Follow these 7 steps to blogging success

As of October 2006, there were 57 million blogs tracked by Technorati, but its sad to say that a majority of the blogs out there are not achieving as much traffic as they wish they can. How do you change that?

Do you have a blog or plan to start blogging? Is your blog achieving the amount of success that you have wished for? If not, here are 7 steps to follow to make sure you are maximizing your blog towards success!

1. Write about something you are passionate about

Especially if it is your first blog, it is important that you write something that you are passionate about – this is to ensure that you have a smooth flow of ideas to write. It is often easy to start with a few posts, on any topic, but if you are not truly passionate about your topic, you will start to find that it gets harder and harder to keep blogging!

2. Write regularly

If you are serious about marketing your blog, you need to commit time to your blog. Blogs are favored by search engine for one reason – they are updated very regularly. For a start, it might be good to build up the content in your blog by posting at least twice a day. After the first month of frantic posting, you can revert to a regular schedule, and this can be from anything to a minimum of twice a week. Anything less than twice a week will not make your blog enticing enough for readers (of course, unless your blog is tagged to the development of a piece of software, for example)

3. Write in the language you talk

The key thing attraction about blogs is that you can write just about anything and everything, and what brings readers back again and again is the style of writing. Most bloggers write in their own voice. So instead of “Seeing that the situation requires attention, I immediately picked up the phone and called security”, you can write in a more first person and exciting tone like “I thought the situation was getting out of hand, so I called security”. You can feel free to use all the “I”, and “me”!

4. Ask questions to encourage discussion

Blogs are not only about instant publishing, but also about conversation. One way of doing this is to present several perspectives and alternative to a problem and pose a question at the end of your blog post – literally as if there is someone waiting on the other end for question. Readers will tend to comment more, if you just ask.

5. Use media

With the widespread availability of broadband networks, many Internet users are now not limited to the 56K download speed. Things are moving towards interactivity, audio, and video. Go ahead and publish a podcast or stream a video from your blog. Different media will help to keep your readers awake!

6. Make your blog readable

I have come across some blogs which have a super cluttered layout, with ad smacked thoughout the top fold of the page. While it has been said that most users do not scroll after the first fold, it sometimes really turn people (like me) off when I see ads splattered everywhere, so do note your blog layout.

Another point to not to make your blog more readable is to have subtitles for your posts. People like to read in chunks. Long paragraphs of text turn people off.

7. Link, link and link

I have talked to some friends who blog, and they are worried that by linking out to other blogs or articles, you are effectively sending away your visitors. While this is true to a certain extent, bloggers also need to note that the whole blogosphere is a world of giving.

It is only when you give a link to a fellow blogger, that he or she will take notice of you – and who knows, if you have established a good relationship with some bloggers, whenever in the future you post a particularly good article, you will find people linking to you! Link out and people will link back – that is how the blogosphere (and the web) is run!

For more great tips on blog marketing, check out Kian Ann’s Blog Marketing Tips at Blogopreneur.com