The Secrets of Successful Blogging

by Raj

According to Technorati data,there are over 175,000 new blogs mushrooming up every day i.e., two new blogs are mushrooming up every second somewhere around the world whereas the updating sequence of contents of all these new and old blogs is only to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second. A good chunk of them are getting withered out like mushrooms itself without any new contents being added once the initial enthusiasm is over.

I remember being to a few motivational seminars, even many of you too might have been to. The sequence of events before and after attending these seminars is always one and the same. People get into these seminars with the dream of a better and meaningful life and come out charged, ready to take on the world and change their lives for the better, but a week later they’re back doing their own chores. The seminar operators too know this and count on it. If everyone they teach became successful, they’re going to be out of business. Same is the case here. You too got charged with all those make-money-online blogs and got started with a new blog, but somewhere down the lane, you are feeling of being at the brim of extinction. Even Darren Rowse of Problogger.net was on the brim of quitting or at least was thinking of giving up on blogging as an income source. What put him back on the driving seat? Check out his video post on

“A secret to profitable blogging trending up over the long haul.” Really worth reading/watching.

Coming back to our point, how to keep the flame of your blog get going without getting extinguished? How to keep away from getting demotivated? The answer is traffic! Traffic is the ultimate success of any blog. If your blog is without a single visitor, you lose confidence and enthusiasm. So, how to bring in traffic? How to sustain such brought traffic? How to prolong the initial enthusiasm that you had? How to be a successful blogger? I have amassed a few guidelines (which I’ve learnt over a short span of time) to withstand the pressure of getting withered out and to have the fun of blogging. All these tips are interconnected; hence, try to adhere to every single aspect because every small deed that you do in the right direction is a keystone in constructing your blog. Assuming that you are coming up from scratch, I begin here:

Write about something you love, some thing you’re craze about and you would go on writing even if you don’t make a single penny out it. Choose your niche wisely so that you won’t get depleted off the content in a few posts. Preferably, be an expert in your niche. Do not start a blog just for the purpose of making money online.
You need tons and tons of patience before you can get traffic and obtain accreditation in blogging. It may take even years. Hence blogging is essentially a kind of testing your patience.
Still if you are serious about blogging, start your domain on a paid hosting. Else, if you start on a free platform like blogger, it’s like building your home on someone else’s plot. There are numerous options of cheap and best paid hosting available; you could even find one such with Yahoo Small Business!
Use WordPress. WordPress is very good for SEO right out of the box. The built-in linking and pinging functions make WordPress a search engine friendly tool for blogging.
Put your blog in a sub-directory rather than in the root, in case you want to do other things with your site later. It might also get people to link to your home page and your blog separately for double the link juice. Name the directory “blog” or “files” or something like that.
Choose the appropriate WordPress plugins. Check out “Top ten WordPress plugins of MT Herald” and “Additional WordPress plugin list of MT Herald.”
Create robots.txt and place it in the root directory and only in the root directory, not elsewhere. Note that WordPress creates multiple links for a same post, leading to push the posts into Google’s supplemental index. Hence restrict the bots with appropriate robots.txt commands.
An automatically updating sitemap.xml file, created with the aid of appropriate plugin such as Google sitemap generator, should be there in the root directory, although in my case, I found that the sitemap.xml is of less importance than inbound links with keywords in the anchor text. Anchor text attracts spiders on the internet just as juicy flies pull in arachnids for a sticky web-based feast. For details about sitemap generator plugin, again check the plugin list I mentioned above.
Submit your site to major search engines viz., Google, Yahoo and MSN.
One of the most important factors in search engine optimization is link strength i.e., how well your pages are connected, whether inbound links from other sites or internal links within your site itself. Check out some other search engine optimization tips with which I started.
Google’s supplemental indexing is really a hell for beginners. Almost your entire pages may get trapped in there. Only as the blog grows, those pages may find their way out. Supplemental indexed pages indeed need links to get out of the supplemental index.
Avoiding linking to bad neighborhood and avoiding excessive reciprocal links are the other two tips to keep supplemental indexing at bay. Similarly, prefer long posts over short ones to be away from supplemental index but break extra long posts into multiple posts for breaking the monotony of reader and to increase page views. Going by this theory let’s continue this discussion in our next post Deeds That Can Build Trust In Your Blog.