Blogging Advice: How to Start Your First Successful Blog?

You maybe a curious person upon knowing that their are people who can make money online. Maybe you are wandering how they did these stuffs and become successful in their lives.

How they do these things is through blogging where they share their knowledge or information about the things they love to do.

You heard it right. Blogging today is indeed a very popular medium to build online businesses. But the real truth in online business is that you can’t help yourself to not spend an effort and some amount of money from your pocket.

Because having a blog may cost some amount of money like setting up a WordPress blog and typepad blog.

Luckily google company gave publishers the opportunity to share their knowledge and ideas through free blogging where blogging is not just an online journal but many considered it as an online business.

If you want to become a successful blogger that aim to earn money from it, you should consider these things in the future of your blogging activities.

1. Expect that you will give more efforts to your blog from your earlier days of blogging.

2. Expect that you will do some sleepless nights because of your hunger in information.

3. Expect for the restless times that you create your first 5-10 quality content.

4. Expect that you will do more blog promotion where your blog is not yet popular.

Now, that you already knew what are the basic factors may happen in your future blogging activities, let’s proceed to blogging basics and start your blogging processes on the steps below.

Blogging Basics Preparation:

1. Find a niche or topic that you knew or passionate about.

Finding your niche or topic to focus is your first step to your blogging journey. You feel with ease upon sharing your ideas in your niche, if you knew the topic you cover in your blog. For some reasons, you could do research for more information about your topic.

2. Choose Domain Name for your blog.

Domain name is the site’s address on the world wide web. Even you use a blogger blog, I would recommend to use your own custom domain name.

Setting a good domain name for your blog is a good practice to get reputation in the blogosphere. Because some bloggers (especially newbies) in the internet usually don’t believe what the author shares to them and they just ignore it and find other blogs they think could help them. For instance, It will look more professional together with your professional template.

Consider this easy points to choose your own domain name or site address.

* Make it short as possible.

* Easy to remember.

* Easy to read.

* Related combination of words to your niche.

Research and list those sub domains names that you choose for the future process.

3. Register an account on blogger.com

First, you need to have a account on www.gmail.com then proceed to www.blogger.com to register a blogspot blogging account. To know these steps, follow the instructions on the video here.

4. Set – up your first blog but don’t broadcast or publish it yet.

Setting up your first blog is very easy as you see on the video earlier. After that don’t tell anybody yet, even your friends when it is not done yet or else they won’t comeback again because your blog/site is under construction. Give them a bang after is it complete.

5. Create an About Me page on your blog.

Tell the world who you are in your about me page. Tell them what was your purpose and interests why you launch your blog. Tell them what you can share to them and what are those things they can get from you that might change their lives like what blogging gurus Darren Rowse and Yaro Starak said.

Don’t forget to tell them your skills and knowledge that you wish to share to them. But don’t share those irrelevant issues of your personal life, it might ruin your professionalism or depending on the situation.

Blog Optimization:

1. Search and choose a professional looking blogger theme.

There many free premium blogger template in the internet which converted from wordpress to blogger format template. There are also sites had compiled professional looking blogger template on the web like eblogtemplates.com or you can suggest a wordpress theme design to be converted to my friend at bloganol.com for free. He converted my template which I currently use called Ultimate Blogging Theme for blogger.

2. Use Google webmaster tools and analytics.

This features provided by google, helps websmaster and blogger to improve their site’s Search Engine Result Position (SERPS).

3. Set – up RSS and Email subscription.

Register an account on Feedburner.com to let your users to subscribe to your blog and be updated what’s new on your site.

They can do subscription through RSS feed or any feed aggregators available on the web or via email. Optimize your feedburner account for more great functions and features that could benefit your blog.

P.S. Give of your time to explore the entire features of feedburner and familiarize its operation and basic information.

Search Engine Optimization

1. Submit your site to different search engine websites.

Submitting your site to different search engine sites like google let them know that your site has exist. That they would try to crawl your site and index it on their SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).

2. Write or share content for your readers and search engines.

There are many articles on the web that are search engine friendly only that users can’t get any benefits on it. There are also contents that are user or readers friendly but don’t have much exposure on different search engines to let other internet users knew what you could share.

Try to share content that could give both benefits to your readers and search engines. Bloggers and webmasters considered that “Content is King”.

3. Create robot txt.file.

The main purpose why you create a robot.txt file is to improve your site’s indexation that search engine crawl your site/blog to indexed it to their search engine. More information and how to do this is here.

4. Create and submit sitemap to google and other search engines.

Site map helps search engine crawlers to index your site faster. According to one of google’s engineers name Matt Cutts, “Sitemap could help your site indexed faster not in months but in days” as they crawl thousands of websites each day as quick as possible they can.

Another benefits of having a sitemap is that, it serves as the archive of your blog that your users might want to read and explore your previous contents.

5. Ping your blog to this “Ping List”.

According to Retire at 21 dot com, Ping or Pinging is a built-in notification system ‘pinging’ the search or directory engines every time you post a new article on your blog to get the search engines to visit your site more often, thus improve indexation.

Below are the list of ping services that I use

* http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

* http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2/

* http://pingqueue.com/rpc/

* http://ping.feedburner.com

* http://www.bloglines.com/ping

* http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

* http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

* http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

* http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

For more details and services here is A Complete Lists Ping Services for your reference.

6. Create Meta Tags for your site.

Having meta tags in your blog could help search engine robot crawlers categorize your blog. Most search engine crawlers used these keywords and description tags to appear on their search result pages. This is a very good search engine optimization process that you shouldn’t missed.

These meta tags looks like below, you can edit it and paste it in your blog’s html editing template.

<meta content=’Your blog description here’ name=’description’/>

<meta content=’your keywords here separated by comma’ name=’keywords’/>

<meta content=’index,follow’ name=’robots’/>

<meta content=’15′ name=’revisit-after’/>

<meta content=’Author’s name here’ name=’author’/>

<meta content=’your email address here’ name=’Reply-To’/>

<meta content=’Your blog title here’ name=’Copyright’/>

<meta content=’EN’ http-equiv=’Content-Language’/>

<meta content=’text/html; charset=US-ASCII’ http-equiv=’Content-Type’/>

<meta content=’Global’ name=’Distribution’/>

<meta content=’General’ name=’Rating’/>

7. Submit your site to different site/blog directories.

It is said that google search engine’s algorithm used to rank a site referring to the number of good quality back links from high page ranked websites.

Submitting your site to high page rank directories could help your blog gain good quality back links and good page rank. Here is the list of 71 handpicked high page rank blog directories from my friend.

Blogger Blog Promotion/Marketing:

1. Article Marketing.

Most blog contents compose of articles because most bloggers and webmasters believe that “Content is King” and I agree with that. Having good articles in your blog makes your users back in your site again and again.

Article marketing is said to be the best link building strategy, where google loves more links pointing back to your blog.

2. Guest Blogging or Posting.

Guest posting is a type of article marketing method where you create an article to be published to other blogs. If you done this correctly, you could gain good reputation as a blogger and new readers or traffic to your site where that article have back links to your blog. Yet another link building strategy is applied.

3. Blog Commenting.

I am fun of sharing my comments to other blogs where I learned many things about blogging doing it. Joining blog commenting community could help you get notice by other bloggers.

This process could also help you gain more traffic to your blog with no money expenses with less effort. Make sure that your comment is quite a good information where your comment serves as your bait description of information you knew that was shared and published in your blog.

4. Forum Marketing.

Most bloggers and internet surfers often visit forums to gather more information. If you can give the information they need, you could traffic to your site also trust from your users. As a new blogger, there were information in forum that could help your needs to your blogging journey.

Here are the 8 Factors why you must join forums.

5. Use of Social Sites or Social Media Marketing.

This type of blog promotion could also help you drive traffic to your blog. Well in fact that many bloggers like John Chow who is using twitter to promote his blog contents and products. He also make money on twitter through sponsored tweets.

Make Money Online or Blog Monetization Process:

Here is your time to make money from your blog. Below are some companies that will help you make money online. Try and consider some of their offers and apply it to yourself and conclude which suits to your blog.

1. Google Adsense.

Google adsense is the number 1 choice for bloggers (especially for begineers) to make money from their blogs. Where you get paid as revenue when your users clicked in your adsense ad links (Pay Per Click Process).

Take note that you can’t click your own adsense ad or else you get banned if you the this. Driving more traffic to your blog gives you chance to earn more revenue. Optimizing your ad blocks could help you earn more money from google adsense .

2. In-Text Advertising.

In-text advertising is also a good option to make money from your blog where they are compatible joining with google adsense. In-text ads is a hyperlinks containing ads appears in your articles. When your users clicked on that link, you earn revenue from it. If you have in your blog, try infolinks or kontera.

3. Affiliate Marketing.

Affiliate marketing is also good choice to make money online. If you already have good amount of traffic to your blog and trust from your users, selling other products is a great bang to your internet income.

Most successful bloggers today, used this process to earn consistent monthly income on their internet marketing business. If you arelooking for products to sell, I recommend amazon and clickbank marketplace.

4. Direct Advertising.

This blog monetization option is not advisable for new blogs where other sites or products buy an ad space in your blog. Having this option, you consider that you all have the features below in your site:

1. Good page rank (the higher the better).

2. Good quality of traffic (the larger the better).

3. Good quantity of subscribers.

If you have these in your blog, you can apply this option and earn consistent income from your blog. The price of the ad space depends on your blog’s status.

5. Freelance Services.

After the times passed by in your blogging career, your blogging skills or any related skills like theme designing and copy writing could be a way to make money online through freelancing services.

You could write other blog contents design a template in exchange for reasonable amount of money as a price. You could refer your blog as a prove of your success to gather more customers to hire your freelancing services.

6. Sponsored Reviews.

If you have a good sense of balance in judging things through your articles, then doing sponsored review for someone else’s products or services would be a good source of your income.

There are many marketplace that often visited by internet users to seek good reviewer like sponsoredreview.com and reviewme.com you visit and register an account there.

Final Thoughts

The above tips and information above is your basic know how to start your successful blogging career. After you all have done those steps try to do experiments which suits you well and repeat the steps again and again.

The above “how-to” guide may not the ultimate guide to make money online that you think, but forgetting the basics will lead you to failures especially if you haven’t done blogging before.

Thank you for making it this far reading my post. If you have something in your mind that make you confuse, don’t hesitate to contact me via email (see my contact page) or post a comment below of each post and I will be happy to share my knowledge to help you.

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