone. Upgrade as you would like to…but only you would like to!

 

Niche

A niche may be a targeted product, service, or topic. You should first choose a product, service, or topic which interests you. Choose a neighborhood that you’ll enthusiastically write on on a day today.

You can use keyword research services like Google or Yahoo! Buzz Index to find popular searched topics. It doesn’t matter if your topic is popular as long as there’s an audience for your topic and therefore the topic is precisely focused then your blog should achieve success.

Anything is often considered a distinct segment as long because it features an audience regardless of how large or how small the audience is.

A blog about your cat is often a distinct segment or a blog about the species of the cat family is often a bigger niche market.

If there are people who have an interest in hearing about your cat or the species of the cat family, then you’ve got a niche…you can even prefer to build your audience for a market in which an audience doesn’t exist, but first, you want to build your blog.

Update Daily (nothing less) YOUR blog

This step may be a must and not a suggestion. Updating your blog daily not only keeps your blog more interesting to readers, but it also gives your blog fresh content on each day to day making it more appealing to search engines.

Not updating your blog on an occasional holiday or at some point here and there’s understandable to most, but missing days at a time or weeks is unacceptable and will presumably end in your blog being unsuccessful.

To keep your blog traffic and retain your visitor’s interest it’s a requirement to update your blog daily with multiple entries. Though I’m seeing a growing trend of successful blogs that aren’t being updated daily, they’re successful and have a stable audience who still visit their blog daily.

Regardless, these blogs are still updated weekly with multiple entries. Until you’ve got a gentle audience you ought to attempt to update your blog every day with a minimum of 3 or more daily entries.

The best thanks to accomplishing this is often to line aside 1-2 hours each day for tending to your blog and adding new entries. It may even be knowing schedule a group time that you simply dedicate to your blog every day.

Give yourself work hours and treat your blog as employment, what happens if you don’t come to figure for days or weeks…you lose money or worse you get fired! The same applies here…if you don’t update your blog for days or weeks you’ll lose visitors.

 

Traffic

It’s no secret. You must have traffic to take advantage of blogs. There are numerous ways to create traffic. Paid advertising, free advertising, viral marketing, search engine marketing, RSS/XML feeds, and word-of-mouth.

You should always use your blog URL address in the signature of your email, forum discussions, message boards, or any other communication media. You should submit your blog URL address to look engines and blog directories.

You should submit your RSS/XML URL feed to blog ping services like Technorati, Ping-O-Matic, and Blogdigger. You should confidently share your blog with family, friends, co-workers, associates, and business professionals when it relates.

Many blogs are often considered as a set of articles, for this purpose you ought to submit your blog entries (those that are valuable and lengthy articles) to content syndicators like GoArticles.com or ZapContent.com.

Once submitted your articles are often picked up and published by others. The trick is to form sure you include your Blog URL address within the “About the Author” passage. What this does is create link popularity and backlinks for your blog, when someone picks up your article from the syndication then publish the article on their website the “About the Author” passage is included with each publication and therefore the link you included is followed, crawled, and indexed by search engines.

Imagine if your article is popular enough or controversial enough to supply 10,000 publications across the online. The search engines are sure to find your blog in no time thereupon many publications and credit you an authority on the subject, reciprocally increasing your rank on search engines.

The small effort of writing a well-written article is rewarding. You should attempt to write a minimum of 1 full-length article hebdomadally for syndication and submit your article to a minimum of 10 article syndicators.

 

Track Your Blog

How does one know if your blog has traffic? Just because nobody is leaving comments doesn’t mean your blog isn’t growing. Many visitors don’t leave comments but they’re returning visitors. I know it sounds crazy but with blogs, people are more curious about what “you” need to say! Many visitors don’t comment on their 1st, 2nd, or 3rd time. Some don’t comment in the least but are active daily visitors.

Tracking your blog doesn’t need to be overly sophisticated usually an easy free page counter like StatCounter.com or Active Meter will do the trick. Install (copy/paste) the code into the Html of your blog template and begin tracking your visitors.

It is better to use a service that provides you advanced traffic analysis, like keyword tracking information, referral information, and program information. Visitors, returning visitors, and unique visitors should be standard for any page counter service you select.

 

Listen to Your Audience

When using the right page counter you ought to begin to ascertain how others are finding your blog and if through search engines then which keywords are getting used to seek out your blog.

If constantly your blog is being found by 1 or more keywords then focus your blog around those keywords to form it even more powerful.

When writing entry titles and entries use the keywords as often as possible while keeping the blog legible and interesting.

Multiple blogs

Use multiple blogging accounts (free) to draw in more people. This means you ought to have a blog with JournalHome.com et al… The more blog accounts the higher (be bound to read and cling to the Terms of Service for every site).

You can copy/paste from 1 blog to all or any others. Having different blog accounts is like having a publication in several newspapers. This enables you to draw in more visitors and this also increases the prospect that 1 of your blogs is going to be within the program results for your focused keywords.

Short & Concise

Aside from the lengthy article every week for syndication and publication, your blog entries should be short & concise (if you’ll help it). Sometimes there are exceptions to the rule and you’ve got no choice but to blog lengthy entries but attempt to avoid this the maximum amount as possible.

You do not want your blog entries to become hours of reading. Visitors wish to easily find information and skim through your entries. It is good to be detailed and supply useful information, but don’t include useless information or run away sentences that veer faraway from your topic. Stay keyword-focused.

 

Digital Art

Try to include non-advertising graphics, pictures, photos, and art in your blog entries. Not too much. Once a week is fine. Graphics can sometimes bring your blog to life.

Of course, the content of the blog is that the most vital aspect and you are doing not want to overshadow your content with graphics, but displaying graphics can add a bit of spice to the blog.

Be choosy about your graphics and confirm they suit your entry topic. You should add content with the graphic, a minimum of a caption. Original graphics, photos, pictures, and art is recommended.

Keep it Personal

A blog is most successful when it’s kept personal. Try to include personal experiences that relate to the subject of your blog entry. Stay away from the business style of writing.

Write with a more personal style and use first-person narratives. Do not write any of your entries as sales letters, instead share product reviews and private endeavors.

 

Interact With Your Visitors

You now have the traffic you deserve. You should begin interacting with your visitors. Create a daily theme such as: “Monday Money Tip” or “Picture of the Week” which entices your readers to seem forward to every week.

Give your readers advance notice a few product, service, or topic which you’re getting to review then mention later. If the President was scheduled to offer a speech then in your blog you ought to state that you simply “will discuss the speech and provides your opinion after the speech airs. Comments will be appreciated”.

Try your best to seek out exclusive information that not many have. Do not disclose any confidential or secret information which is deemed illegal or can potentially get you into trouble, but attempt to get the inside track before everyone else does.

Such as: If your blog was about Paris Hilton (the socialite) and you had a blog entry about “Paris Hilton Getting Married” then it might be interesting to your readers if you had an actual picture of Paris Hilton ring.

Give your best effort to dig and search the web for exclusive information and you’ll possibly come up with something useful.

Your readers will appreciate this and that they show their appreciation through word-of-mouth referrals. Imagine what percentage readers will tell their friends, family, et al. about the information they only can find at your blog.

Make Money

Once your blog has gained some real momentum and your blog traffic is increasing then it’s time to start out brooding about turning your traffic into profit. You should use contextual advertising, like Google Adsense or Chitika.

Contextual advertising is typically text links that use the content of your blog to publish targeted ads on your blog.

The payout is typically supported by a pay-per-click model, meaning for ever click a billboard receives you’re paid a little percentage of the profits. In addition to contextual advertising, it’s good to also use graphical advertising such as BlogAds.com, Amazon.com, MammaMedia, or General Sponsored Advertising.

You’re a Professional BLOGGER

You’re a professional now! What are you continue to doing thereupon free blog hosting service? It is time to upgrade to a website hosted solution. You need to urge an internet host and choose a website name for your blog then check its availability.

Select the blogging software you would like to use, such as Squarespace.com, WordPress.org, MovableType.org, TypePad, etc. When you have your new blog domain setup and prepared for traffic then it’s time for you to announce your advance all of your previous blog accounts.

Your last entry to the blog should be a “move” announcement. The title should be “Moved” and therefore the blog entry should state something like “I have a replacement home for my blog, please bookmark and follow the link: http://www.YourNewBlogDomainName.com”.

This way all returning visitors and new readers shouldn’t have any problem finding your new blog domain. Plus, search engines can easily index and crawl your new blog, since your old blog should already be fashionable the search engines.

At the extent of knowledgeable bloggers, you’ll want to team with 1 or more other bloggers. This will create a more interesting and more powerful blog. The old saying “two heads is best than one”, more authors mean more advertising and exposure because each author will have a vested interest within the blog.

The idea of a team blog is to form it profitable and rewarding for all authors while continuing to focus on the blog topic and keeping the blog interesting for visitors.

Conclusion

Following these blogging techniques should make your blogging experience far more rewarding. There is no guarantee that your blog will become popular or a household name, but the trouble should a minimum of put you one step closer. Making money online isn’t an overnight experience like many might imagine, but making money online is certainly a foreseeable possibility. As well, growing popularity online isn’t an overnight experience, but through time, dedication, and persistence you’ll be rewarded with all the royalties of blogging.