There has been a huge surge in the number of people blogging even since blogging was first started by a few people as a platform for expressing their views on things that they experienced and liked. Blogging has emerged as a good source of generating revenue as well and gives a means for people trying innovative ways to make their blog popular in order to generate traffic on their site hoping for clicks in order to earn. Here in this article I will cover the various aspects of this very topic.
When you have set up a blog make sure that you have a welcome page and an about page where you describe yourself and the blog. Mention about the scope of your blog and what your likes, dislikes and interests are and what you plan on sharing on the blog. It is a well known fact that a picture speaks a 1000 words and it can make all the difference in your blog. The images that you put up on your welcome page should be in relation to the theme, idea or content of your blog. That helps the viewer relate better to what your thoughts are and will draw attention.
Once you have an idea and concept ready for a type of a blog, put in a lot of effort and get ready a few posts first before publicizing your blog. It will not be a good idea to announce your blog publicly until you have at least 10 well written articles that would give the reader a fair amount of idea of your writing style, your interests and also a general overview of the blog itself. If you make the mistake of launching your blog with a few posts, it is likely that it will get abandoned because the viewers will get an impression that your blog is not going to be a very active or interesting blog, so that will not work for you.
One of the very common and handy features which blogs provide to users is the ability to subscribe to RSS or Atom feeds enabling users to get notifications of new posts in the blog. It is certainly not easy for anybody to visit a blog very regularly just to check if there have been any new posts on that blog. RSS or Atom feeds help the reader a lot in this respect and also puts a good impression on him about your blog.
Make it a point to add links to various newsreaders as well along with your RSS feeds links so that it helps users to use them with your feed. That will make their task even easier. Giving some instructions to readers on how to use the feeds will also be a good idea.
In the blogging world today, as the number of blogs grows almost exponentially in the market, there has been the emergence of social book marking sites such as digg it, stumble upon, etc. These social book marking sites enable readers to rate and categorize various blogs and help tell other readers about good blogs. You should also include links to such popular social book marking sites to enable users who use these features to publicize your blog in such sites making a good impression about your blog. This will certainly draw more and more traffic to your blog and increase the general liking and awareness of visitors about your blog.
Being a blogger is not just about having your own blog and just writing interesting posts on it. Blogging is a form of expression where people share their thoughts. Hence it is a very good idea to visit other people’s blogs as well. At times when you find somebody’s blog that you really liked, or a post that was very informative to you and you really like it, make it a point to comment on this blog. This proves to be really beneficial to you in many ways. The owner of the blog will appreciate your comment and most likely make an effort to visit your blog and even perhaps comment on your posts, and besides that commenting on other peoples popular blogs will also give you more visibility, as people reading those posts will certainly come across your comment and are more likely to check out your blog as well.
It is a good idea initially to include a lot of external links to resources, and other people’s blogs in your posts in the beginning. If you refer to blogs and links that are already popular, that will attract other bloggers to your site to read your views and at the same time referring to popular blogs will also increase your popularity since your blogs posts will come up in searches. This is also a good way to gain popularity in the beginning.
If you are skilled in any area it is a very good idea to give away free samples of that you may have developed yourself. A web design, a wordpress plug in, or anything that can come useful to your readers. People loves free stuff.
This is part one of this article. Keep your eyes open for part two.