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. 

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. 

The Importance And Use Of A Huge Fan Base

I've mentioned quite a few times in my previous posts that having a huge fan base/lots of readership is important for a writer. In today's article, I'll go on to explain the various reasons why this is so and what you can do with your readership.

One of the first things readership does is give your writing a purpose. After all, if you write over and over and no one sees your work, what's the point of it? Although on the internet, this isn't the case. No matter what remote website you publish your articles on, there are always people who will find them.

The next thing is that your followers and fans like to create conversations whenever your working on something big. Conversations like this usually draw in people who've never heard of you before and once they get in, many of them will stay there, joining your followers. So in other words, your fans do your advertising for you, without you asking them.

Basically, followers are there to: read and appreciate your hard work, spread the news around and buy your eBooks (provided that they're good!). Now that that's out of the way, let's see how you can direct them. It's not really such a hard thing to do, in fact you don't have to say much; just a gentle nudge in the right direction will do quite well. An example:

I write for two articles websites and I had accumulated a reasonably-sized fan base on each. Now, to direct my fans (as well as people reading my articles who weren't my fans) to my new blog, I began going through my articles and at the end of each one I put a link at the bottom to my blog and said things along the lines of "for more helpful articles visit *blog*". If that's what brought you to my articles, don't feel like your the victim of some trick that I employed - I wasn't joking when I said you can go to my blog for more helpful articles!

The point is that fans of online writers are hounds of information - if you promise them more and better information, they'll go where they have to! You'll have to hold up your end of the deal too, so I hope you keep some high-quality articles in reserve before you make promises like this!

 The more places you write, the more you can multiply this effect. It's a simple matter of adding more links at the end of your articles.

Finally, you need to make sure that you repay your fans in one way or the other. The place I like to do this is my blog because your blog will the place where people to truly want to hear from you will go. The way I repay my fans for their readership is by giving them extra content and articles on my blog. Of course, in the future I'll have more things for them like discount codes for eBooks that I've published, etc.

That should be everything you need to know about your fan base, how to make use of them and how to maintain them. Remember to maintain a frequent amount of article posting and if you're planning to leave your blog for vacation, write up a whole bunch of articles and either take a minute every day of your vacation to post them or make an account for someone back at home (someone you trust!) and ask them to post one of your articles every day - give them a list if you want the articles posted in any specific order.

Article Writing Websites For Writers

Starting out in the online writing world, one of the basic things you'll want to get into is article writing because it's a great way to start learning the ropes of online writing and it's a great way to build up a fan base. In a future article I will tell you the advantages a large fan base gives you but until then, think of it as one of the greatest advantages you'll have in the online writing world. After all, writers thrive on readership!

So, starting out with article writing, you'll first need to pick a website to write for. Now, you could write for someone's blog if you'd like but just starting out, it's not much of a good idea at the moment. So, let's list and compare some article writing websites. Some popular ones are:

• Helium
• Triond
• Expertscolumn

The first one, Helium is a combination of revenue sharing and article purchasing. Basically, you can write articles and you can keep your rights over them and get a cut of the revenue that your article generates or you can write an article and sell all your rights over it to the Helium website in exchange for a solid couple of dollars which go into the 10s and 20s. Personally, I have no real love for Helium and have gotten bored of it quite fast but don't let my opinion obstruct this opportunity for you!

The next is Triond. It's a fairly popular article writing website with a lot of audience from the US and UK. Lots of people write for Triond and with the fan/follower system it has, Triond's a great place to start buiding up your readership and fan base so long as you don't mind having to struggle to make a couple of cents. If there's one thing about Triond it's that your first two or three months won't meet much success unless you constantly work on it. The good news is that after you get over the dreaded beginner months, you just need to write frequently (an article or two a day) to start making dollars. All in all, a good place to start for your fan base and since that's a necessity for a writer, go for it.

The next one is Expertscolumn which is gaining popularity every day with writer's thanks to it's more lenient policy which allows you to re-post your articles from other websites under the condition that you wrote it and 85% of the article is your own writing. Because of this, Expertscolumn is frequently used as a base to re-post your already-published articles in an attempt to 'double' your monthly revenue. In my opinion, it's a great website and I get lots of traffic towards my articles. My only qualm about this website is that no matter how many people read my articles, I never seem to make more than 1 - 5 cents per day. Not much in terms of making money but the plus side is that I can use my articles to direct my traffic to my blog, the final destination for all my writing. So in other words, this is where you go to make a crowd and direct it where you need it.

For now, those are all the websites I'm going to be covering. If you want to look into more you can hop on Google and see what you can do at eHow or Associated Content. I'm a little too stuck to my ways to explore them but I definitely encourage writers to do so - if you don't explore an opportunity, you can lose a lot more than you thought of it.

This information should prove useful to you - but in the end it's not the information that counts but how you use it. Good luck, writers!

Why A Writer Should Have A Blog

As a writer, your blog is your home base for all your writing. No matter how many different websites you write articles on, the place you want to ultimately lead people to is your blog because your blog is the point where all your different writer profiles connect and merge as one. Imagine it like this: each article writing website is a base full of people and your blog is your own base where you want to direct people. When you create an account on an article writing website, you've basically created a bridge between that base and your base. At first you have no content in that bridge; it looks ugly and boring. As your put more high quality content in that bridge, it starts looking cleaner and more grand until finally people think it might be a great idea to stop looking at the bridge (reading the articles) and cross over it (go to your main base). The way you do this is by putting your blog link in your article writing profile and at the end of each article, put a link to your blog.

Why Freelance Writers Need A Website

Freelance writing in itself is a business. If you've seen companies that manufacture goods then you'll know that they have stuff like ads, websites, etc. set up for their company. Why? To promote them! Unless and until you promote your business in one way or another it will NEVER be a success. So that brings us down to today's question: Why do freelance writers need a website?

What Is Niche Blogging And Why It's Ideal

If you're a writer and you're thinking of getting into the blogging world, I'd recommend you aim for niche blogging - the best, most favourable type of blogging in my opinion. It shows you as an expert in a certain area (although only your content will reveal just how much of an expert you are) and it's more favourable in terms of traffic and monetization. This is because, due to the fact that your blog is about one subject, people interested in that subject can find your blog and stick to it. In terms of monetization, this is also great because advertisements placed on your blog can be related to the main idea of your blog, unlike general blogs which have articles varying over many different subjects.

Anyways, here's the link to the full article: http://expertscolumn.com/content/what-niche-blogging-and-why-its-ideal

As always, I hope the information it provides you proves valuable.

Pros and Cons Of Writing eBooks For Profit

Nowadays, with freelance writing becoming a rather popular method of earning money online from your house, lot's of freelancers have taken into consideration the idea of becoming authors to eBook series. The idea is a good one but like most ideas it will have its sacrifices/bad points as well. If you want to make your decision a smart one by looking into both the pros and cons rather than blindly going with a decision then you can rely on this article to help you make the decision.

Inspiration Can Strike At Any Time - Keep A Pen Around!

As a writer, you'll always be thinking of new ideas for articles, blog posts, eBooks, etc. Even when you're not consciously searching for your next piece of inspiration, it can be triggered at any time; due to something you see, or a sudden thought that pops into your head because of something that's occurred around you like something you heard. I've experienced this loads of times and honestly, I'm fed up with how many great ideas I lose because I never have any writing material down.

How To Drive Traffic To Your Articles

As a little follow up to my last post for beginners (although even pros can use this advice too), I created an article that teaches you various methods of getting mass traffic at each of your own articles, therefore increasing your readership/fan base as well as increasing your revenue - since most of you probably write articles for money anyways. You can read the complete article at http://expertscolumn.com/content/how-drive-traffic-your-articles

Yes, I know it seems slightly tedious and annoying that I insist on giving you links rather than the whole article  right here on the blog but I believe that it keeps my blog posts short and sweet while keeping the whole mess of the article on an entirely different page. Enjoy! Keep in mind that if you'd like to read other articles that I've written (that are not related to writing), you can visit the 'Other Articles' page of the blog.

Things New Article Writers Should Know

Being new to the article writing world is hard enough, with all the different methods of traffic gain you have to undertake to make your articles a hit, all the conventions and expectations that no one told you about, etc.

Thinking back on my first two months at article writing, I know I had to do a lot of research to keep up with the other competitors (when you're writing articles, you have to compete against everyone) which is why I've writting this little lifeline of an article to help newbies get on their feet and make a run for the lead right from the start. You can find the article over here http://expertscolumn.com/content/things-new-article-writers-should-know

For convenience, you can find every article I've ever written at my writer profiles:
https://www.triond.com/users/ThatTeenageWriter
and
http://expertscolumn.com/users/thatteenagewriter

Hopefully, this information will put a lot of new writers on the right track and get them straight to writing like a pro.