1. Don't Resign From Your Full Time Job Yet : When you are all fired up,
that's where the danger lurks. The first blogging secret applies to all of us
who blog part time. We need the stable income from our job to probably to tide
us through the first and second year of our new blogging business.
Imagine
the stress you would have to go through if you resigned from your job
spontaneously. How long could you last through the drought? Inspiration and
stress do not correlate. The sad fact is, if you resigned from your job
prematurely, you would be forced to look for a new job again.
2. Only Focus On One Blog At Any One Time: They all do it. ProBlogger,
DoshDosh, John Chow and Chris Brogan don't stray from one blog to another!
They all share a common trait called 'focus'. Focus would give you the
strength to strife on because your mind won't need to strain on different
genre of blogs or websites. Another thing about focus. When our mind focus on
a particular object, we give life to it.
I used to tell you to try working on two blogs instead of one. The reason?
So that you could continue to work once you run out of subjects for any one
blog. After working on two blogs simultaneously for 3 months, I realized that
I might actually be wrong. If you happened to blog part time, it's best that
you concentrate just on one blog.
There is so much to do even when you are working on one blog. Do you know
what else am I doing apart from writing on my post? My Tweetdeck is on, and
I've logged in to my Facebook to engage my friends and building rapport, all
for the sake of my How To Blog.org.
3. Be Active In At Least One Social Media Network: At the moment of this
writing, John Chow has 3,998 friends in Facebook and oops, surprise surprise,
only 398 followers in Twitter. ProBlogger (also known as Darren Rowse) has 3
Fan Pages in Facebook and 88,038 followers in Twitter. I could not find
DoshDosh in Facebook (maybe you can help me out on this!) and Maki has 14,874
followers in Twitter. Top blogger like Chris Brogan is a superstar in Twitter,
boasting a whopping 120,273 followers!
When you tweet about your latest blog updates, your followers may link to
your post. Some may even retweet and help in spreading the word around. Such
action will create inbound links from Twitter to your blog. Building links is
one of the most important part of creating traffics to your website.
4. Comments On Other Bloggers' Post: ProBlogger said this many times.
During the initial years of his blog business, he had spent an equal amount of
time creating contents and commenting on other people's blogs. The reason; to
get backlinks.
The best link building effort comes from getting a prominent blogger to put
your url into his blogroll. Tons of backlinks will be created via such effort.
I was fortunate enough to get a PR6 blog called Dr Shock to add my site in
this way very early in my blogging effort. As a result, my 'How to Blog.org'
just leaped from a PR0 to a PR2 website within 2 months!
However, your request for a link exchange from the big brothers are usually
futile. By this, you just have to do the next best thing. You put comments on
their post. Remember only to put smart comments and not just any spammy phrase
like 'Great post. Thanks!'
5. Use Pictures And Videos: Google and many search engines favor the using
of videos and pictures in your blog content. The best videos come from your
own recording effort whereby you put in your own keywords for optimization.
However, you are still able to use other people's work provided that you give
due credit to that person.
6. Build Genuine Relationship: Your readers are intelligent human beings.
They know how much effort you have contributed just by reading your content.
Once you assumed your role as a blogger, you focus on your effort in adding
value to your readers' knowledge.
Ask yourself, how could your content change your reader's outlook. Would
your work open up a new perspective or would it just invoke a 'what's new'
response? Think about how you would advise a dear friend when he or she hit a
snag?
7. Love What You Are Doing: Only make blogging your business if you really
love writing valuable contents for your readers. Although building a blog
business consumes very little monetary cost, you invest your time in the
building process. To me, time is priceless and no amount of money can really
replace the time that you have spent. So, only spend this limited resource in
something that you love.
8. Your Blog Is Serious Business: Look at these prominent bloggers' site
and tell me what you observe? It's not just paying lip service when I said you
have to treat your blog as a business.
Darren Rowse of Problogger started of as a lone ranger like most of us
newbies. Look at his website now. He hires feature writers for Problogger.net
and I'm sure he has accountants to keep track of his ROI as well.
9. Build Original Content
Writing original content is difficult. Since most of us do not write for a
living, the urge to just link to other people's post is quite alluring.
Steve Pavlina always preaches about having our own original contents. You
could just look at the comments readers make in his blog to gauge how much
they love his contents. Creating your own original content would pull traffic
to your blog. Linking would push your hard earned traffic to other people's
website. In other words, you became the middle-man that creates free inbound
link to other bloggers.
