Blogging Basics - How to Generate Traffic
If, you do an internet search for the term blogging, you will get millions of search results. Blogging gives people a platform in which to communicate different things. Some like to communicate about their life. Some communicate about a business or a hobby. Starting a blog on the internet today has become exceedingly easy. There are free sites like blogger, or you can host your own blog with a private name server. The majority of blogs that start will fail with in the first few months.
Blogging is no different from any other type of marketing that is available on the internet today. To make money from blogging you need two distinct things.
1. You need internet traffic
2. Traffic that wants to buy stuff
Many bloggers fail in the early months because they get discouraged from not being able to generate much traffic to their blogs. If, there is no traffic you can forget about trying to monetize your blog. Let’s look at steps for generating traffic and the monetization of your blog.
Creating Traffic
Creating traffic to your blog is easy. Top notch, original articles, is the best way to generate traffic to your blog. Then be able to tell them the information that they are searching for.
So, the question remains is how do you know what people want to read? Site like Technorati is an excellent source to let you know what people are talking or writing about.
Technorati is a website specifically designed to rate blogs according to how many visitors and back links are linked to each blog. Using this resource as a research tool is invaluable. You start by searching through the blogs using a set of keywords that you have chosen, and it will provide you a list of the top blogs that are relating to the keywords you have chosen.
Once you have narrowed down the list of blogs that are available to the first 50 or so. You will want to ask yourself some basic questions. Have you noticed any patterns? Do any particular blogs come out more than others? What key things on these blogs make them stick out to you?
When looking at these blogs make note about what attracts them to you and it will give you some inside information on what else might attract people to your blog. Of course, you want to make sure that you also find your niche and choose one carefully that doesn’t have much competition.
When blogging about a specific topic, it is crucial that you are satisfied with your niche. For the next year or so that is the topic that you will be writing about on your blog. So giving up blogging in a few weeks because you didn’t do your homework about your niche is wastes of time, know up front what you are going to write about.
A good thing to understand about blogging and to succeed at it is the frequency of your post. In the beginning, you obviously will not have any content, so blogging every day will give your new visitors something to read. If, you are not able to do at first on a daily basis then you want to start once or twice a week the idea is that you not give up the frequency of your post for several reasons. Your readers will become accustomed to your style and know when to expect a new post. Second, Google’s spider learns the frequency of your post, and it will crawl your site on a more regular basis when you make a regular posts.
There are also some other things that you can do to increase traffic to your blog ranking.
1. Comment on like blogs like your own
2. Participate in blog carnivals
3. Social bookmarking is the new wave
Then once the traffic has started flowing to a level you are comfortable, with you can introduce different ad sense or affiliate programs to help maybe generate revenue. Most of all have fun, be original, and drive traffic.
