Content Writing & Copywriting Blog

How to Make Your Blog Popular

Jan 31, 2008 26 Comments »

The success of your blog mostly depends on the amount of traffic it gets. This is especially more important if you want your blog to generate some kind of revenue. Frank on Biziki touches upon the topic of how to make your blog popular and I would like to share my version of the topic over here.

In order to receive tons of traffic you need to make your blog popular. The first most step of course is having lots of great content. Your blog content is the backbone of your Blogging success. In fact, personally I feel that getting lots of traffic to your blog is not the big problem; the greater challenge is generating lots of relevant, useful content, because it is only the relevance of your content that brings your readers back to your blog again and again. Your content also decides how many RSS subscribers you have; the more RSS subscribers you can boast of the higher is the value of your content.

That said, in order to make your blog popular there are some other things that you must take care of. Some of them are:

The design and look of your blog

Your blog design doesn’t matter much if you have highly useful content; people will throng to your blog no matter how it looks. but it helps your blog gain some popularity if its design is striking. If nothing else, there are a great many blogs and websites that routinely publish a list of beautiful and striking layouts. Once your blog starts appearing on these lists your blog will quickly get popular. Along with the design you should also make sure that you blog is user-friendly and all the content is easily available to everybody. Your blog design should not be browser-dependent.

The SEO aspect  of your blog

SEO (search engine optimization) of your blog matters a lot. Blog SEO does not mean manipulating the search engine results so that you can get lots of traffic from them; blog SEO means making your blog search-engine-crawler-friendly. The search engines want to index good content and if your blog contains good content then help the search engines index its posts without hiccups and obstructions. Formulate your blog posts in such a manner that the most important points are easily accessible to the search engine crawlers as early as possible, for the right keywords and this also means highlighting your keywords wherever necessary. organize the content of your blog posts using headings and subheadings, lists, and links, wherever needed. The more creatively you center your content around your main keywords and important expressions, the better ranking you achieve for individual blog posts.

Your interaction on other blogs and online forums

Interact on other blogs and online forums as much as possible because it not only gets you lots of incoming links it also helps you establish yourself as an authority in your blog subject. Take care that you don’t leave comments and messages just so that you get the chance to leave your links there; this needlessly annoys both the blog owners and their readers and there is nothing in your message that motivates them to visit your blog. Contribute to the ongoing discussion and if you feel that you have nothing constructive to say then keep mum.

Remember that lots of blog traffic is generated through networking with other bloggers. When you visit the blogs and leave useful comments the bloggers get interested in your opinion and visit your blog. If they think that your blog will add value to their blog they will add your link there. They may also refer to your particular blog posts and this is how you generate incoming links for your blog and your blog posts. Well-meaning incoming links not only send you direct traffic they also help you improve your search engine rankings. Additionally, even the readers of the blogs linking to you visit your blog and if they themselves are active bloggers there is a chance that they will link to your blog.

Guest blogging

Guest blogging is a great way of creating a presence for you all over the Internet. Actually this is not a new concept. Webmasters used to submit free articles to various websites looking for content. These free articles used to carry something called a “resource box” that used to contain information pertaining to the author along with the link to the author’s website. I have generated lots of traffic for my various websites using this tactic. I am gradually approaching other bloggers to write for their blogs but with the scene with my own blog looking so shady I doubt how regular I’m going to be on other blogs. Nonetheless this is one of the greatest ways of generating traffic for your blog and increasing its popularity.

A sense of regularity

A regular blog gradually becomes popular — of course the factor of relevant content being a constant — because the same people visit your blog again and again. When they visit your blog again and again they tend to remember it whenever they need to refer to something that exists on your blog. Regularity, for instance, one or two posts everyday, brings the search engine crawlers to your blog with greater frequency; besides, lots of blog posts, provided they are of good quality and relevant to the subject of your blog, will also increase the density of your keywords and key expressions, further fetching you higher search engine rankings.

Other reasons

You can organize contests and such events on your blog and this draws in lots of traffic, because many bloggers, if they find the events interesting, mention them on their blogs along with links to the concerned posts. Memes are an old method but it has been overused so much that many a time people want to avoid taking active part in them unless they are unavoidably interesting or relevant.

Technorati Tags: blog promotion, blog SEO, blog marketing, blogging

Random Thoughts On Content Writing

Jan 22, 2008 4 Comments »

After a long time!

This is genuinely ironic; in October I wrote about what should be the frequency of your blog posts and then I didn’t post for almost 3 months. I was planning to write but this blog on a daily basis; so much for sticking to the blog writing schedule. There is no particular reason, and in fact I wasn’t even writing content much. For more than two months I didn’t take up new assignments and it is only in January that I have again started accepting new content writing projects.

It’s not that I didn’t do any work. I started rejecting new assignments because I had lots of work — both PHP programming and content writing. I have a few permanent clients for both kinds of works. But I think this is temporary because gradually I would prefer to write just content. I’m going to revamp my website (actually it is already revamped; I just don’t promote enough) by writing lots of targeted content for it.

Another irony is that I am writing constantly for my clients so that their websites rank higher due to their optimized content and I don’t do that for my own website. My website does fair well for some keywords (for example, for “content writer” my website appears somewhere around the first spot on Google) but there are scores of other keywords and expressions for which I get very little traffic and this means a lukewarm response.

As a content writer am not very happy these days with the way I’m writing. I need to brush up both my reading and writing because it seems my writing is losing its edge; it is losing its soul. My strength is not the impeccability of the language, although I’m not saying that there are many mistakes in my writing; my strength is the way I write and many clients hire me for the way I write. Recently I lost a project because the client thought my work was not up to the mark and it was no way near to the quality of samples I had sent him or near to the quality of content I have on my own website. When I showed the work to my wife she agreed with the client: the “Amrit” factor was conspicuously missing in the writing.

I need to bring that factor back and I know that I can only bring it back if I start writing again on various other topics instead of just sticking to corporate web content. This means writing articles and analytical essays for newspapers and magazines, the way I used to do until a few years ago. This stimulates the mind, inculcates the research habit and makes the writing muscles flexible and strong.

Let me know what you think regarding content writing an online copywriting; should a content writer stick to writing content for websites and develop his or her writing skill vertically or he or she should write for the conventional media too for the purpose of acquiring broader writing experience?

Technorati Tags: copywriting, online copywriting, content writing, content writer