Top 10 Things Ive Learned About Blogging In 2006
September 21, 2006 – 4:38 pmby Darren
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I’ve been blogging heavy in 2006, and have learned quite a few things. I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the lessons I’ve mastered this year, and what I think is important to blogging. Hopefully you’ll take the time to add your thoughts in the comments section.
1) Focus on what you’re doing.
This tends to be good advice for blogging, or for just about everything else. You need to devote a great deal of attention to a blog, and you have to be an expert on the subject. If you aren’t, you end up lagging behind bloggers with better credentials. Focus makes you do the things necessary to succeed.
2) Go for a subject that has a ton of demand.
I’ll make this easy: go for popular subjects that have huge demand, if you plan on earning money from blogging. The reason is obvious. The more people out there actively searching for you information on the subject, the higher the traffic volume and the higher the inventory of ads. These factors combine to create revenue opportunities.
3) Start a dialogue with readers of your blog.
The easiest way to get page views to increase on your blog is to talk with the people who visit. They come back and respond and your number rise naturally. This gives you a good sense of feedback, and helps both your confidence and your circulation numbers.
4) Social networking traffic is basically non-productive for blogs.
For the most part, social bookmarking traffic remains unproductive. I guess it costs little to submit, and the link may show up in backlink totals, so go for it. But don’t let this type of traffic become too big of a part of your daily stats, because it may have a negative impact on your Adsense numbers.
5) Comment in other blogs and create relationships with other bloggers.
This is a must, and something you have to do from the very start of your blogging efforts. Go around and make yourself known in the “neighborhood” you’re in on the internet. Anything you can do to collaborate with others is bound to have a good result on your website traffic, by having qualified bloggers send you much-needed traffic.
6) Always do your best to link to sources.
Don’t slack on this one. Always link directly to sources of ideas and pictures. Don’t be selfish and try to “hoard” something. The act of linking to others is what helps search engines determine the content of your blog. If you link to quality sources, they recognize your link, and the search engines give you a bonus for being on topic.
7) Link bait takes a lot of work.
You need to get links into your blog from the outside world. Everyone knows this, so the game becomes one of attracting the right kinds of links. That means you have to write at least a few seminal articles that make your blog stand out from the crowd.
Blogging is very conducive to solid search engine rankings.
Blogs tend towards ranking well in search engines. There shouldn’t be a ton of work you have to do in order to garner SERPs attention. If you update often, and add a lot of content, your blog will both attract links and get good search rankings. The main thing bloggers need to do is write great content in order to be ranked.
9) Hardly anyone will agree with your viewpoint, so write posts based on your beliefs.
You aren’t really in the business of having everyone agree with you. Some people read blogs in order to get a well balanced view of the world. Be open and honest with your feelings, but be respectful of people. That’s all anyone can expect of you.
10) What everyone tells you: “there’s an A-List of bloggers”. What they don’t tell you: the “A” sometimes stands for a-holes.
There’s a lot of blogs “on the top” you’re expected to check out and automatically admire. So many people do, that most of the blogosphere is now an “echo chamber”. Try and go outside of the A-list echo chamber for your reading and linking. There’s a ton of blogs that aren’t well known that are extremely impressive.
What have you learned about blogging in 2006?
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8 Responses to “Top 10 Things Ive Learned About Blogging In 2006”
I learned alot about blogging in 2006, so I blogged it as well! Glad to read what you learned Darren.
By TechZ on Sep 22, 2006
I learned that the saying ‘Slow and steady wins the race’ is very much applicable to blogging.
By Satish on Sep 22, 2006
After 6 months of professional blogging, the only thing important to me now is to try to provide quality content everyday. If any blogger can write good content on a daily basis he will get the blessing of Google sooner rather than later. So, I guess quick and steady wins the race.
By Razib Ahmed on Sep 23, 2006
You are so on the money.
By jf on Sep 23, 2006
Great post.
I’m certainly no pro blogger. For me, it looks like it will be slow and steady. I can’t be able to write on a daily basis. My pace is a few posts a week and it’s a pattern and pace that is what I find works. Too many posts gets me burnt out and too few will be not enough for my readers.
I hope that I’ll keep plugging away for a while, even if my topic isn’t of great demand, but at least it’s something I enjoy writing about and there’s some audience. So my target isn’t as high. I just want to achieve a level where I don’t have to worry about paying for the hosting fees.
By May C on Sep 26, 2006
May C,
Thanks for the comments. There isn’t a single niche out there where you can’t make a profit. I’m sure you’ll exceed the hosting fees.
By Darren on Sep 27, 2006
I’ve been learning a lot about numbers 5 and 7. The participation really makes a huge difference, not just in traffic, but in the connections you build with other bloggers. As for number 7, if you’re serious about blogging, it takes much more time than you would think at first. Thanks for the article!
By Ray Dotson on Sep 28, 2006
Thanks for reading Ray,
The participation is everything. People commenting stops a blog from looking dead. The more people talking, the more likely new people are to want to contribute and the more likely the blogger is to want to keep on blogging.
A circle of benevolence, I’d call it.
By Darren on Sep 28, 2006