The Factors That Make a Successful Blog

There are a lot of different factors that make up a successful blog. If you want to know what some of these factors may be so that you can work towards them, you've clicked on the right blog post!

Traffic

The first and foremost factor is traffic. It's absolutely vital for a blog to have traffic because traffic: gives your blog a purpose, increases your ratings, your viewers who make up your traffic spread your blog by word of mouth, spread the news about your latest work, recommend your blog to people who might like it, etc. so on and so forth. Basically, traffic is one of those self-replicating things meaning that if you don't have traffic to start with, you won't get any more. Getting traffic is a relatively simple process and if you want to look into it more, check out some of my other blog posts. 

Marketing

How you market your blog is very important to and there's many ways to do it but people primarily market their blogs by spreading the link around and getting high-traffic, high-value keywords involved to increase the value of the traffic coming your way. The best way of marketing your blog is to do a little experiment with the Google AdWords campaign system to find out the value of a keyword that people type in and find your blog with. Using this process, you can easily find high value keywords that relate to your blog.

Content

This is quite easily related to the 'traffic' factor since bad content = bad traffic ratings. Basically, if your blog is full of good, high-quality content of a respectable amount with new content being published daily, you can expect higher and higher traffic ratings by the day, until the one fateful day you might hit a Traffic Drought (see my previous post of Traffic Droughts and how to beat them).

Design

Your blog should have a great, eye-catching design that attracts customers and appeals to their 'pretty colours!' side. Everyone has one, you know. Just make sure that the design, while eye-catching, also relates to the idea of your blog. If it's a business blog then you'll want some impersonal, grey/black design that emits an aura of professionalism whereas a niche blog should have a design that pertains to the niche of the blog itself (i.e. a Writer's Blog could have something like a pen lying across a paper as the background image).

Interactivity

Your readers should feel like your interacting with them through your blog posts - include things like puns, comedic sarcasm and hilarious comments here and there to make your blog posts feel less impersonal and make your readers feel like your right there in real life, talking directly at them. Create polls, forums, special weekly/monthly events, etc. to make your readers feel like they're interacting with you and that your blog is more than just a place to go, find out something and then try it out. It should be an awesome experience for everyone who visits. My opinion on interactivity is to build a community with your readers over something like forums.

Well, there you have it! The most important factors that contribute to making your blog a success. Of course, there are more but these are the ones you should work on the most to make sure your readers the best experience out of your blog and to make sure all your hard work pays off and you have some enthusiastic readers to communicate with. Honestly, once you build the bridge to communication with your readers and your traverse it, you'll find they can provide you with a lot of great ideas and helpful insight, no matter how experienced you are!

In Need Of A Cheap Domain For Your Writing Website?

As a writer, you need to be on the constant lookout for a good chance to get a respectable domain name for your online writing. After that, you also need to take a look at good hosting options too. With both those things, one costing a great deal more than the other, the expense can be unworkable for some online writers.

Well, if you've been looking for cheaper yet good alternatives to the prices at GoDaddy.com and the large amount of money you have to pay for HostGator domain hosting, then you've come to the perfect blog post because within the confines of this post, I will tell you about two great places to go for a cheap domain and free hosting. I can proudly say that I have tested both and that their services are really satisfactory. If you have a problem with the domain that you buy, you get a 30-day money back guarantee. As for the free hosting... well, you're not really losing anything there, are you?

When it comes down to cheap .com domain names, the search can be quite a hassle and most give up halfway through. I haven't and now I'll help you end your search too by giving you the website, http://www.networksolutions.com/. On this website, you can get domains for the cheap price of $2.95 per year! I've gotten one before and (Spoiler Alert!) I'm thinking of getting another one to shift Writers' Trade to.

The next website I'm going to show you is a great, free alternative to most hosting services on the Internet and it's URL is http://www.000webhost.com/. 000Webhost is a website that gives you free domain hosting, is completely legit and has a great record of 99% uptime! This is all just the basic, free plan. They have a paid hosting plan too which I recommend if you need more CPU power to your website than the basic package can provide.

With those two services, setting up a website on the internet is a pretty easy endeavour. Once that's done, if you want a blog, you can look into Wordpress' downloadable blog service which allows you to download the basic Wordpress blog files and upload them on an FTP server for your website, from which you can install your Wordpress blog (don't worry if it sounds complicated - they give you a tutorial).

UPDATE: This will only work as a 1 year temporary website due to the fact that the Networksolutions auto-renewal for the domain registration puts the price back up to a killing $35. Sorry for the inconvenience.

An Important SEO Lesson

SEO or Search Engine Optimization, is the process in which we help search engines recognise different pages on the internet and place them in search results. The more SEO you do, the more likely it is that your pages will make the first page in a search engine but the question is, how can you do it?

Well, SEO entails lots of arduous methods that take up a great amount of time to complete, but one of the quick ones that I'd like to tell you all about today, is Marketing. Marketing or in other words, promoting your  website, is a sure-fire way to get search engines to take notice of your pages and the more you promote your website's link throughout the Internet, the higher up your websites and pages go in search results and the more traffic you get and traffic, as I have said many times before, is what writers such as ourselves thrive upon.

It's a simple matter, promoting your website and pages - just go through some websites that are relevant to the topic of your pages and leave your link behind when you find a good place. Writing up articles and at the end of each article, linking to your website is a good idea as well. The more you do it, the more the search engine recognizes your website but DO NOT overdo it and turn into a living spam bot. No one likes spam and no one likes it when a person leaves their links all over the place. If you comment and leave your link on someone else's page, present it in a manner which proves that you are not a spam bot and shows that you are trying to help people with the information in your website. Also, make sure that the owner of the page you comment on is OK with people dropping links there - if not, you could get IP Banned if it's something like a blog.

Well, there you have it - a little lesson on one of the methods of SEO known as Marketing. Marketing links always helps your website's rankings on search engines so it's important to market your website but at the same time, I urge you not to be obnoxious about it. 

Allowing Guest Bloggers

As a little way of helping my readers gain more popularity through Guest Blogging, I am allowing my readers to apply for guest blogging on this blog at Writer's Trade. It's a fairly new blog but it hits hundreds of viewers each day, so your posts here will gain maximum exposure to everyone to reads this blog. I'll be allowing Guest Bloggers to put links to their websites/blogs/articles in their posts so that they may gain some traffic and popularity.

There're a couple of rules you should know before you apply for guest blogging on this blog. First off, you cannot give out any inappropriate material. Secondly, your posts must be related to writing, which this blog is all about. Finally, you should remember to format your posts in paragraphs and use proper grammar.

Applying to guest blog is pretty easy - just leave a comment in the comment section. Your comment should include your e-mail ID so that I can send you an invitation to publish posts on my blogs and you don't have to worry about other people getting your ID - Blogger has a system in which no one can see your comment unless I approve it. I will see your comment, add your email and then delete it straight away.

In other news...

I'm starting a new system in which at the end of each week, I'll post a huge news post which will welcome new guest bloggers and link to their websites/pages and the news post will tell you about future plans for the blog, including progress on building a community and how you can help. This weekly news update will be posted every Friday.

Don't Be Discouraged By A Traffic Drought

Every now and then, an online writer will experience something I like to call a "Traffic Drought" - a period of time in which your viewership dramatically decreases and stays on the low for a while. Traffic Droughts can be triggered any day, sometimes for no apparent reason, but I find that it'll have something to do with a change on the writer's side. It could be any change really, from a decrease in how many articles you publishes per day to a decrease in the amount of content you give in your articles. Traffic Droughts happen from time to time but the first time is usually the worst, because the first time is when your more new and inexperienced. Newer writers panic at the sight of a Traffic Drought and it usually discourages them and affects their writing even more.

The key is to not let it get you down. If you wake up one day and find out that your blog's been hit by one, take it as a challenge instead of an error on your part. Look at it and say "I'm going to publish so much content that those viewers will be running back!" and do just that! Keep posting lots of content everyday and whenever you look at the viewer count and see that it's low, just stick your chin up and write more articles. If you see it's starting to rise again, keep writing more anyways because when a drought is on the verge of being over, you need to be careful up until the point where it's completely restored, otherwise your blog could have a relapse and you'll have to start over again.

Well, there you have it! If you ever find a Traffic Drought on your blog, do not despair no matter how big it is! Instead, take it up like a challenge you've been set. Take it up the way you would when the world is trying to put you down but you'll fight back! The bottom line: don't cower in the face of a Traffic Drought; brace yourself and run straight through it.

How To Monetize Your Blog

If you're planning to build a successful blog and earn money from it, you'll need to learn a thing or two about Monetizing your blog. In this article, I'll be showing you a couple of ways to do just that.

The first thing would be content that your readers pay for. Examples of this would be things like eBooks, podcasts, videos, tutorials, etc. Podcasts would allow your readers to listen to your lectures/tutorials/whatever on the go while eBooks could be things as simple as a collection of your best articles, tips and tricks. I won't go into detail on how you can make these because I'm sure you all know how to make a video and how to record a podcast.

Advertisements are another way to go when it comes to monetizing your blog. However, if you've been on the internet for a while, you probably know that these can get a little out of hand and start driving people crazy. There's all types of advertisements: pop-up, graphical, full page, text, etc. Text advertisments are the least annoying of all because they're just very small blue text, the same as Google Ads. Pop-ups are also annoying, graphical ads just sit there but their colours and pictures keep drawing the users attention and some people find it annoying and full-page ads are just straight-up frustrating. To get started with putting advertisements on your blog, you can go to websites like Bidvertiser, Google AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network and grokAds. If you want to look at more options, go through Google but try to keep your search limited to the first two pages, in order to find the best options available. 

The last method I'm going to go through are affiliate programs that pay you for telling your readers about one of their products in your posts. It's an inevitable thing, dropping product names around, especially when you like to recommend good software, hardware, etc. to your readers. The key is to not go out of hand with affiliate links by telling your readers about products that have nothing to do with your blog. If you have a software blog, don't give affiliate links to things like premium hair curlers or anything else that isn't software. A couple of great affiliate programs to opt for include: Amazon Associates, Linkshare, Clickbank and others that you can find all over Google.

I'd like to finally conclude this article here and thank you all for your readership. I hope this information proves very valuable to all of you and helps

Earn $5 For Every Time You Write On Fiverr

Writing articles on article writing websites is a decent way to make some money with writing but it's a little time-consuming what with having to build a large fan base and writing very frequently every day. To top it all off, it'll take atleast a month or two for you to even begin to start working your way to real income on those websites. If you feel like you want to make so more money on the side while your article writing picks up, why not joing Fiverr?

Fiverr is a website that allows people to offer services (that are allowed by their Terms and Conditions/Policy) through the website but the most a person can charge/pay for a service from a person on their website is five dollars. A lot of people offer writing services here such as "will research and write an article on any topic" or "will transcribe audio files" and you can do much the same here. Lots of people come on this website so there's a good chance your offer will get noticed or as an alternative, you can see if anyone's made a request and take it up. Either way, it's a quick method of making a couple of fivers which you could use to buy a .com domain and a hosting plan for your writing website (or just save up the money for something else).

All in all, a pretty nifty little website for you to make some quick money in your spare time.