How To Start Successful Blog - 14 Steps

How To Start Successful Blog-14 Steps

Introduction:

This article is a blend of useful tips that will lead you to start a successful blog. It teaches how you will progress in your blogging and graduate to the level of enviable blogging experience. If used appropriately, blogging can be very profitable and commercialized. In order to profit from blogging, one should have been able to have gotten an audience attention.

Successful Blog

And to get audience attention, the quality of the info you are sending out is very crucial, and of course, you must have optimized your blog for Search engines. Blogging is an art, and for profitability, masterly creativity is needed. We will be revealing in this article, 14 most credible steps to start a successful blog.

1) Where to start?

I would always advise that it pays to start blogging using free blog hosting services offered by companies like Google (blogger), Wix, or WordPress.org. A free blog host is very rewarding for a new blog. Starting with a free blog hosting service allows you to begin blogging instantly without having any advance knowledge of scripts, hosting, or programming.

It allows you to build an audience and buzz for your blog. Again, it allows you to get focused on the content of your blog instead of being bothered about maintaining your blog. The major benefit of free hosting blog service is that you will not lose any dime should your blog not thrive well at the long run.

One good thing about blog posts is that the latest postings appear first in the chronological order of display. When your blog traffic grows greatly and you are ready to upgrade to your own domain then you can simply make your last blog entry the announcement of your "move".

Simply publish your last post stating you have moved to a new site and you include the new site URL. This will directs your followers or readers to your new site, in this way, you would suffer major setbacks. Don't forget to upgrade only when you need to!

2) Niche

Niche refers to a targeted topic, product or service. I would advise you do a little research first, then decide on topic/discipline, product or service you are interested in. Choose an area which you can enthusiastically write about on a daily basis. One free good keyword research tool you use to this is Google Zeitgeist or Mike Blumenthal's Category tool. It does NOT matter if your topic is popular as long as there is a audience for your topic and the topic is precisely focused then your blog should be successful. Virtually anything can be considered as a niche so long it has target audience, no matter how small or large that audience is. A blogging about your dog or dog training can be a niche. If you have audience that wants to read or know more about your dog or how to train a dog, then that is a niche. It's even possible to build a blog on a area without an audience yet, then you begin to build the audience.

3) Headlines

Learn to write stunning headlines. David Ogilvy a popular and highly successful Ads men of this generation was said to be used to writing up 100 headlines to select from for some of his ads copy. It has been observed that about 5 times as your visitors read your headline as your blog article. They only have a few seconds to spend before they go to other items.

4) Update Daily (nothing less)

This step is 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 a day to day making it more appealing to search engines. Not updating your blog on an occasional holiday or one day here and there is understandable to most, but missing days at a time or weeks is unacceptable and will most likely result in your blog being unsuccessful.

You should be able to update your blog daily with multiple entries in order to retain your traffic and rank well on search engines. Though, there seems to be a growing trend of successful blogs that are not being updated daily, this happens when the blog already have a stable audience. Regardless, these blogs are still updated weekly with multiple entries.

Try to update your blog about 2 or more times daily with varying entries, at least until you build a stable audience. The best way to accomplish this is to set aside 1-2 hours a day for tending to your blog and adding new entries. It might even a good practice if you can specify a time of the day when you attend to your blog.

Give yourself work hours and treat your blog as a job, what happens if you don't come to work for days or weeks...you lose money or worse you get fired! Same applies here...if you don't update your blog for days or weeks you'll lose visitors.

5) Traffic

It's no secret. You must have traffic to profit from blogs. There are numerous ways to build traffic. Paid advertising, free advertising, viral marketing, search engine marketing, RSS/XML feeds, and word-of-mouth. Always ensure you use your blog URL address in the signature of your email, message boards, forum discussions, and possibly in blog comments if necessary.

You need to submit your blog url address to a blog directory. If you are targeting local audience, you also submit it to local article directory. You should submit your RSS/XML URL feed to blog ping services like Technorati, Ping-O-Matic, and Blogdigger. Start sharing your blog with friends, co-workers, business professionals, associates, and relatives.

Many blogs can be considered as a collection of articles, for this purpose you should submit your blog entries (those that are valuable and lengthy articles) to content syndicators like GoArticles.com or ZapContent.com. Your blog posts can be picked up and published by someone else. The trick is to make sure you include your Blog URL address in the "About the Author" passage. In this way, you create backlinks for your block and popularity when your article is picked from content syndication and then published in other websites.

Your URL in the "About the Author" passage is followed, crawled and indexed by search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo. If your article is good enough to be picked and published by say, 10, 000 publication across the web. The search engines are bound to find your blog in no time with that many publications and credit you an authority on the topic, in return increasing your rank on search engines. The small effort of a well-written article is rewarding. You should try to write at least 1 full-length article every week for syndication and submit your article to at least 10 article syndicators.

6) Track Your Blog

How do you know if your blog has traffic? Just because no one is leaving comments doesn't mean your blog isn't growing. Most visitors don't leave comments, but they may be returning. In blogs, people go after what you have to say, what information you have for them. Some visitors may not like to comment in their 1st, 2nd or even 3rd visits.

Some do not comment at all but are active daily visitors. It doesn't cost a fortune to start tracking your blog. You can use a free counter like Active Meter or StatCounter.com to do the job. Install (copy/paste) the code into the HTML of your blog template and start tracking your visitors. Its better to use a service which gives you advanced traffic analysis, such as keyword tracking information, referral information, and search engine information. Visitors, returning visitors, and unique visitors should be standard for any page counter service you choose.

7) Listen to Your Audience

Proper page counter should be able to give you information on how visitors get to your blog and by which keywords. Try and find out regular keywords through which visitors get to your blog, you then try to focus your blog around those keywords to make it stronger. Use keywords and keyword phrases when writing entry titles and entries as often as you can, but also avoiding spamming.

How to start a successful blog : 14 Steps

8) Multiple blogs

In order to attract more people to you site, you should consider opening multiple blog accounts, which usually is free. It means you should set up a blog with JournalHome.com and other sites with similar services. If you many blog accounts, the better for you in terms of getting traffic and monetizing your blog. You copy and paste from one to the other blogs. Having different blog accounts is like having a publication in different newspapers. This helps you to get more customers and increases the probability of having one of your keywords in search engine results per time.

9) Short & Concise

Aside from the lengthy article a week for syndication and publication your blog entries should be short & concise (if you can help it). Sometimes there are exceptions to the rule and you have no choice but to blog lengthy entries, but try to avoid this as much as possible. Such too long articles takes too long a time in reading. Visitors like to easily find information and skim through your entries. It is good to be detailed and provide useful information, but do not include useless information or run away sentences that veer away from your topic. Learn to stay keyword focused, as it would add to your SEO efforts.

10) Digital Art

Try to include non-advertising graphics, pictures, photos, and art in your blog entries. Not too much. Good graphics and images have a way of adding taste to your posts. Of course, the content of the blog is the most important aspect and you do not want to overshadow your content with graphics, but displaying graphics can add a bit of spice to the blog. In adding images to your post article, ensure that they match your entry topic. Add content to every image you add to your post, especially caption and alt text which also will add credit to SEO. I would recommend you add original pictures, graphics and photos.

11) Keep it Personal

Most successful blogging has a touch of personality on them. Bring your personal experiences to bear on your post entries. Avoid business style kind of writing. Write with a more personal style and use first-person narratives. Don't present your write ups as though they are sales letters, rather try to give your personal reviews and share your experiences with such services/products.

12) Interact With Your Visitors

Good interaction is critical to converting visitors to customers and maintaining already converted readers. You should begin interacting with your visitors. Create a regular theme such as: "Monday Money Tip" or "Picture of the Week" which entices your readers to look forward to each week. Give your readers advance notice about a product, service, or topic which you are going to review and then talk about later. You may even announce to analyze a scheduled International game tournament that involve your country and invite your readers to offer their opinion. Search always for exclusive useful information which is not widespread you can give to your readers. Be mindful of the kind of information you give out. Don't give out confidential or secret information which you are not in position to give. It might land you into serious trouble. Scout for first hand info, give it out first. It sells a lot. For instance, if you blogged about Paris Hilton, and you wrote a post on him getting married, it would be much interesting if you had caught a glimpse of his wedding ring and displayed the picture. It's all about sacrifice and hard working, but it worths it; try your very best to search and scout for exclusive and useful information for your readers. They will always be returning to your sites for more. They will even show their appreciation via word-of-mouth referrals. Imagine how many readers will tell their friends, family, and others about information they only can find at your blog.

13) Make Money

When you noticed that your blog has gained some stability, you have gotten some good quality contents and your traffic is increasing, that is time to turn the traffic to profit. You should use contextual advertising, like Google Adsense or Chitika. Contextual advertising are text links and info-graphics that are keyword triggered. So, they are content specific and show up based on the content that is being searched. The ads are run as PPC. When a visitor clicks on the ads, you are paid a commission. Apart from the contextual advertising, you can also monetize your blog through the use of graphical advertising such as Amazon.com, BlogAds.com and MammaMedia, plus sponsored ads.

14) You're a Professional

At this stage, you can be called a professional blogger. If you are still using free blog hosting service, you can begin to think of upgrading to a domain hosted service. You need to get a web host and choose a domain name for your blog then check its availability, if available you buy it. Select from among the free blogging platforms such as WordPress.org, Squarespace.com,TypePad, MovableType.org etc.

The time is due now to announce your move from the previous free domain to your new hosted domain. Your last post on your previous domain should be your "Move Announcement". You can give the title of that last post "Moved To My New Home" then you give the link ( http://yournewblogURL.com) and ask your readers to check it out and bookmark it. This way all returning visitors and new readers should not have any problem finding your new blog domain. Also, search engines wouldn't find it difficult crawling and indexing your new site as your old site should have been popular with search engines.

You might also consider teaming up with one or more professional bloggers for corporate advantages. The co-operation is bound to yield a successful blogging experience. The old saying "two heads is better than one", more authors mean more advertising and exposure because each author will have a vested interest in the blog. The idea of a team blog is to make it profitable and rewarding for all authors while continuing to target the blog topic and keeping the blog interesting for visitors.

They are the 14 Steps on how to start a successful blog. If you follow these blogging steps marshaled in this article, you should be able to make your blogging business more profitable and fruitful. Note, no guarantee that your blog will become a household name and so popular, but these techniques will surely put you close to it if adhered to.

Making money online is not an overnight experience like many may think, but making money online is definitely a foreseeable possibility. Getting popular on the web takes a lot of dedication, persistence and quality time. Your reward will come soon, you continue to build on what you have already. Never let a week go by without you publishing at least an article.