A Great Idea for a Blog is No Longer Enough!
Posted on 11. Sep, 2009 by admin in Blogging
There are heaps of blogs on the internet ranging from artists displaying their work to how to paint a zebra. It can be really tough to distinguish your blog from all the others. Whether you are starting up a new blog aimed at bloggers or whether you are looking to make your existing blogging site more distinctive and colorful, the key to building and maintaining a blog site, that will capture the interest and attention of the blogging community, is finding your niche.
When you fill a unique need in a way that no other blog does, then you have found your niche. You then can build a lasting relationship with your readers by giving your subscribers what they want. Once you have discovered your niche, you will still have a lot to do, but finding your one of a kind place in the blogosphere is the place to start.
Every blog should start with a great idea. There are heaps of sites aimed at today’s bloggers so competition is fierce. To get your blog to stand out from the crowd you need to offer something that no other site is currently offering, or find a micro-niche of an already popular site but with a twist. The twist would be adding extra value to your readers.
One way to discover an ideal style for your blog is to look at other blogs that have already got a good following. Look at these blogs, analyze what the blogger does and says. Read the comments from their readers – this will give you an insight as to what the readers are asking. Hmm your niche could be in their questions.
Adding a unique flair to your blog will make you stand head and shoulders from your competition. Websites and blogs that do the best in today’s market are those sites that have personality, character and individuality. Surfers of blogs are a demographic that responds strongly to personality, so consider how you can give your blog a distinctive and attractive feel by lending your own voice and personality to your site’s content and design. Just be you.
Right, you’ve got your idea for your blog, you’ve narrowed down your niche, you’ve got pizzaz and personality on your site, the next step is getting the word out to bloggers and web surfers. A great idea isn’t enough to drive your blog site to success. A simple yet smart and realistic marketing plan should be used in order to draw readers to your site.
Once you hook a blogger, your unique content, style and personality will keep them coming back for more.
A Great Idea for a Blog is No Longer Enough!Introduction of Search Engine Optimization
Posted on 12. Aug, 2009 by admin in search engine optimization
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, and is the process of designing, building, and promoting a website with the search engines in mind. The purpose is to rank well in the search engines, which will then in turn provide you with organic search engine traffic. Organic traffic means free traffic.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is very important if you ever want to gain decent rankings in the search engine. Even though the word “SEO” can sound intimidating, actually applying it to your blog is not as hard as it sounds. All you have to do is invest some time in the beginning into learning the basics, and soon your blog will be better than many others out there, simply because you have done what the search engines want – SEO.
SEO is not only the initial design of a website, but the promotion as well.
Before I go any further, I would like to talk a bit about the many advantages of SEO, and why you absolutely need to apply it to your websites or blogs
The Advantages of SEO:
- Free Traffic
- Makes your website more “friendly”
- A lot people don’t do it!
- It will increase your profits
As you can see there are several reasons why you should be doing SEO.
Before we start tackling SEO, I would like to first talk a bit about how search engines work. It is very important that you know the basics of how they work, because SEO is essentially all about doing what we can to please the search engines.
Search engines gather data from any website they can find. Search engines send out little helpers called “spiders” and they crawl the net, putting their webs out and gather and store information about everything that they find. The search engines then rank the websites in order of importance, based on a variety of factors. They also penalize and reward websites, based on what they find.
Important factors include:
- Number of quality of backlinks
- Freshness of content
- Uniqueness of content
- “Authority” status
- Age
Our goal then, is to provide the search engines with a website or blog that the spiders have determined to be valuable. That way we can achieve a high ranking which will in turn bring us traffic.
