So, you have been thinking about creating a blog, but aren’t sure where to start. That’s okay, this article will fill you in on what you need to know before you get started.
The good news is that blogs are very easy to set up, and you can put up a basic blog in a fairly short amount of time. Here some basic tips to get you on the path to blogging success.
1. Decide what type of blog you want to have. Will it be a personal blog that is meant to be read by your family and friends? Will it be blog about one of your favorite hobbies? Or will the purpose of it be to make money? Know the kind of blog you’ll have will determine a lot of the other things you need to do.
2. Pick a topic. Once you know what type of blog you’ll have, you need to narrow it down to a more specific topic. Now, if this is just for family and friends, then it doesn’t matter all that much as you won’t be as concerned with how much traffic you get to your blog.
If it’s a blog about a hobby, then you can keep it more general, or you can blog about a specific aspect of the hobby. However, if you will be creating a blog to make money, then you need to be more careful about the topic you choose.
3. Research. Assuming you are interested in making money with your blog, you need to start with research. First, you need to research who your target audience is; how many people are part of your target audience, what their problems are, what solutions they’re looking for, and how much they are willing to pay to solve their problems.
Second, you need to research the best keywords for your blog. There are a few free keyword tools that should give you enough information to get started. However, it may be a good idea to find some paid keyword tools if you want to see even better results.
4. Keep your visitors in mind. This can be hard to do when you’re the one who’s creating a blog, but you have to do your best. Picture what your visitor sees when they first come to your blog. Are the colors to strong? Too dull? How are the graphics? Is everything laid out in a logical and intuitive manner? Are the posts easy to read?
All of these things, and more, will make a big difference to your visitors. Needless to say, if they don’t like what they see, they will go to someone else’s blog. Therefore, it makes more sense to try to look at your blog through the eyes of your visitors.
5. Be yourself. What really keeps people coming back to a blog? In a word: personality. So, go ahead and let yourself come through in your posts. Some people may not like, but the ones that do could become some of your biggest fans, and will start recommending your blog to other people.
6 Ways For Acquiring More Blog Subscribers
So, you say you want visitors to your blog? You are not the first and will probably not be the last person seeking this fortune. Truth is though, some people make it harder than it has to be.
One of the first things you need is traffic. And once you get it then you have to know how to convert that traffic into subscribers. Use these six tips to assist you in achieving that goal:
1. Focus on SEO
One of the better ways of attaining long-term traffic is by making sure you get ranked in the search engines. This won’t come without a little work so don’t set unrealistic expectations.
Getting those desired results in SEO could take some time. This is where a lot of people will get frustrated when they don’t achieve their desired results of ranking for their chosen keywords, and then might give up. But, if you can learn to be patient and continue to work hard you will start to see results.
Think about the what keywords you are targeting. A lot could be determined by the time you are investing in your blog. For a smaller site you may want to go after long tailed keywords. But if you want to go after a bigger site, you might be able to use more popular keywords for your site.
2. Leave comments
You might look at this as being obvious but it is one of the oldest strategies for getting more blog traffic and it still works just fine. You just want to make sure you are leaving quality comments on forums and blogs that you find are related to your site.
You just want to be sure you are leaving these comments on places that allow you to leave a backlink to your site. You will want to try to include your keywords in the link. This should help to generate some traffic and should also help your rankings in the search engines.
Make sure that people will find your comments useful. You do not want to be like those others that like to use the “spammer approach”. You know, the kind of person that is leaving similar comments on all of the blogs and forums that will allow a do-follow link. You might discover this will help you with your SEO but it probably won’t do much for attracting visitors to your site.
A far different strategy that could actually work well for you is to hang out in a few of those forums and make some intelligent comments on a few blogs for a while and try to establish yourself as an expert. This will show that you are there to provide some helpful information and quality content and soon people will be much more interested in what you have to say.
As people see that you do really want to help others instead of trying to acquire backlinks, you could be seen as an expert. And then this could increase your traffic.
3. Guest posting
A good way for you to be seen by more people is by guest blogging. When you are contributing to other people’s blogs you could get a backlink in return. And if you run into a popular blog that will let you become a regular contributor, this could help you gain a long-term source of traffic.
4. Make it easy to subscribe
Acquiring visitors is but a part of the puzzle. The other part is to be able to get them to sign up for your list. But even this is not that hard.
You can start by making it easy to subscribe. A real good strategy for this is to put a squeeze page or sign up box on the bottom or side of every post. Then you can test it out to see what would be a more effective area, but this is where you tend to get the most sign ups. I tend to use the right side of my post.
5. Write great content
Probably should be near the top as this is oh so important. If you can provide great content for you site, you will find that more people will be willing sign up for your newsletter.
And you do not want to rewrite some of those public domain articles. It would probably work better if you can give some help with personal experiences about the niche. Try telling your own story to get some good results. You might also consider some PLR articles.
6. Give incentives to sign up
As an example, offer a free e-book or an interview when they decide to sign up on your squeeze page.
As you can see, getting more sign-ups is not that hard. In fact, none of these strategies are very difficult, but they will work well. It will require some work and you will have to be patient but it could lead to a very sizeable list of subscribers you can market to again and again.