The miracle of blogging
Blogging is a relatively new phenominon in web business. It used to be something that eccentric loners did to connect to the world. Now, its considered a standard part of promoting your websites and web business. I’m not a writer, but the irony is that I spend 30% of my professional time writing (or “trying” to write).
What does blogging do?
Blogging connects you to people who want to read. Successful blogs will get amazing search engine presence, and people looking up keywords will be able to find you. If your blogs are interesting, informative, or entertaining, then you can develop a following which is a fundamental part of your success. Additionally, blogging is sometimes fun, because its an outlet to express yourself.
How does blogging work?
Many people start a blog, and then don’t write much. They will write a dozen posts and give up because nobody is reading it. Others will persevere longer and get some viewers. But, its hard to develop a following. Blogging alone is not the solution. Combining networks is how to become successful. If you have a large site with email addresses in a database for a few thousand individuals, you can email them once a month to invite them to your blog. If you keep them entertained, they will open your subsequent emails and become regular visitors for your blog. If the blog is boring, you are dead in the water, but being interesting alone without a network leaves you in the cyber-doldrums.
Keeping it interesting
When you cater to a particular group of people, you have to find out what types of topics interest them. Its not always easy, because people often don’t give feedback. You can keep track using analytics tracking systems, or just see if anyone write a comment to your blog. Once you find out what people like, try to find more ideas which relate in theme or spirit to the ideas that worked. What I learned is that it is not so critical how good a writer you are, providing you find topics that people want to read about and make some interesting points.
Combining networks?
The trick of blogging is understanding that critical mass and links are what attracts search engine traffic. If your blog has 100 or more posts, you will attract a lot of search engine traffic. However all posts and no links is a very incomplete formula. You also need links, but where can those come from. You can link to your blog from your site, twitter campaign, facebook, and have other people you know link to your blog. If people like a particular blog post, they might link on their own to that post. If you do an email blast to people on your network, if they click on links in the email to your blog, that will boost your search engine traffic too. Everything you do compounds on itsself. I’m not sure how well a blog would do that had no supporting networks. It would have to compensate by being very large and have a few hundred posts.
Twitter?
Twitter is a very interesting tool. Twitter is a great way to link to pages on your site, new blogs, events, and other things going on. Twitter is perfect for tweeting about whats going on in “real time” as opposed to tweeting about old things. Although its hard to know how to please your audience and know what to tweet about, if you tweet about things your viewers like, your number of followers can go up within 24 hours. Additionally, you might get retweets, and many clicks on good links. There is a lot of competition on Twitter. People can go to thousands of established twitter networks, so why yours? The only way to build a big network is to figure out how to tweet really popular material every single day. Good luck!!! I’m just beginning to figure out how to please the Twitterers.
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