How to build a successful blog

A blog, a term derived from web log, is a collection of thoughts or analyses on a topic or topics of the person running the blog.

There are now tens of blogs started every minute of the day. This obviously means it is now a crowded market, which makes it all the more important that a blog is good enough to stand out from the crowd.

In the yesteryear, well, actually not that long ago, but when blogs first started appearing on the internet in the 1990's, they were often a simple a collection of thoughts from individuals, often on the daily happenings in their lives. No matter how dreary, they were often compulsive reading, something I guess, typifying our big brother culture.

Commercialization of blogging

However, more recently, blogs have become much more commercial with topics that have greater commercial value. People have started to realise blogs, especially popular ones, can make substantial money for the proprietor from advertising revenue.

In theory, the more popular a blog the greater its value to advertisers as they have a greater concentration of mass in terms of users and, therefore, greater opportunity to expose their products and services to the visitors on those blogs. In terms of pay per click advertising, higher traffic is likely to mean greater number of clicks.

There are certain characteristics that are shared by popular blogs no matter which topic(s) they cover.

•  Provide free information

People love something for nothing. If you provide regular advice and helpful tips on your blog about something, then it is likely to draw regular visitors. Free helpful information - even if it's a collection of links to other sites/blogs can still attract lots of visitors. The key here is to find such information on a regular basis to attract a lot of repeat visitors.

This will also result in increase in popularity of your blog through natural linking – the equivalent of marketing through word of mouth. Links, especially on other high traffic sites or blogs about your blog will lead to a steady stream of traffic from these links, but they will also boost your search engine rankings because major search engines put a lot of weight onto natural linking patterns.

•  Free downloads and tutorials

One certain way to attract large traffic is to either provide tutorials that people find extremely useful which they will link to, or providing free downloads of useful tools. These tools can be anything such as web tools for people to develop their sites and blogs or help to improve the quality of offerings on their sites or blogs, free financial tools to help people better analyse their income and expenditure, etc.

Also, it greatly improves your reputation on the Internet as so many people start recommending your blog. Of course, with so many people linking to your site, which acts as a “vote” for your blog from everyone linking to you, the search engines will take that as an affirmation that your blog is of great value and move your rankings higher.

•  Daily commentary

Commenting daily on interesting stories on different subject matters is a good way to draw traffic. Making interesting observations on them together with a link to their original source is a great way to capture regular readers. Lets face it, most of us like to catch up on daily news, but today, we do it in different ways to gone days before when we all sat around our television set.

•  Providing great analysis

Another way to draw a lot of repeat visitors is to provide great analysis on latest news and big stories that are in development on the topics covered on your blog. The analysis has to really stand out. You have to convey yourself to your readers almost as an expert i.e. an authority on the subject matter, which of course acts like a magnet for visitors. So, providing a unique perspective will always have people coming for more.

•  Cover unique and funny stories

People love entertaining themselves when they are browsing the internet. This is why entertainment sites tend to draw a lot of traffic. A blog with lots of funny clips and jokes tend to become big hits because they tend to get linked on lots of other sites.

•  Be controversial

One way to attract attention through your posts is to be shocking by posting something controversial that gets noticed.

Getting the initial traffic

Enough of the type of ways to devise the content now lets focus on the steps to make a blog off and running.

•  Blog link exchange

A blog should exchange link s with other similar blogs, especially if they are highly complementary and have similar levels of traffic. It is unlikely that a blog owner with a lot of traffic would be too keen in exchanging links with someone who has far less traffic, as it would not be deemed mutually beneficial to both parties.

•  Buying high traffic links

You can also advertise by buying text links on monthly campaigns on other blogs or sites with high levels of traffic. However, this tends to be an option used mostly by site owners rather bloggers.

•  Promoting a blog in forums

A good way to promote a blog is to go on forums. The idea is to make informative or/and helpful posts in forums dealing with similar topics to those covered in your blog. By making useful posts, you can leave live a link back to your blog in the signature or somewhere in the post, if allowed, of course. This is a widely used technique to draw traffic to a blog.

• Posting a link on other blogs

You can also reply to comments on other blogs that have a similar theme to your blog. You can leave a link to your blog so long as the comments you make are both productive and not written merely with the intention of getting traffic to your own blog.