Tips to Help You Manage a Successful Blog
It’s been almost 12 years since Leo Hickman made history. Unbeknownst to most, the feature journalist for “The Guardian” etched his name in history with a few keystrokes and his name in the byline. Today, he is regarded as the world’s first recorded blogger. While much of what he produced some 12 years ago was just an experiment, today, the phenomenon of blogging continues to emerge as a culture icon for individuals looking to share opinions, ideas and information.
What was once reserved for professional, Web-savvy experts with working knowledge of HTML and FTP now has morphed into a streamlined version for everyday folks. Today, millions of individuals operate and manage blogs, ranging from daily journals to information about sports media. With so many topics and so much to learn about blogging, it can overwhelm even the most tech-savvy individual.
Know Your Readers and Write About What You Love
The reason most blogs fail to yield high traffic results is because of the lack of reader focus. A student studying business should always remember one important aspect: Understand your customer. If salesman forgets this concept, he loses his sale.
Blogging functions in a similar fashion. Knowing the reader builds traffic. If you know your readers like, short, quick information about entertainment news, why would you create lengthy articles? Get to know your audience. Ask yourself what they enjoy to read. Find out the style of writing they prefer. Ask questions. Find solutions, and most importantly, know who it is you’re writing to.
Other bloggers feel they should write about topics no one else has covered before. In theory, sounds like an excellent idea, but say what your writing about doesn’t interest you very much. Your writing will suffer because of it. Stick to what you know and love so that you’ll produce your best work as a blogger.
Develop a Following
The lifeline of a blog is its followers. Without them, a blog remains tucked away in some dark corner of the Internet. Followers help establish credibility. Followers help earn money. Followers display that people want to hear what you have to say. Building a decent following derives from a number of different avenues. Here’s some of the best:
- Strengthen Your HTML Titles – It’s easy and simple to rework your HTML title tags to meet recent search criteria. Search engines use keywords to direct users to sought-after information. If your HTML titles happen to be one of the keywords, you just created a traffic spike.
- Create Link Clusters to Your Content – Link building helps boost your search ranking placement. The more links you have, the higher the likelihood a search engine will rank you closer to the top. Go through your content and embed links that direct users to previous posts to help boost your traffic.
- Stay in Touch with Readers – They are your lifeline of your blog, remember. Make them feel important by responding to their thoughts and opinions. It’s quick. It’s easy and it shows you care about their comments as well.
Take Pride in What You’ve Achieved
Blogging takes time to master. It requires dedication. It requires determination to improve; more importantly, it demands a decent writer. Look at some of the best blogs in each respective field – technology, politics, advice and even video game blogs – and you’ll notice they all share one common characteristic: They look and read professionally.
The best bloggers take pride in developing content. Webmasters spend hours devising a solid layout, and even asking for help when necessary. Blogging is more than just rushing to type out your thoughts and hitting the “Publish” button. It’s about captivating your reader so they continue to return to your blog.
Now, that isn’t to say you must be a grammar wiz to be a great blogger – not by any means. You do however need to eliminate common mistakes found in your writing, such as run-on sentences, subject-verb agreements, homonym misspellings, correct tenses, and proper punctuation.
Take pride in your writing. Show audiences that your competent enough to compose relevant, alluring information that will keep them coming back for more. How serious would you take a news blog with several grammar mistakes? Or a sports website that cannot spell the name of a professional athlete correctly? Slow down. Edit your work and aim on improving your abilities.
Blog Promotions
Established blogs tend to have a few thousand visitors each day. With a solid following, webmasters have a proven record of captivating audiences with their words. You might operate a niche blog or may even discuss political events in a satirical manner. No matter what you cover, you’ve demonstrated a sagacious writing style. With your devote followers, you can open your blog to advertisers to make some money.
Promoting your blog can make for a great source of income, but maneuvering through the various channels can present a series of challenges. From knowing how to promote your blog to recognizing who to target presents a series of overwhelming obstacles. Here’s the basics:
- Outsource Your Content – Consider using an article writing services company to help with promotion. Blogs gain popularity by the number of visitors that visit a site because of the captivating content found on it. Without content, visitors will go elsewhere for news, information and opinions. Producing content takes time, skill and patience. Content mills serve as a great way for donating a part of your website to help promote a business.
- Leave Some Space for Click Ads – Online blogging platforms make it possible for the webmaster to set aside space for advertisers. Visit any popular websites and you’ll see side and top banners riddling each page with advertising. Each click earns the host a few. Now imagine if 10,000 of your 100,000 followers click on an ad on your website at 5 cents a click. You just made an easy $500 for almost zero work.
- Compose a Review on a Product – Businesses release thousands of new products a year, and many need reviewers to offer candor opinion on a product. It’s quick, easy and great way to make a few extra dollars by posting information.
Sources
Image source: FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Entrepreneurs-Journey.com (2006)
Problogger (2008)
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Nice Stuff!
First of all Right mindset is successful key point. Permanent attention is valuable for any successful blogger.
“Quality and Quantity” Takes strong part, less quantity but more quality i found in your blog and that’s what i want to say…
furthermore, your mention tips are awesome for every blogger to Organizing Successful Blog.
Thanks for sharing
Hi Rosey,
Agree with you quality is more important and better than quantity. I am glad you liked the points. Do you have any other key points? Please share with us.
Thanks for stopping by.
Nice post!
Those were some wonderful tips for newbies wanting to manage a successful blog.
I guess what matters most is that your content should be compelling and gripping enough to draw visitors to your blog, and also give something of value to them.
Besides the content there are many factors, most of which you already stated above, that need to be considered to really make you blog successful.
Thanks for sharing 🙂
Hi Harleena,
As you said, “besides the content there are many factors”. If you don’t mind would you like to share them with us?
Thanks for dropping by and leaving your valueable comment.
interesting.
Harleena would you like to share your experienced factors please. may be it will helpful to me. i will really very appreciate if you’ll share. awaiting your response 🙂
This is an interesting blog which must be really useful for new bloggers.
Thank you for leaving your comment.
very useful tips Bashir
especially Create Link Clusters to Your Content
thank you for the post 🙂
Hi Farouk,
Glad to know that you found the post useful. Link clusters will boost you traffic if you do it in proper way.
Thanks for leaving your comment. 🙂
Great post Bashir but I didn’t agree with content outsourcing strategy because mostly outsource using spinner for writing content and it’s not a good think to used spinner article on professional blog so I think in writing point of view we didn’t depend on others.
Hi Rizwan, I’m glad you Liked the post. You are absolutely right most of them using spinner software to spin the old articles. I agree with the point you mentioned. But in my point of view not all are same some of great writers provide you 100% unique and intresting articles. Thats why I mentioned in my post.
Thanks for dropping by and leaving your comment.
I have a site promoting my business but now need to focus on launching a blog so this is very useful. Obviously I will want to monetize this blog and get revenue from adsense or affiliate offers. Is there any benefit in linking my static business site to the blog, I am sure the answer is yes but why?
If you outsource then you can do rest of the work such as link building, promotion and getting the word out. Creating content takes a lot of time and perhaps best to outsource. You can also write it yourself which I do very often.
Some excellent tips on how to manage a successful blog. If you were asked which tip you placed as the highest importance which one would it be and why?
Killer and unique content blog promotion.
My first visit to this website and i must say i was not at all dissappointed. You write really good and all the tips covered were nicely written and executed. Keep up the Good Woark.. 🙂
Hi Prithvi – Welcome to the blog.
Glad to know that you liked my blog and post! Thanks for your appreciation.
Hope to see you around here! 🙂
Nice post!
It is really important to know your audience. if you know what your readers like or dislike, you can put up a great blog with a lot of traffic.
Thank you!
You are right! Thanks for leaving your comment.
These are great tips , Bashir!
Sometimes people will just write and write that they’d forget about promoting their blog post. In order to attract more followers, one should also promote their article in various social bookmarking sites. It would be useless to keep on writing if you don’t really have any readers, it’s not going to be worth the effort!
Hi James,
You are right! blog is not about for just write and write! you need to write useful content and promote it to attract more readers. social bookmarking, social media sites are best for promote blog posts.
Thanks for stopping by and leaving your comment.