Blogging Secrets for Success and Profit Revealed: Content and SEO

Preface

According to Technorati State of the Blogosphere, there are over 175,000 new blogs mushrooming up every day. Two new blogs are mushrooming up every second somewhere around the world. Whereas the updating sequence of contents of all these new and old blogs is only to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second. Without adding any new content, a good chunk of them is getting withered out once the initial enthusiasm is over.

I remember being to a few motivational seminars, even many of you too might have been to. The sequence of events before and after attending these seminars is always one and the same. People get into these seminars with the dream of a better and meaningful life and come out charged, ready to take on the world and change their lives for the better, but a week later they’re back doing their own chores. The seminar operators too know this and count on it. If everyone they teach became successful, they’re going to be out of business.

The same is the case here. You too got charged with all those make-money-online blogs and got started with a new blog, but somewhere down the lane, you are feeling of being at the brim of extinction. Even Darren Rowse of Problogger.net was on the brim of quitting or at least was thinking of giving up on blogging as an income source. What put him back on the driving seat? Check out his video post on “A secret to profitable blogging trending up over the long haul.” Worth reading/watching.

Traffic

Coming back to our point, how to keep the flame of your blog gets going without getting extinguished? How to keep away from getting demotivated? What are the secrets of successful blogging? The answer is traffic! Traffic is the ultimate success of any blog. If your blog is without a single visitor, you lose confidence and enthusiasm.

So, how to bring in traffic and sustain such brought traffic? How to prolong the initial enthusiasm that you had? How to be a successful blogger? I have amassed a few guidelines which I’ve learned over a short span of time. Try to adhere to every single aspect because every small deed that you do in the right direction is a keystone in constructing your blog. Assuming that you are coming up from scratch, I begin here:

Content

• You need tons and tons of patience before you can get traffic and obtain accreditation in blogging. It may take even years. Hence blogging is essentially a kind of testing your patience.
• If you are serious about blogging, start your domain on a paid hosting. Else, if you start on a free platform like blogger, it’s like building your home on someone else’s plot. There are numerous options for cheap and best-paid hosting available.
• Use WordPress. WordPress is very good for SEO right out of the box. The built-in linking and pinging functions make WordPress a search engine friendly tool for blogging.
• Put your blog in a subdirectory rather than in the root, in case you want to do other things with your site later. Name the directory “blog” or “files” or something like that.
  Choose your niche wisely. Preferably be an expert in your niche. Thus you won’t deplete the content in a few posts. Do not start a blog just for the purpose of making money online.
• Write about something you love, something you’re crazy about, and you would go on writing even if you don’t make a single penny out of it.
• Google’s complex algorithms have really become a nightmare for beginners. However, as long as your intentions are genuine, to help visitors find quality content, you don’t have to worry about any algorithm change. With a few search engine friendly tweaks, you should be able to convey the message of your intentions.

SEO

• Create robots.txt and place it in the root directory and only in the root directory, not elsewhere. Note that WordPress creates multiple links for the same post, which could lead to stamp a post as a duplicate content. Hence restrict the bots with appropriate meta tags commands. See the guidance on taming search engine spiders.
• An automatically updating sitemap.xml file, created with the aid of appropriate plugins such as Google sitemap generator or Yoast WordPress SEO, should be there in the root directory. However, the sitemap.xml is of less importance than inbound links with keywords in the anchor text. Anchor text attracts spiders on the Internet just as juicy flies pull in arachnids for a sticky web-based feast. Hence prefer an HTML sitemap to serve both human beings as well as search engine spiders.
• Submit your site to major search engines viz., Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
• One of the most important factors in search engine optimization is link strength i.e., how well your pages are connected, whether inbound links from other sites or internal links within your site itself.
• Avoiding linking to bad neighborhoods and avoiding excessive reciprocal links are the other two tips to keep your blog out of trouble.
• Similarly, prefer posts to have at least 500 words and break extra-long posts into multiple posts for breaking the monotony of the reader and to increase page views.
• Going by this theory let’s break our blogging secrets for success here and continue the basic blogging lessons in our next post Deeds That Can Build Trust In Your Blog.