Sunday, January 24th, 2010 |
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See that. It’s a summit. You have to climb up to get there.
I have a confession to make. I try to sound positive on this blog, and on top of everything, but I gotta admit, sometimes I get down. Does that happen to you too, fellow bloggers?
I had a relatively new blog up until a few days ago. It was about 3 months old. It was progressing nicely. Nothing spectacular, but I was making progress. I had gone from an Alexa ranking of around 4 million to one in the 700 thousands in about 3 weeks. I was feeling pretty positive about it too. I was messing around with code and trying to make it look better when I messed something up. I messed up bad, too. After compounding the problem another time or two, I committed a massive screw up in the file manager, and the blog disappeared.
Three months of work gone. Bummer! What did I do? I didn’t whine about it. I liked the blog, but it lacked focus, and since I had dreams of monetization, it really wasn’t a great candidate. So I decided to start a new one (actually I plan on starting several, but this one is first). When I began the first one I hadn’t really thought it out well. I just knew I wanted a place to express myself. And I wanted to express my self on a variety of subjects. Rather than figure out which subjects I really cared about, I just thought I could write about many subjects on the one blog. I have come to think that was not the best decision. It’s better to have a niche. I read that shortly after I started the other blog, but I thought I could find away around it. Note to self: When Yaro Starak speaks…listen dammit!!! The guy knows his stuff. There’s a reason the pro bloggers are the pro bloggers. But back to the story.
I am working hard to get this blog up and running, but I’ve got that 17,244,602 Alexa number up there on the Alexa toolbar staring at me. I think it’s mocking me and I hate it for that. But after I get through feeling sorry for myself, I’m going to do something about that damned number. Feel free to tell me that the number isn’t precise and that it doesn’t matter very much, but I won’t believe you. It matters to me. It’s a sort of confirmation that what I’m doing is making some small difference. I decided to write this post about getting overwhelmed with a new blog, because it’s my guess that I’m not the only one out there that feels that way every now and again.
So what am I gonna do about it? Well, there’s two components to blog success. Content, and Promotion. I’ve written about that before, and believe me, I’ll be writing about it again. In one of my first posts I talked about the need to set what I called tactical goals. These are the goals that you set to achieve your strategy of building a successful blog. I said then that I would give actual numerical goals in a near future post. Guess what. The near future has arrived.
These then, are the goals I want to achieve on a daily basis to grow this blog:
- At least 1 new post every day, and sometimes more
- Comment on at least 20 blogs every day
- write and/or submit 3 guest posts every day for the next week
The first two are quite doable. The third is really going to make me buckle down and seriously get to work. Guest posting is probably the fastest way to get noticed. And if you are going to be noticed then it had better be for great content. For a guest post, I believe you should be submitting your best stuff. After all, you’re trying to be invited into the house, and you don’t want to track in that dog dropping you just stepped in, do you? Of course not. Be a courteous guest. Sure they’re getting free content, but you asked them to do you the honor of popularizing your writing. Be grateful.
So. There you have my new tactical goals for the next week. Goals can always be reviewed and changed if necessary. After a week, I’ll review and see how I did. If I must I can adjust downward, but I think the goals should be a stretch. By the same token, I may be able to change them upward. We shall see. And I will, of course keep you informed.
As always, comments are encouraged.
How To #2 – Effective Promotion
Here’s number 2 in my series of “how to” articles for bloggers.
What should you know about effective promotion of your blog? You are probably already familiar with the usual litany of blogging. Write posts, comment on other blogs , and guest post. But is there more that you could be doing? Funny you should ask. Now let’s talk a little about what you could be doing to promote your blog more effectively. (Here’s a little freebie piece of advice. Make sure you hit “save draft”, and not the “publish” button when you’re writing in the wordpress editor. heh)
New Posts
This one is not really promotion, but you need to add fresh content to your blog regularly. It doesn’t have to be an every day thing, but try to update, and add new articles on a fairly regular basis. Think about it. How many times are you going to keep coming back to aq blog if the content never seems to change.
Comments on other blogs
This is always on everyone’s list of promotional activities. There’s a reason for that, of course. It works! As has been said already a hundred times, this does not mean making meaningless noises abut how helpful this post is. Leave something with a little meat on it (Sorry vegetarians, but if God didn’t want us to eat animals, then why did he make them out of meat? I’m sorry about that. I couldn’t help myself. It’s one of the funniest things I ever saw. As a public service, here’s the truth. The China Study proves that meat really is not very good for you. The consumption of animal protein leads to all kinds of health problems. End of health lesson.) As I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself, when you leave comments, be sure you are contributing to the conversation, and not just leaving noise. The point of the exercise is two-fold. One, you want the backlink, which is important to traffic. More backlinks = higher rank on the search engines = more traffic (=more money if you are monetized). Two, you want to leave a comment that has valuable content and is so well-written that readers feel that they just have to go see what your blog is all about.
Guest posting
Guest posting, like commenting has two purposes. One is the backlink, and two is to gain readers. Always check the blog you want to submit a guest post to for any rules or guidelines that they want guest posters to abide by or follow. Since you’re trying to generate more backlinks, and traffic with your guest post, and you are using another bloggers site to do it, you owe them your very best work. Your article will reflect on them as well as you. Make sure you show them the respect and gratitude they deserve by offering only your best writing.
Build Links
There are a number of ways to get links. Blog carnivals, where a number of bloggers with a similar interest get together and list there latest offerings can be effective. Get your blog listed in directories. Find forums and take an active part in them.
Social media
Twitter and Facebook are changing the internet. They should be an important part of your campaign to get people to be aware of your site. Create accounts and talk.
SEO
Before I go I should probably mention something about SEO or search engine optimization. In the comments and guest posting sections I briefly touched on backlinks. They are the principal criteria for ranking. There are different levels of backlinks. The more authoritative the source of the backlink, the more weight it carries. You also should be aware of keywords. Keywords are not just single words either. They are the words and phrases people put into search engines. The higher your page ranks in the search engines for any particular term, the more likely it is that people will click on the link to your page. This is especially critical if your site has something to sell. This one does not…yet. It also helps your site to link to your own articles within your site, so don’t overlook that source of links. I find it helpful to go through my posts after they are written to inspect them for keywords to use as tags, and to look for any terms I may have used that are well-suited to use for links.
Conclusion
The basic concept is simple. You want your blog’s name to appear in as many places as you can possibly find. The more places on the internet it shows up on, the more people will see it. See, effective promotion isn’t that hard.
If you enjoyed what you read here please send a link and share it with others, and as always comments are encouraged.