Hi Guys,
This is my fourth post in my Blogging Tips series that I started few days back. If you haven’t already you can read my previous 2 posts from here
- Blogging Tips: Where to start
- Blogging Tips: Think out of the Box
- Blogging Tips: Why Blogs won’t work
I will be talking about my experiences. There are so many other ways that I may not cover in my points below. You can contribute too using comments.
Ok I believe that I am doing few things right because when I started writing the traffic was really minimal. I understood driving traffic after posting few months. Google and other major search engines are too important to your site that you cannot avoid them. You have to understand that you are writing for prospective visitors that are just search for that information. In other words you are not writing for yourself. Now if you are writing for yourself then only you will understand it and neither your visitors or major search engines will be too entertained with what you wrote.
Here is the visual difference when I was running blog for myself and then I starting writing for major population.
You have to understand the Content is king Every unique post that you write is guaranteed to bring quality traffic to your site.
Now that I am sure you are either using wordpress or something similar for you site. Here are some key points that I assembled over the time. Keep above graph snapshot in your brain just for the time being until you finish reading this post.
Post Title
Choosing your post title is the most important thing that you can do before you even wrote a single word for you post. You title is your first H1 HTML tag and thus is most important piece of information for search engines too. Putting some research work and checking Keyword competition is a good thing. No matter how good your post is if your title lags that crispiness it is most unlikely to receive a hit.
Content Quality
If you got your titled sorted then next part is your article content. No wonder you should be highly sensitive of your content quality. Google and other bigger search engines look for content quality and Google in particular will determine your page’s ranking based on your content. I mean that certainly is one of the key points. Add images to your post and definitely pay more attention to typography. For users visuals do matter so the way your content is laid out is very important. One Tip from me here regarding layout is that use fixed width for your article. Think about those website where you have to move your head around to read a line on a bigger monitor. Not so cool right! so the post width should be maximum 650px – 700px, thats typical in Novels etc. and make life easier of the reader.
Keep your blog updated
Its your article and your know when to update it. I generally updated 1 article per week day because the content needs some change because either a new software version is available that need coverage or I may have thought of a better solution to a problem that I discussed before. Google will love you for that. No one wants to read Old stuff so if you keep your blog updated, your visitors will love for that too.
Authority
Its exactly what you are when you talk to someone on Economic conditions of your country. You tell them what you know. So in your article if you use I, Me, Myself etc. that in other words depicts that you are trying to communicate with the reader. So don’t generalize your article rather write with authority. When you use I, Me etc. try not to show Off. Bragging about yourself or insulting someone else leaves a bad taste. Let it be you who is humble and natural. Your visitors will talk about your article on other websites and thus will get you those really handy back links that increase your website’s authority.
Repeat Visitors
How many posts have your read when last line in the article says “Stay tuned. More examples coming tomorrow or next week” or something similar. Well that always gets me so either I bookmark that page to revisit it subscribe to that blog to get an update on that topic. So Idea is to get repeat audience. When that start coming back they are most likely to subscribe too.
Internal Links
Just as you saw at the beginning of this post I’ve posted few links to what I covered before in Blogging Tips series. Well! You got the Idea. You see how many people land on this page from Google and will hit those links first. I would say atleast 70%+. What I want you to tell is that Internal links to your articles used in reference are really important and keep your readers interested. If they like the way you’ve written your posts they may also buy a compiled PDF file or download a Free one if you offer one.
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Social Media
My next post actually will go into more depth on how to effectively use social media when possible. You know the fact say for instance Facebook claims that it has 850 million active users. Wow! that huge number and guess what! you can use few of them. Create a page for your website on facebook, twitter etc. and let users interact with your. Post your article links on relevant group that talks about topic of your interest. They surely will visit your site. I am pretty sure if you do things right and truthful you will gain reputation really quickly. Again, quality content is must as we discussed before.
Guest Posts
You can invite others to write for you. This will definitely increase some interest and repeat visitors. Number >1 is better than 1. So if you Blog can get quality content from others be sure that you set some guidelines. When others start posting for you then your Blog posts are more frequent and thus your page rank will improve I suppose. You can do the same thing yourself. Write for others to get the backlinks. Users reading on other website will sure click on your link to land on your website to find more if they like your post. You will get those really wonderful back links from high quality websites.
Using Ads
Ok so you are starting afresh. My tip is to wait posting Ads until you have atleast 100 quality article and atleast 4000 unique visitors per week. When you start afresh you don’t want yourself to be labelled as “Another blogger trying to make some money“. I remember when I put my first Ad I had roughly 4500 unique visits every week and had roughly 140 posts.
Naming your Blog
You blog is your brand. Use your blog name wisely. My blog is my name. I kept it like that because I wanted people to know me and my work. There is no harm using your name as your website name. But in my experience if I would have named it something more relevant to what I do it would’ve been better but still people will love you for you work and my blog is more of a problem solution blog that cover few programming languages and OS’s. So I am just passing on this usefull info to you that keep your blog name that is really easy, short and falls in line with your topics.
SEO tools
You should use SEO tools like for wordpress there is “All in one SEO” which is really great product according to me. Use that. There are others too for wordpress so in the end its upto you what you choose. SEO will not happen overnight. It requires time and experience but you will learn very quickly how to use these tools.
User Engagement
This is most important. Allow users to comment and install Social bar as you see on your left and let your like your post and share it with their friends. It goes like this, the more +1s or Likes you are going to get, more traffic is coming your way.
Last words
When you start you should try to post atleast 2 articles per day. This frequency matters a lot. Your blog traffic is guaranteed to grow if you keep posting article by article I mean Good Articles. Monitor your blog traffic and post them when your anticipate high traffic during the day. Follow up with posting links on twitter and Facebook.
I hope you like this read
If you have any question please contact me.
If you want to start writing and want to be a guest poster on this Blog you are most welcome. Check this link out
Cheers,
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