Making Your Blog Successful

The new thing is to make a blog. Everyone has an opinion on everything, and for those that like expressing their opinions (which happens to be the majority of people), they think it’s a good idea to make a blog. And it is! Making a blog for the most part isn’t too difficult, and they have lots of benefits to be reaped. You can monetize off the blog, obtain followers to listen and respond to what you have to say, and there comes a sense of satisfaction when talking about topics in which you’re knowledgeable about.

Alas, what is a blog if it isn’t successful? Further, “successful” may be very different to two people. In regards to what I claim “successful”, I mean the blog has consistent followers (while not necessarily thousands and thousands of them), and has enough search engine optimization that the site ranks well for specific keywords on your topic(s). It’s not the easiest task to be #1 on Google, but even ranking on the first page is certainly something to be applauded about. It also means that you will get more traffic because the more online visibility you have, the more people are going to see your site.

So what does it take to have a successful blog? Here are some things that you should definitely consider when either starting a blog or already have one, but want to make it better, more targetted, and well… more successful.

Make your content great, not just good.

More than anything else, excellent and original content will always prevail. Search engines love it and so do people. Write your own work, keep it well-edited, and always make it of the best possible quality. It’ll pay off.

Write about what you’re passionate about and know a lot about.

If you don’t care about your topic, it will show in your writing. Write about what you love or know a lot about. Writing vague information will be seen right through; people want detailed and specific information, not basic information they can find on a million other sites. What I mean is, be in-depth. Allow people to read your blog posts and learn a lot from them, that’s why they’re reading them in the first place. The more they learn from a blog post, the higher chance they’ll come back and want to learn more.

Include pictures — people love pictures.

Pictures add a story to your blog. They add something visual and will make people stay on your page longer. Too many pictures are bad and will make your blog take a long time to load, but one or several smaller pictures pose no problem. At the same time, the pictures should be directly related to your topic — a picture unrelated to the topic(s) of your blog will leave people confused and thinking you’re a little confused yourself.

Write often and keep your page(s) updated.

If you write a blog post and wait a month, that post may be on the first page of Google but after days then weeks of nothing new being posted, your ranking will continually decrease. You need to add new content and if your old work isn’t as tight as it could be, make it stronger, give it a nice edit. Don’t blog to blog, though, don’t just write new content because you feel it’s necessary. Write when you have something to say.

Put a story behind yourself.

If people are going to read your content as it becomes posted they want to know who you are. You don’t need to provide a picture, but just what you’re all about. Why you’re writing, how you might be considered an expert in the field, and whatever else you’d like people to know about you.

Offer a means to contact you.

Whenever you write about a topic, people will have questions. If they are on your page because they’re interested in the topic, they probably want to learn more. Maybe they’ll want to contact you by email if they’re confused. If you truly enjoy writing about what your blog’s topic is, you won’t mind sending a sentence back to people randomly as they message you. Your readers simply knowing you’re a real person might just convince more people to read your blog than you think.

Include ways to follow you (Facebook, Twitter, RSS).

If your purpose is to get more people interested in your site and more people reading each blog post you make, let the posts be known as soon as they go live. If people are able to be updated regarding something new on your site via Facebook, Twitter, or an RSS feed, the people that regularly read your content will become more of a community and feel a further sense of attachment to your work if being informed when something new is available.

Make your page clean, simple, and understandable.

Confusing, strangely colored websites are hard on your eyes and sometimes reason enough to leave the site. Keep your site simple; while it can still be colorful and complex, let the navigation itself and content of your posts be easily read. I would recommend showing someone else your site and see what they think, kind of like a proof-read. If they aren’t confused, great. You yourself will be bias about your page because since you made it, you will know how to navigate it properly.

Optimize your online presence.

Through SEO (search engine optimization), headers (H1, H2, H3), plugins if you’re using WordPress, a sitemap, submitting to directories and search engines, all are great ways to optimize the presence of your website on the internet. Plus, it’s important if you ever want to rank well and become a popular blog. Go do it! It’s super important and putting an hour or even a couple of hours towards it can make a world of difference. Google some keywords that you believe pertain to your blog. See how well you’re doing with content alone. And remember, when you start optimizing your site, results can take around a week to be seen. Sometimes it’ll happen in a couple hours or day, or sometimes it’ll even take a little longer than a week. But they’ll be seen, promise.

Don’t overload with ads.

Too many ads looks bad and unprofessional. If you want to monetize your site that’s great, but placing too many ads where your viewers are expecting to read content is a real turn off. I recommend taking advantage of the top and bottom of your page as well as side-columns, but then again I don’t recommend taking advantage of them all. Maybe use the method as I explained before — ask a friend, family member, etc, to look at your page and ask them, “are there too many ads?”. Remember, the most important thing on your site is traffic. With traffic, all else will fall in to place.

Keep your topic at least a little broad.

If you want to write about something specific, don’t let me tell you not to. But if the broad category of what you’re writing about is too specific to begin with, you might want to reconsider. Let me give an example. Say your blog is about ways to make your house “green” and eco-friendly. Well, “going green” is a broad topic so you can narrow down. Maybe how to make your house eco-friendly and green would be a good blog topic. Or, narrow it down a little more. How to make the garden of your house, waste consumption, or energy use in your house more “green”. However, if your blog is going to be about something so narrowed down such as how to listen to music in your home in the most “green” way possible, it’s going to be hard to buid a strong following. That might be a good blog post inside of a “going green” blog, but certainly not the focal point of your blog in general. Remember, you want to hit as large of a crowd as possible, while still maintaining focus on what your blog is truly about. If you stray away from your blog’s initiative, you will find less traffic. People will be coming to your site for a specific topic and if it ends up being about everything and everything, they will be turned off.