The goal of any blog is to offer a muse for an author/artist/whatever in the form of an outlet (or outreach) to others. Sometimes, if you’re trying to earn money online, you’ll REALLY want to put in the extra effort to make your blog stand out. Put simply, you (author) creates content for them (readers). The question, of course, is HOW to make sure people are reading your content. Here are just a few tips to help you out:
- Use WordPress. There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel. Unless you’ve got some skills in the world of internet coding languages, WordPress is pretty much the best there is out there for getting a blog set up quick, either hosting it yourself or having them do it (for FREE!).
- Use SEO plugins. Once again, other people have already done the grunt work and built some great plugins for search engine optimization. If you want to make sure your new content can be found/indexed by the “Big G,” find out what other successful blogs have under the hood.
- Invest some time in figuring out what RSS is. “Real Simple Syndication” is a term most people sort of understand, but not one that everyone uses the right way. I’ve got a feed for my blog, and a way to track the subscribers (see number 2). RSS can offer your readers a quick-and-not-so-dirty way to keep up with both the posts and comments on your blog.
- Promote your blog. Use channels like forums (don’t spam, just contribute helpful information and include your blog’s link in your signature), other blogs (same principle: contribute useful comments that link back to your blog), and any other website. Consider submitting your best posts as articles to article databases like EzineArticles.com (they’re the “Google” of article marketing, so EA might be the only one you really need…).
- Analyze your blog’s statistics. The king of stats right now is Google Analytics, although there’s somewhat of a learning curve involved. WordPress users rest assured, though–there’s a great plugin for automatically installing the code on your blog. If you need more help, drop me a line–I’m on my way to Analytics Certification, and can help out with the installation/tracking of your blog’s stats.
- Don’t give up. I hate reading advice that stinks of aesthetic nonsense and lacks substantiated action steps, and this one should be obvious anyway. You can’t expect a ton of visitors to grace your blog’s prescence after a week of posting. Let’s face it: your site probably isn’t THAT interesting, and you’re certainly not offering information they can’t find elsewhere (if you are, let me know!). The common number I hear from “successful” bloggers today is one post a day, at least. This is tough, but try taking your longest posts and splitting them into different parts. With WordPress (and I’m sure others) you can even set a “publish” date for your posts.
I’ll be updating this post when I figure out what else has worked for me and others–feel free to contribute via the comment section until then!
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