13 Secrets Of Successful Bloggers

Over the past week I have been busy working on various changes to my blogs. You know it takes time to reach the desired perfection you wish for your blog. When you do it well, you improve your skills and feel fulfilled.

In my blogging career, I am very happy to have met with great people who had taught me tips on getting ahead. Some of what I learnt from them is what I have been bringing to you in my posts so that you too can leverage on their knowledge to become a master and above all swell your bank account.

Sharing your knowledge with others is a great way to express yourself and ad value to
other people’s lives.

My mentor who will be sharing winning tips with you today is Ant Onat. You will learn 13 steps to successful blogging so easily that you will be instantly motivated to take the vital step to your eldorado.

Blogs can be a very marketable and very profitable tool if used correctly. Profiting from blogs is just a matter of grabbing the attention of an audience and not doing any actual salesmen selling. In this article you will learn the 13 most essential steps to successful blogging.

1) Where to start?

You should begin your blog with a free blog hosting service such as Journal Home or Blogger. Starting with a free blog hosting service allows you to begin blogging instantly without having any advance knowledge of scripts, hosting, or programming. It allows you to focus on your content and not the internal maintenance of the blog. The best benefit of starting with a free service is, in the case your blog doesn't become successful you do not lose any money or are you left holding the bill. The great thing about a blog is that they are organized in chronological order, your latest entry is displayed first. When your blog traffic grows greatly and you are ready to upgrade to your own domain then you can simply make your last blog entry the announcement of your "move". Simply add a last entry stating that your blog has "moved" and type the new blog URL address. Which directs visitors to your new blog site, keeping your following, without a major inconvenience to anyone. Upgrade as you need to...but only when you need to!

2) Niche

A niche is a targeted product, service, or topic. You should first decide on a product, service, or topic which interest you. Choose an area which you can enthusiastically write about on a daily basis. You can use keyword research services like Google Zeitgeist or Yahoo! Buzz Index to find popular searched topics. It does NOT matter if your topic is popular as long as there is a audience for your topic and the topic is precisely focused then your blog should be successful. Anything can be considered a niche as long as it has a target audience no matter how large or how small the audience is. A blog about your cat can be a niche or a blog about the species of the cat family can be a larger niche market, if there are people who are interested in hearing about your cat or the species of the cat family...you can even choose to build your audience for a market which an audience does not exist, but first you must build your blog.

3) Update Daily (nothing less)

This step is a must and not a suggestion. Updating your blog daily not only keeps your blog more interesting to readers, but it also gives your blog fresh content on a day to day making it more appealing to search engines. Not updating your blog on an occasional holiday or one day here and there is understandable to most, but missing days at a time or weeks is unacceptable and will most likely result in your blog being unsuccessful. To keep your blog traffic and retain your visitors interest it is a must to update your blog daily with multiple entries. You should try to update your blog everyday with at least 3 or more daily entries. The best way to accomplish this is to set aside 1-2 hours a day for tending to your blog and adding new entries. It may even be wise to schedule a set time which you dedicate to your blog each day. Give yourself work hours and treat your blog as a job, what happens if you don't come to work for days or weeks...you lose money or worse you get fired! Same applies here...if you don't update your blog for days or weeks you'll lose visitors.

4) Traffic

It's no secret. You must have traffic to profit from blogs. There are numerous ways to build traffic. Paid advertising, free advertising, viral marketing, search engine marketing, RSS/XML feeds, and word-of-mouth. You should always use your blog URL address in the signature of your email, forum discussions, message boards, or any other communication media. You should submit your blog URL address to search engines and blog directories. You should submit your RSS/XML URL feed to blog ping services like Technorati, Ping-O-Matic, and Blogdigger. You should confidently share your blog with family, friends, co-workers, associates, and business professionals when it relates. Many blogs can be considered as a collection of articles, for this purpose you should submit your blog entries (those that are valuable and lengthy articles) to content syndicators like GoArticles.com or ArticleCity.com. Once submitted your articles can be picked up and published by others. The trick is to make sure you include your Blog URL address in the "About the Author" passage. What this does is create link popularity and backlinks for your blog, when someone picks up your article from the syndication then publish the article on their website the "About the Author" passage is included with each publication and the link you included is followed, crawled, and indexed by search engines. Imagine if your article is popular enough or controversial enough to produce 10,000 publications across the web. The search engines is bound to find your site in no time with that many publications and credit you a authority on the topic, in return increasing your rank on search engines. The small effort of writing a well written article is rewarding. You should try to write at least 1 full length article every week for syndication and submit your article to at least 10 article syndicators.

5) Track Your Blog

How do you know if your blog has traffic? Just because no one is leaving comments doesn't mean your blog isn't growing. Many visitors do not leave comments but they are returning visitors. I know it sounds crazy but with blogs people are more interested in what "you" have to say! Many visitors do not comment their 1st, 2nd, or 3rd time. Some do not comment at all, but are active daily visitors.

Tracking your blog does not have to be overly sophisticated usually a simple free page counter like StatCounter.com or Active Meter will do the trick. Install (copy/paste) the code into the html of your blog template and start tracking your visitors. Its better to use a service which gives you advanced traffic analysis, such as keyword tracking information, referral information, and search engine information. Visitors, returning visitors, and unique visitors should be standard for any page counter service you choose.

6) Listen to Your Audience

When using the proper page counter you should begin to see how others are finding your blog and if through search engines then which keywords are being used to find your blog. If constantly your blog is being found by 1 or more keywords then focus your blog around those keywords to make it even more powerful. When writing entry titles and entries use the keywords as often as possible while keeping the blog legible and interesting.

7) Multiple blogs

Use multiple blogging accounts to attract more people. This means you should have a blog with JournalHome.com, Blogger.com, LiveJournal.com, Blog-City.com, tBlogs.com, etc. The more blog accounts the better. You can copy/paste from 1 blog to all others. Having different blog accounts is like having a publication in different newspapers. This enables you to attract more visitors and this also increases the chance that 1 of your blogs will be in the search engine results for your focused keywords.

8) Short & Concise

Aside from the lengthy article a week for syndication and publication your blog entries should be short & concise (if you can help it). Sometimes there are exceptions to the rule and you have no choice but to blog lengthy entries, but try to avoid this as much as possible. You do not want your blog entries to become hours of reading. Visitors like to easily find information and skim through your entries. It is good to be detailed and provide useful information, but do not include useless information or run away sentences that veer away from your topic.

9) Digital Art

Try to include non-advertising graphics, pictures, photos, and art in your blog entries. Not too much. Once a week is fine. Graphics can sometimes bring your blog to life. Of course, the content of the blog is the most important aspect and you do not want to overshadow your content with graphics, but displaying graphics can add a bit of spice to the blog. Be choosy about your graphics and make sure they fit your entry topic. You should add content with the graphic, at least a caption. Original graphics, photos, pictures, and art is recommended.

10) Keep it Personal

A blog is most successful when it is kept personal. Try to include personal experiences which relates to the topic of your blog entry. Stay away from the business style of writing. Write with a more personal style and use first-person narratives. Do not write any of your entries as sales letters, instead share product reviews and personal endeavors.

11) Interact With Your Visitors

You now have the traffic you deserve. You should begin interacting with your visitors. Create a regular theme such as: "Monday Money Tip" or "Picture of the Week" which entices your readers to look forward to each week.

Give your readers advance notice about a product, service, or topic which you are going to review and then talk about later. If the President was scheduled to give a speech then in your blog you should state that you "will discuss the speech and give your opinion after the speech airs. Comments will be appreciated".

Try your best to find exclusive information that not many have. Do not disclose any confidential or secret information which is deemed illegal or can potentially get you into trouble, but try to get the scoop before everyone else does. Such as: If your blog was about Paris Hilton (the socialite) and you had a blog entry about "Paris Hilton Getting Married" then it would be interesting to your readers if you had a actual picture of Paris Hilton engagement ring. Give your best effort to dig and search the internet for exclusive information and you will possibly come up with something useful. Your readers will appreciate this and they show their appreciation through word-of-mouth referrals. Imagine how many readers will tell their friends, family, and others about information they only can find at your blog.

12) Make Money

Once your blog has gained some real momentum and your blog traffic is increasing then it is time to start thinking about turning your traffic into profit. You should use contextual advertising, like Google Adsense or Chitika. Contextual advertising is usually text links which use the content of your blog to publish targeted ads on your blog. The payout is usually based on a pay-per-click model, meaning for ever click an ad receives you are paid a small percentage of the profits. In addition to contextual advertising it is good to also use graphical advertising such as: BlogAds.com, Amazon.com, MammaMedia, or General Sponsored Advertising.

13) You're a Professional

You're a professional now! What are you still doing with that free blog hosting service? It is time to upgrade to a domain hosted solution. You need to get a web host and choose a domain name for your blog then check its availability. Select the blogging software you wish to use, such as: Squarespace.com, WordPress.org, MovableType.org, etc. When you have your new blog domain setup and ready for traffic then it is time for you to announce your move on all your previous blog accounts. Your last entry to the blog should be a "move" announcement. The title should be "Moved" and the blog entry should state something like "Old Blog has been moved to New Blog please follow and bookmark this link for future reference: http://www.YourNewBlogDomainName.com". This way all returning visitors and new readers should not have any problem finding your new blog domain.

At the level of a professional blogger you may want to team up with 1 or more other bloggers. This will create a more interesting and more powerful blog. The old saying "two heads is better than one", more authors mean more advertising and exposure because each author will have a vested interest in the blog. The idea of a team blog is to make it profitable and rewarding for all authors, while continuing to target the blog topic and keeping the blog interesting for visitors.

Following these blogging techniques should make your blogging experience much more rewarding. There is no guarantee that your blog will become popular or a household name, but the effort should at least put you one step closer. Making money online is not an overnight experience like many may think, but making money online is definitely a foreseeable possibility. As well, growing popularity on the web is not an overnight experience, but through time, dedication, and persistence you will be rewarded with all the royalties of blogging.
About the Author
Ant Onaf is the owner and founder of www.JournalHome.com He is an online internet marketer, content writer, and IT consultant. Ant Onaf has years of IT-related experience and Internet-related experience. His ingenuity, dedication, and passion for technology, internet marketing, & writing have made him a monumental icon in the World Wide Web. His

How To Use Social Sites To Drive Traffic To Your Blog

There are some blogging truths you need to discover as you commit more of your time to digging out the skills that will open your eyes to how top fliers drive massive traffic to their blogs. Please remember that you can make money without getting people in numbers to read or view your blog.
What has social or bookmarking sites got to do with your blog traffic? That is what you will find in this article culled from blogging truth.com

'Social Bookmarking (adding your sites to bookmarking sites like Digg) sometimes known as SB in short is one of the biggest traffic generators to the blogs.
They help in following ways : -
Wide Exposure - Your posts after being added to social bookmarking sites like Indianpad, Digg would show your posts to a large audience who would come to know about your blog.So this is a big exposure and way of getting new feed subscribers & traffic.

Direct Traffic - If your article is good enough & few people vote for it, then that would bring you a bunch of traffic to your blog which can help improve Alexa ranking which is crucial. You know the sites/links which get enough vote in Digg.com to appear in front page get about 50000+ unique visits per day if they stay in homepage for sufficient time.

Good Backlinks - Many social bookmarking sites like Digg provide quality backlinks as they are the one very much liked by Google and usually come at top of searches. indirectly you get google juice as a part of SEO and organic traffic from Google search. Also search engine ranking of your blogs increase due to lot of incoming links. Still you have to remember that not all bookmarking sites pass Google Juice to links. StumbleUpon which is much known for targeted traffic it provides has all the links in nofollow so does not pass PR or SERP.

How To Boost Blog’s Traffic & Exposure : -

Select Social Bookmarking Sites According To Niche - Some bookmarking sites like Digg are general and don’t comply to any niche. So posting your top blog posts there would bring traffic. one advice is never post all your articles there as either they may ban your site due to spam or you and your articles may not be liked by Diggers who would bury your items instead of digging. For General news, entertainment news,Hollywood etc the bookmarking sites are Digg, Indianpad,BestOfIndya (Indian entertainment niche) and at last but not the least my own social bookmarking site Urlpix.Com which may be new but gets good traffic as it is well promoted.

Not All Bookmarking Sites - I’ve seen many professionals give service like submitting your site to 50,75,100 etc bookmarking sites but we have to remember that they may provide backlinks but not traffic. Sites like Digg.com where the users vote for articles provide real traffic & more votes->more traffic. But bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us are meant to share & store links/bookmarks online. If many people would save your article then chances are there you may appear at their homepage which consists of most saved articles, but that is very difficult for content sites like blog. So you should not waste time by submitting to those sites where each article does not get exposure at instant but in social bookmarkings like Digg your articles would appear on upcoming news to be digged & taken upwards.

Submit Best Posts Only - Submit best of your posts to these bookmarking sites but for bookmarking sites like Indianpad.com, Urlpix.com you can submit all your posts regularly as they would provide good traffic.
Keep Submitting Everything Before Your Blog gets Popular - one thing i marked is after you keep on submitting good posts to these bookmarking sites, you would get a bigger audience - more daily traffic, more feed subscribers after few days even tough you don’t submit any more to those bookmarking sites. this is because your site has got good exposure & hence something like a buzz is spread to many potential readers.

Stumble Rumble - StumbleUpon is more a social networking than bookmarking where you share a link(may be some of your top blog posts) but it is made in a way where people visit your site if interested and traffic is targeted to your content(you should use appropriate tags while submiting)'.

Top 10 Ways To Make Your Blog Popular

Popularity counts. If you want to really make it as a blogger, there is the necessity to popularize your blog. Different people have several techniques they use to make their blogs popular. In this post, i will reveal top 10 ways to make your blog popular so that more people can know about your blog. This concept alone is capable of multiplying your income overnight.

1. Post A Comment-Don't be surprised that i'm making this the first technique to adopt in order to popularize your blog. Get to visit the blogs of others on the internet. Find out more about them and leave a kind comment as a post on their form. By so doing, it will be easy for you to sign out with the signature of your blog address. Readers who find your comment attractive can visit your blog to know more about you.

2. Put Your Post To Work-Sites like www.adbrite.com gives the opportunity to use inline adds in your blog. This will stand you out of the crowd with a great potential for high income.

3. Pay For Review-You can enter paid review programs like the one offered by www.blogitive.com When others write about you, more people gets to know about you.

4. Join A Blog Contest-I never knew how good this method could be until i joined a blog contest recently. Apart from the popularity you get, your creativity is enhanced and you stand to benefit from the voters who leave a comment on your blog. You cannot see yourself better than how others see you.

5. Offer A Contest-Invite your readers to enter for a contest and offer a grand prize. This will stimulate participation and huge response from visitors who are likely to become your fanatical fans.

6. Write For Others-Don't forget that you are writer. Submitting articles to other webmasters is more likely to increase your traffic flow. I personally enjoy the service offered by www.ezinearticles.com

7. Make Your Posts Unique-Let your posts be a unique expression of your personality. Be original and independent.

8. Ping Your Posts-You will need to register with technorati for instant announcement of your posts to the online community. This allow your fans to get fresh stories instantly from your blog. The service is available at www.technorati.com

9. Stumble Upon-This is a social bookmarking site. You dare not underestimate the popularity you can enjoy by signing up free at www.stumbleupon.com

10. Link To Other Blogs-You can get to be seen when you link with other blogs that offers complementary service to yours.

Most people keep on adopting new techniques to make their blogs popular. If you adopts any of these 10 ways, you may just be on your way to mind blowing popularity and profits.