What is a Blog?
Before you even start to create your own blog. It is necessary to know what blog really is. The term blog is actually derived from the word Weblog or Web log. Back in the days, around the late 1990's, these Web logs are utilized by users to track updates and references to other resources online. They served as journals, which made them useful as a publishing tool for the user's stream of consciousness. Of course, the readers can still comment and share their thoughts on just about anything under the sun.
Wikipedia explains a blog as ....
"a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs.
Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photo blog), sketches (sketch blog), videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), audio (pod casting), which are part of a wider network of social media. Micro-blogging is another type of blogging, one which consists of blogs with very short posts.As of December 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs.[1] With the advent of video blogging, the word blog has taken on an even looser meaning — that of any bit of media wherein the subject expresses his opinion or simply talks about something."
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Advantages of Blogging
The main question is; why should you make blogs in the first place? You need to know blogging can enhance and support your online communications. However, you must first understand the outcome of your blog that you desire in order to attain success. The main reason why you should start blogging, is that it can be both an excellent outlet for your frustrations or excitement and profitable at the same time.
Business Blogs
This does not mean that if you are not into blogging, you should not blog. Being in a business, especially those with dealings on the Internet, requires you to establish a clientele that are actually interested with your services. Blogs can do this easily due to its accessibility and being an excellent medium for marketing that it is, blogs are essential for businesses.
Blogger Competitors
More so, if you are handling a business, there is good chance that your competition is blogging about their products and services. This is an easy method for you to examine the competition and what their clients' preferences are. Additionally, blogs can create strong customer relationships since your target market can easily and directly communicate with the authority within your business.
How to Get Blog Traffic That Sticks
People are not visiting your blog for fun or because they want to make you happy but because they believe they can gain something from you. While it is possible for you to spend a lot of money on advertising your blog or to try several marketing strategies you can think of you should know that this won't help you if your visitors don't find anything valuable on your blog.
The first step to making sure your blog visitors stick is by giving them what they want: this means you also have to know where they came from and why they're reading your blog.If people are reading your blog because they want more information about home insurance you won't have any luck giving them information about blogging and if people are visiting your blog in order to know about the latest fashion in town you won't be able to make them stick by trying to teach them how to make money online.
Try to have a crystal clear understanding of what your readers want from your blog, if you aren't sure about this you might want to survey them or even contact some of your major commenters to ask them what they'd like to be seeing more often on your blog. You will go really far if you can understand and meet the needs of your readers.
Another sure fire way to make sure your blog visitors stick is by getting them into a funnel. This means you should try to know how they react to information and what is the best way they love to consume information.If your readers are tech savvy the best way to get them to continue to read your content might be by making them subscribe to your RSS feed and if you're in the marketing niche or in a niche where people aren't that tech savvy the best way to make sure your readers keep reading your content might be to make them subscribe to your email list.
Don't rely on the thousands of daily visitors you're getting because the source of that traffic may crumble: Google might stop sending you traffic one day and that big site that keeps sending you tons of visitors might one day stop, the only way to make sure you enjoy is by being in control. Start building a mailing list now and always ensure you do the best to make sure your readers always come back to your blog.
Consistency Is A Very Important SEO Factor
If you ask people what they think is necessary to get a website ranking high for a particular keyword, most of them will mention things like an optimized title tag, unique content, backlinks and so on.
While those factors are indeed important for SEO, they will produce very small results if you don't combine them with consistency.
That is, you could launch a new website today with a lot of unique content and many backlinks, but unless you keep adding new content and getting new links consistently over time your website, would not rank high for any competitive keyword.
The opposite is also true. Even if you launch a website with little unique content and no backlinks, you can still get it ranking high for competitive keywords if you consistently keep adding new content and getting new backlinks.
Let me illustrate this point with some numbers. Suppose we launch two websites targeting the same keyword, website A and website B. On website A we publish 50 articles right away and manage to attract 500 backlinks on the first day thanks to a viral campaign on social media sites. On website B, on the other hand, we work our way up gradually, publishing one article every other day and getting 10 new backlinks per week. After 6 months I would be willing to bet that website B is ranking higher than website A, and that is because of the consistency factor.
In fact Google confirmed in the past that the pace at which a website publishes new content and gains new backlinks is indeed used inside its algorithm.
Whenever you plan an SEO campaign for one of your sites in the future, remember that slow and steady can win the race, even on the Internet!
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