Basic Blogger Tips: Creating a Successful Blog - Rome Wasn't Built in a Day!

With reports that over 20,000 blogs are started daily it's easy to see why many fail to win significant numbers of readers. In  fact, the vast majority are abandoned within the first six months, as bloggers become disillusioned with the results they see - usually as a result of their own unrealistic expectations regarding blogging.

Upon recognition that your blog is but a tiny grain of sand in an infinitely expanding ocean, you may feel as though you face an impossible task that simply isn't worth the effort it requires. But before you go ahead and give up, consider that Rome wasn't built in a day, and that all enduring structures are built slowly, and purposefully, with keen attention to detail. Also remember that the foundations are the most important feature of any building project. The same is true of your blog.

Creating a Successful Blog

If you speak to any successful professional blogger you'll soon discover they all have pretty much the same advice when it comes to building an enduring blog - patience, and perseverance. That's not to say that quality content, SEO techniques and design are unimportant - quite the opposite: they're detrimental - but understanding the time and effort required to build a successful blog is an important aspect of the process.

It is said that any blog will take a minimum of six months to a year to develop a reasonable page rank in it's particular niche. This is true even if you are posting quality content several times per week or more, so there are no short-cuts here, and patience is ultimately the key.

If you're planning to set up a blog and fill it with content under the assumption it will receive instant recognition from search engines, and an immediate surge of visitors, you are sorely mistaken; creating a successful blog requires motivation and commitment over a long period of time.

This means your topic-choice must be one you are willing and able to expand upon for years to come, or your blog will die an early death, quickly becoming redundant - along with millions of others.

In short, if you want to build an enduring, successful blog you are going to have to put in a lot of effort, on a regular basis, over a long period of time. If you're not prepared to do this you may as well give up at the first hurdle. Blogging isn't easy, but it's not exactly hard, once you know what you're doing. However, if you lack the patience, perseverance, commitment and motivation necessary, you may as well not waste your time.

Blogger Basics: 10 Simple Tips & Tricks for Effective Blogging

This article provides simple tips and tricks for effective blogging. Following this advice will help you maximise your chances of reaching your targeted audience, gaining subscribers, and successfully monetising a Blogger blog. Some of the following tips apply mainly to those blogging professionally, but many apply equally to those blogging for pleasure.

1. Marketing: Effective blogging requires that you know and understand your market. Choose a topic or a small number of related topics and stick to blogging about those. Niche blogs receive far more traffic and are more relevant to readers, who are usually looking for information - not a glimpse into your inner world or to find out what you had for breakfast.
2. Appearance: Design is important. A cluttered blog with poor navigation will almost certainly put off visitors. Keep it simple and clean. Use categories or stand-alone pages to enable readers to find exactly what they are looking for. Install useful widgets and add relevant ads, but don't crowd the site. List interesting or useful labels, and provide a search box.
3. Subscriptions: Make it easy for visitors to follow your blog. Add social bookmarking buttons, provide an RSS feed, enable email subscriptions, and add similar applications, such as Facebook's Networked Blogs. Keep important buttons close to the top of the blog.
4. Blog Titles: Use appropriate titles for blog posts. They should be clear, concise, and contain relevant keywords. Choosing a rare keyword combination as a title-phrase can be one way to reduce competition and increase traffic. Detailed information can be found in my previous post, How to Choose Successful Blog Titles.
5. Blogging: each post should ideally contain from 300 to 500 words. The title phrase should be repeated more than once in the text, and individual keywords should appear numerous times, at the rate of around 5%. Break each blog post down into short paragraphs, and add a small, relevant image whenever possible (only ever use images you own the rights to, or that were published under the creative commons attribution and marked as suitable for commercial use). Ensure there are no spelling or grammatical errors before publishing a blog (Blogger draft now includes an integral spell-check but professional software such as Office Word or a dedicated writing program such as Whitesmoke is essential if you have major problems in this area). Not only do errors look unprofessional, but they can also affect page rank. 
6. Domain Names: Buy a custom domain and host with whichever company fulfils your needs, but don't use a free Blogspot or Wordpress domain name if hosting on these platforms. A blog is more professional-looking to visitors if it has a private domain name. Blogging on a custom domain also provides SEO benefits.
7. Post Frequency: Blog regularly, but don't swamp your readers with several page-long blog posts per day. Keep it short and sweet, and if you have nothing to say simply keep quiet. Most people wouldn't remove a blog from an RSS reader due to not receiving enough feeds, but they may do if they are frequently overwhelmed with irrelevant or lengthy posts. Besides, blogging about nothing is pointless!
8. Advertising: Avoid using pop-ups and/or too many brightly-coloured or moving images - some readers will find these off-putting and leave your blog as a result. Advertise products relevant to blog content.
9. Promotion: Promote your blog using social bookmarking sites and blog directories. Network a little and find people with similar interests to the topics you're blogging about. Viral marketing can be hugely successful, if the right person promotes your blog. 
10. Content: Use only original content. Not only is it disrespectful to steal someone else's work, it will usually work against you in search engine results.

Detailed information concerning many of the above tips can be found in individual posts on this site.

Here are some useful books providing more tips and tricks for effective blogging. You can add them to your Amazon basket without leaving the site. For more great books about blogging, marketing, monetising, and promoting a blog please visit the Tips & Tricks for Blogger Blogs Bookstore.

Getting Started: Blogger Basics - Setting Up A Blog

Setting up a blog can be slightly overwhelming if you're new to the internet. This post is aimed at those with no prior blogging experience, nor any understanding of html (the code used to create websites). Here we'll cover the basics of setting up a blogger blog, such as choosing a suitable name and web address, customising a template, adding widgets, and applying appropriate settings.

If your reason for blogging is solely to keep in touch with friends and family, or to record your thoughts and experiences, you'll be ready to start after completing this stage. However, if you wish to use your blog to promote your business, or you want to display advertisements to generate a little income, you'll need to optimise and customise it further, as will be explained in future posts.

Setting Up A Blog:

• Before you go about setting up a Blogger blog you need to set up a gmail (googlemail) account, which you can do HERE.
• You then need to set up a Blogger account HERE, which you do using your gmail log-in details.
• Next you must choose a name for your blog and a website address (url). These needn't be the same, but it's best to use words that describe your business in your url if you're planning on using your blog to promote it. For example, if your business is called Zeena and you make jewellery your url should be www.zeenahandcraftedjewellery.blogspot.com, rather than www.zeena.blogspot.com. This is because including these keywords will help your website be found more easily by prospective clients later on (we'll learn more about search engine optimisation in future posts). It is also possible to use your own domain name (website address) for your blog, and this option may be preferable for businesses, as it appears more professional. However, this option isn't free or necessary and will therefore be explained fully in a later post.
• Once you've named your blog and the url has been confirmed as available (and you've checked spelling carefully for mistakes!) you can save it and move onto adjusting the appearance.
• After saving you will be directed to choose a template (a background design for your blog). If there are none you like the look of, or you have a specific theme/design in mind, it's possible to install a custom template, but this is far trickier than using one of blogger's own, so for now we'll work on a basic template by customising it with colours and fonts of your choice, to make it unique. This blog is currently using minima stretch, with a few slight changes to font and colour, but as we progress through various tips and tricks you'll see many changes occurring, all of which you'll be able to apply to your own blog, if you choose.
• Once you've saved your template-choice you can start changing colours and fonts to suit your needs, by clicking on the 'Layout' tab in your Blogger dashboard and then on 'Fonts and Colours,' where you are given the option to adjust many details. Play around here until you've achieved the look you want - and make sure you remember to save any changes!
• Now you can start adding gadgets to your blog. The 'Profile' and 'Followers' gadgets will have already been added to get you started, although these can be easily removed if desired; to do so simply visit your dashboard (see top left hand corner of blog page), click on the 'Layout' tab, then click 'edit' on the gadget you wish to remove and click the 'remove' button (and don't worry - you can always add them again at a later date if necessary, by clicking 'add a gadget' in 'layout'). 
• Adding third party widgets to your blog can slow down your page speed (which can affect page ranking), and some have also been known to cause errors or become infected with trojans, causing your entire blog to disappear, and making it very difficult to remove the widget; in particular live visitor counters seem to cause problems on the Blogger platform, and should be avoided unless you're using a reputable company such as feedjit. As a general rule when setting up a blog, add only those widgets necessary to improve the navigation of of your site and provide helpful functions for visitors; I recommend keeping the 'Profile' and 'Followers' widgets and also adding the following:

1. Subscribe To
2. Stand-Alone Pages
3. Recent Posts
4. Recent Comments
5. Blog Archive
6. Search Box
7. Label-Cloud (or list, as you prefer)
8. Share It.

• After adding these widgets you can move them around by dragging and dropping them in the areas provided. Once you have some followers (ask a few friends and/or relatives to sign up to get the ball rolling) you may want to place this widget close to the top of the screen to encourage others to follow, but until then it's better placed closer to the bottom (few people will follow a blog no-one else has shown an interest in). The 'share it' widget should always be placed near the top of the page (because it could bring you additional visitors, so needs to be visible), as should the recent posts widget and your profile and image (you may want to use your company logo here if you're intending to promote your business). Otherwise, arrange the widgets in an aesthetically pleasing manner, as preferred.
• Now you will want to adjust some settings so that your blog behaves in the exact way you wish. For example, do you want people to be able to comment on your blog posts? If so you need to consider moderating comments (pre-approving before publication), as blogs tend to receive lots of spam. Comments can be set up in the 'Settings' tab of your dashboard by clicking on 'Comments' and checking the boxes required. I would advise moderating comments and using a text verifier to prevent spam.  Alternatively, you may wish your blog to remain entirely private, or to manually invite only people you know as members; this is possible in the 'Permissions' tab, but you are limited to 100 readers. There are numerous other tabs in the 'Settings' area and you should visit each page and check all the boxes required to modify your blog to your exact requirements. You can change these settings at any time, should you feel you need to later on.

And that's it - you're ready to publish your first blog post! A sensible first post is a welcome blog or an introduction, explaining who you are and what your blog is about. 

Tomorrow we'll look at how to choose appropriate titles and how to use keywords to improve your ranking with search engines.

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