Hearing stories of professional bloggers making a living through their blog, reminds me of the Ebay seller turning a hobby into a million dollar company. Blogging is becoming a trendy activity. But like all things, your are not going to be able to quit your day job with out rolling up your sleeves.
So here we are, you have a blog and your goal is to walk into work one day and tell your boss you don't need his money anymore? This article will give you the knowledge and skills to accomplish that dream.
- Make sure that whatever blogging software you are using, that it is pinging major blog search engines updates to your blog. For Blogger, this feature is under Settings --> Publishing and is called "Send Pings".
- Make sure that you visit 5-10 blogs a week that are similar in topic to yours. Find a post that interests you and leave a comment. Leave a comment that will spark a reply from the author, not just spam. If the author feels appreciative of the comment you left, in most cases they will respond to your comment and visit your blog. Not to mention, the authors readers may visit your blog.
- Carry your blog's url around as if it was your wallet / purse. On every one of your email addresses, add this url to your signature. In every social networking website that you are a member, include this url in your profile. On business cards, letterhead, forum posts, and comments on other blogs.
- Visit forums that revolve around your topic. Genuinely engage the users of this forum. Chances are if they find your information useful or valuable they will visit your blog.
- Travel over to feedburner.com, a service that was recently purchased by Google, begin to monitor and promote your blog. Feedburner has quite a few really neat gadgets and tools to help you promote your blog.
- Submit your site to places like Open Directory Project, MSN and Altavista. There are many more than just these three, be creative and do some research.
- Submit your blog to individual blog directories. Blog Connection has an excellent list here.
- Find subjects within your topic that are trendy. For example, if your topic is mobile communications, then talk about the iPhone or Google's entry into the wireless industry. By writing about subjects that are trendy, there will be more users searching for information regarding those subjects.
- No matter what the post is about, make sure that you use your keywords repeatedly within the post. Now lets be responsible and not keyword spam, but we do want to repeatedly use the keywords that users will use to find your blog. For example, when discussing the new iPhone, you should reuse the word iPhone and Apple probably 1-3 times per paragraph. This will bump you up in the results because Google will think that your post is more relavant than others.
- Claim your blog / site on Technorati and Alexa.
If you follow these steps, you will see steady growth in the number of visitors and subscribers to your blog. Work hard, and you may have that opportunity to tell your boss, "go to hell!".
Chris
2 comments:
No comments here? Wow, that was such an interesting article! And probably will prove also useful. I was messing with the idea of a blog, but I thought that, after seeing the eventual downfall of my forum, I would need some advice xD, so I'll try all you've written. Nice work!
Hi Chris, great post and incredible information. I just recently started creating a page on blogger and just applied to become a member with adsence. My goal of course is to blog my way into retirement.:) Your post has answered a lot of questions that I've had in mind and you have provided some valuable tools that I'm sure I can benefit from. Again, thank you. Keep up the good work.
Ellen
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