Content Writing & Copywriting Blog

How to Make Your Blog Popular

Jan 31, 2008 35 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

Does the frequency of your blog posts matter?

Oct 26, 2007 18 Comments »

I have observed that sometimes it matters how much you post on your blog and sometimes it doesn’t matter. Actually it depends on what you’re trying to achieve through your blogging. Some blogs post six to seven posts daily. Some of these posts are very long and some are shorter. I think the blogs that host multiple long posts are written by multiple bloggers because it is not easy to write so many long posts in a single day. You can write multiple blog posts yourself, on your own if your blog posts consist of just one or two paragraphs.

How should you decide your frequency? Again it depends on your plan regarding your blog. Adding many posts in quick succession builds your blog property quickly — just make sure the quality doesn’t suffer because low-quality posts are not going to do any good to your blog. So, many posts with lots of links to other, external blogs — I have personally experimented this with HowToPlaza — gets you indexed, at least by Google, extremely fast. HowToPlaza posts started appearing in the search results within five days. This was not my intention because I was expecting that it would take anywhere between two to three months for the posts to start appearing on the search engines. I was able to post, initially, ten posts on average, because most of the posts were very small in nature.

If you plan on writing longer, comprehensive posts, I suggest you should go slow on your posting schedule. Along with being lengthy if your blog posts are analytical in nature you should give your readers sometime to assimilate the message. The ideal frequency would be one post every day. Posting every day keeps you in touch with your readers but it is not necessary. Whatever frequency you select for yourself just stick to a routine. For instance if you blog readers expect a post on Wednesday that give them a post on Wednesday.

Here on Content Blog I don’t follow a routine because I have been trying to follow a one-post-a-day routine. Sadly my other obligations prevent me from doing so.

As always quality precedes quantity. If most of your readers access your blog posts through their RSS feed readers then frequency hardly matters; provided you generate good blog content your blog is going to succeed. These days it is advised — rightly so — that you should write less, write well, and promote a lot. So more than writing your blog posts you should visit other blogs and online forums and interact there. You should also write as many guest posts as possible. Traffic is as important as your blog posts so set your blogging frequency keeping that in mind.

Technorati Tags: blogging, blog publishing

Is Anchor Text For External Links Important?

Sep 24, 2007 1 Comment »

What is anchor text?

Anchor text is the text that comes between <a> and </a>; for instance, if you write <a href=”http://www.contentblog.net”>content writing blog</a> then content writing blog is your anchor text and it in the link it looks like content writing blog.

What is the importance of anchor text?

Anchor text helps people understand what the link signifies. In the above example the anchor text clearly says that the link takes you to a content writing blog. This helps both you, the reader, and the search engines. When the search engines are crawling your page and when they come across the link having a particular anchor text, they know what the link signifies. It also tells the search engines that your web page gives so much importance to the words appearing as anchor text that you are using another link to give more information. Anchor text is beneficial for internal linking because you are directing the search engines to other, more specialized parts of your website. They can certainly help you in your SEO efforts.

Talking about SEO, the anchor text is quite valuable when it is coming from external links. If someone links to my blog and as anchor text he or she uses some keywords or expressions relevant to my blog I get SEO benefits for my blog for that anchor text. That’s why you should have meaningful page or blog post titles because people generally use the same title when they are linking to your blog or website. So this leads us to asking

Is anchor text for external links good for your SEO?

Suppose I’m linking to another content writing blog from my blog and I use the same phrase as anchor text; does it contribute something towards my SEO efforts? It doesn’t. But it is surely helping the other content writing blog and in this way, I’m not helping myself but my competing blog. So no, the anchor text that I use for outgoing links doesn’t help me, it helps the website I’m linking to.

Does this mean you shouldn’t use anchor text for external links?

Depends. Personally I don’t mind giving some SEO benefit to a competing blog. If you start manipulating your anchor text such that it doesn’t benefit the external website, it may trigger, justifiably, a reciprocal reaction: everybody will start avoiding meaningful anchor texts. The criteria for using the anchor text shouldn’t depend on what benefit it brings you or the external website; it should depend on the criticality of usability and accessibility.

Technorati Tags: anchor text, external links, interlinking

How To Hold Attention Of Your Blog Readers

Sep 21, 2007 5 Comments »

There are two crucial factors that affect the success of your blog:

• Grab attention
• Hold attention

Grabbing attention is very easy actually. Create a sensational blog title and you’ll get many eyeballs, if not in the search engines, then surely on various social media websites. But getting loads of attention isn’t worth anything much if you cannot hold their attention.

How can you hold attention of your blog readers?

By giving them what they need exactly when they need it, and give them in a manner they cannot get anywhere else. You must write unique content, and your content should be written in a compelling manner.

To hold attention you must provide compelling content

Your content is the backbone of your blog. Nobody comes to your blog just to increase your visitors’ number; they come because they think you can provide some useful content to them. How do you create that content? By catering to some pressing need. That need by the way doesn’t need to be technical or professional. May be that need is emotional. If you run a humor blog your readers visit your blog get a healthy dose of laugh. If it is a life improvement blog then they are looking for a useful tip to spend their day more productively. The key is, provide them what they are looking for.

Strike up a personal rapport

Although having a personal rapport cannot help you much if you have lousy content, it does help your readers remember you when they are looking for something that you provide. To have a personal rapport you have to play a host they can trust and respect, and this brings us back to providing quality content. Once they trust you as an authority, they begin to interact with you and may even come up with their problems. I’m not saying become their agony aunt, but you can solve some problems related to the subject and theme of your blog.

Be more visible

You can also hold attention of your readers by being more visible on other blogs, online forums and social media websites. Constant visibility (positive visibility) makes you a familiar figure and familiarity keeps bringing them and reading your stuff even if you cannot come up with great blog posts everyday.

Create controversies on your blog

Creating controversies creates buzz and encourages your readers to participate on your blog proactively. By creating controversies I don’t mean be offensive, I just mean write something contrary to the prevalent belief and back up your argument with substantiated data. After that, encourage your readers to react. Encourage them to not just talk to you, but to fellow commenters too.

Once your are able to hold your readers’ attention it becomes easier to strike up new conversations with them and come up with creative blogging ideas.

Technorati Tags: blogging tips, blog publishing

8 Tips For Newbie Bloggers

Sep 16, 2007 11 Comments »

Are you starting a new blog or you have a blog you think is quite new (you can define a new blog as having very few posts and near to no traffic — just like this blog)? You may find the following 8 blogging tips useful:

1] Be clear about the blog topic

Don’t start a blog just because all of a sudden you’ve come across this great idea. Be sure of what you want to publish and if that thing interests you because since blogging is a regular affair, unless you have lots of interest (and a lot to say) you are going to run out of steam very soon. In theory this is no big deal, but if you continue this string of behavior you’ll grow a disenchantment towards blogging and conclude it is not your cup of tea. Take your time, do your research, and gather your material. Have ideas stored for say, at least a couple of months.

2] Use a suitable blog publishing software

There are many blog publishing software available on the Internet and most of them are free. Take for instance WordPress. You’ll need to download the latest version and then upload it on your server, under your own domain name. Even if you are not comfortable with installing your own copy of WordPress (many hosting companies these days give you one-click installation facility) you can use WordPress-hosted blog at Wordpress.com, at Blogger, or numerous other websites. My recommendation is that you should publish your blog under your own domain name so that you have control over your content and you don’t have to comply with the editorial policies of the blog hosting websites.

3] Use a good blog editor

These days I’m using Windows Live Writer to create my blog posts and I’ve become a big fan of this so-far-free blog editing tool. Creating blog posts should be enjoyable and easy, so use a tool you feel most comfortable with, even if it is a text-editor like Dark Room.

4] Post regularly

By regular I don’t mean publishing 3-4 posts daily (you can do that if your posts are very small, Twitter-like). If your posts are not very long and not very research-oriented then try to post once daily. In case it takes lots of effort then you can even post on a weekly basis. But try to be regular: these gives people lots of stuff to link to, lots of stuff to read, and it gives the search engines lots of pages to index and rank.

5] Make your blog posts search engine friendly from the start

This will save you lots of time later on. Use proper headings, highlight your crucial phrases and use the appropriate anchor text whenever you link to internal and external links. Define blog post titles that contain your keywords or key phrases. Make sure your blog publishing software create search engine friendly URL when your post is published.

6] Comment on other blogs

Commenting on other blogs (related to your blog) generates targeted traffic and helps you increase your network. When people read your comments on other blogs they become aware of the existence of your blog. Regular interaction on other blogs also gives you new blog posting ideas. It also encourages the blog publishers to visit your blog and leave comments.

7] Reply to comments on your blog

When people leave comments on your blog they are seeking a conversation or a feedback. Give that to them and they’ll come for more. If you don’t respond they’ll think you are only interested in playing your own horn and you are rude. This reminds me…I need to reply to a few comments myself.

8] Link to other blogs

Link to other blogs or their blog posts from within your blog posts. This sends them trackbacks (and these trackbacks create links) and encourages them to link to your posts too.

These tips are a start. You don’t have to follow them at the outset but you’ll get a head start if you do.

Technorati Tags: blogging tips, tips for blogging, new blog, starting a blog