Blog

Starting a new blog can be exciting for some, and overwhelming for others. I feel it should be both, depending on your goal as a blogger. For instance, someone who is just looking to start a personal blog, and aren’t really focused on the monetizing or generating traffic isn’t going to feel that overwhelmed because all their goals are easily met with something as simple as a registration form. However, if you’re like me and know that blogging can be both fun and profitable, you know there’s a lot involved with starting up a new venture in the world of blogging.

Research, Research, and Research

Starting up a new blog always starts with an idea. What topic will the blog be about? What perspective will you take on the topic? What sort of content should be produced? If you plan to make money from the blog, usually from contextual advertisements and affiliate programs, then you must have a clear idea of all of this and more before you begin. Anyone familiar with SEO will tell you that you need to begin with a topic, and try and narrow it down as much as possible. The next step should be to find keywords in close relation to your primary topic that all have a good volume of search traffic while having a low or weak competition at the same time. You can read more about keyword research in our SEO learning guide.

Don’t Expect Overnight Results

Many people start out blogging with high hopes of taking the blogosphere by storm. Chances are you will not become an overnight blogging sensation. In fact, the chances that anyone but your few close friends and your mom will be reading your blog within the first few months are rather very slim. These things take time and persistence. Too many people start out strong and only last a few weeks to a couple months before they feel like they’re hopeless and proceed to give up.

Getting regular traffic takes time and constant attention to many details, but most of all it takes patience. It’s a common belief in the SEO community that things like this usually take about 6 months before you start seeing anything worth while. If after this time frame you still have no traffic to your site, you’re probably doing something wrong. Don’t give up, just do your research!

Other Tips

Unique content is king. Nothing makes the search engines happier than a big block of fresh keyword rich content that’s highly relevant overall to the keywords they’re indexing you for. Don’t settle for copying big blocks of text from other sites or bloggers and just making small comments, or perhaps none at all. Content scraping does not make as much money as a genuine unique source such as yourself.

Regular posting is important, especially keeping up on news topics relating to your niche. If your blog makes regular updates, Google and other search engines would be more inclined to visit your site more often to slurp up more information. This effect is amplified when you’re posting about popular news topics. If the search engines detect that you stay current on the times and update regularly and often, you will gain authority and perhaps tap into the massive traffic generators known as news aggregators.

If you’re only in it for the money, take up SEO and hire a writer, you will be much more profitable and much less miserable. Let’s face it, if you’re not enthusiastic about the topic or the writing, the product will not be quite as good as it could be. If you have a paid writer dedicated to writing high quality content for good profitable keywords, there’s a good chance you’ll profit off of any investments into SEO and content.