by Jennifer Laycock - It’s no secret that the pack mentality that often powers social media success can also turn into an angry mob complete with virtual pitchforks at the drop of a hat. That’s great when the mob is…
Blogging has been proven and advised to attract large quantities of visitors, readers and, possibly, customers. Whatever your reason to blog is, follow these proven techniques from the experts to become a successful blogger.
Most beginner bloggers think that blogging is easy. It is, on the surface. However, you may want to know that:
But most importantly, the more you put in your blog in terms of time and efforts, the better it becomes and the more popular it becomes with time. If you just sit and wait, it won’t help 
So be patient and work hard to become successful.
To actually provide value to your readers, you need to know what you are talking about. For that, you can either learn things yourself or, if you are already a professional, provide absolutely useful tips for your readers.
Being in the expert in your field, you are likely to know
If you don’t, you’d rather learn all the points above before writing. All this will help you create better and more useful content for your audience.
Whatever you do, the time will pass anyway. So if you want to achieve something, you gotta do it now, not later.
If you are slow, you may as well forget the interesting idea you had and you’ll become overrun with the new issues before you can write about it.
If anything, save an idea or a post draft for future use.
If you want plenty of unique, quality content for your blog to get visitors and links to get more visitors, you need to start now and write a lot.
You don’t have to publish often, but you need to write often to use your time effectively and create better posts. In my experience, writing a post for at least two days increases its quality a lot. A week is better.
As you write a lot and jot dow your ideas, you will sometimes find that you don’t have more thoughts to add to the post. Save it, but don’t publish it. Saving drafts is useful, because:
As you can see, carefully organizing your writing and publishing schedule can help you not only produce better, more useful posts, but to provide a consitent flow of reading material for your readers.
Simply linking to a news story makes little sense, if the Web is already buzzing about it. You’ll provide greater value to your readers, if you write about something that no one has written about.
Of course, if you think that some subject is not well covered, you can build an awesome resource (hopefully, timeless) to attract a large number of visitors.
The quantity doesn’t necessarily come from the number of posts, but from their size. Well-researched posts, resource lists and so on are a good start.
Admittedly, post formatting becomes ultimately important here, so you need to use short sentences/paragraphs, lists and subheadings to make things easy to read.
I find that a well researched, thoughtful (and useful) post is much more interesting to the public. It also gets much more traffic and links, but that’s another story.
Interchanging concise posts with large posts will give:
This will help your readers read what you have written, bookmark, share or link to your posts.
For example, posts that:
tend to do good with the people, because they can be easily absorbed and shared.
If you want your people to understand what you are writing, you need to use the simplest language you can write in. This will help people read and understand the article, so they could share it.
Online, people can’t see each other and they can only trust by what they read. If you address your readers as you address friends, they will become to know you better and start trusting you, which will turn them into more loyal readers.
Title is the first thing your readers read and it may be the only thing, if the title isn’t compelling enough. Stick to the title writing formulas to craft mind-blowing headlines.
Though some may say that you need to write for the search engines to get search engine ranking, this is largely false.
You can write as you want, for the people, because:
If you want your posts to be read to the end, you not only need to write for your readers, but format the text in short paragraphs, sentences, bullet lists and subheadings.
You want your readers to read all the posts on your blog. For this, you need to link to the posts from the one you are writing now: it will not only get you more readership, but will also help your blog to rank well with the search engines (use call to action and relevant words in the link text).
If you link to
you not only show a broader perspective to your readers and help them understand your point of view from the linked to articles, but you also provide them with quality content they can read.
Once your audience starts reading the posts, articles or visiting sites you link to, the people will be grateful for more useful information and websites.
Though people often read blogs for fun or entertainment, mostly, they have a problem to solve. Identify the problem and help your readers solve it. That’s how your posts will become useful.
By reading related blogs, you will find:
All this will help you provide better content, have more people to share or bounce off your ideas.
As you read blogs, you’ll find more people that write about what interests you and your readers. You can talk about the subject in the post comments and most likely, the blog author will come to your blog and comment, too.
If your content is good enough, these blog owners will link to you, too.
By doing all of the above, you get noticed among the people in your industry and establish your authority. This will
Since visibility and authority is your most valuable asset (along with trust), you can later build something more useful and interesting on it, using your readership to promote/test/improve your new venture.
If you want your ideas and posts to spread, you may want to have the following in mind:
No one “sends” an idea unless:
they understand it they want it to spread they believe that spreading it will enhance their power (reputation, income, friendships) or their peace of mind the effort necessary to send the idea is less than the benefits No one “gets” an idea unless:
the first impression demands further investigation they already understand the foundation ideas necessary to get the new idea they trust or respect the sender enough to invest the time
So, basically, besides having useful posts, you may want to make it really easy to share your stories.
Additionally, you can use various social bookmarking buttons, like the ones you see under this post, to remind people to bookmark the post and share it with others on the sites they frequent. Needless to say, the sites need to be targeted at your audience (such as Sphinn for Internet marketers, for example).
If you want to:
then you need to take part in the social sites that match your blog topic. For example, for bloggers (Internet marketers, SEOs, web designers, usability professionals, etc), you can try:
One social network I particularly like is StumbleUpon. It rocks, because:
As you take part in the social networks, more and more people, whose interests match yours and the topic of your blog, start visiting your blog. They may very well add your posts to the social networks, because they like it and know you from the social site (you are online friends, remember?)
Note: participating in social networks, because it is fun, is vastly different from submitting all of your stories to the site. The best way to socialize is to contribute useful posts and articles that you find around the web.
If you truly think that your post is worth sharing (you should get the feeling about a great post, if not, improve it), you may want to
Note: this only works if your post is astounding, like the post about the titles linked to above. Only do what you feel right, otherwise you’ll ruin your reputation by spamming your friends, industry experts and social sites.
For example, if you have a post about blogging, you can catch the train with the 31 Days Group Writing Project (that only runs in August) at ProBlogger and submit your post to the project.
How easily your readers read and navigate around your blog can really help your visitors read your posts. For example, you can:
Your site may have other interesting features to keep your readers happy:
Knowing all the important moments in mind will help you start building a greater blog from the beginning, bringing you well deserved readers, recognition and, possibly, profit.
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In the world of Web building, an opportunity to develop/code something quickly is a rare occasion. Mostly, you need to spend hours on research, planning and implementation (unless you code with CSS 
).
Here’s yet another thing you can do in a couple of minutes to help search engines index your site better, so you could get more traffic within a week or two by 5-15%.
- “What?”
- “Ca-no-ni-ca-lization/canon-ica-lization/canonic-a-liz-ation issues.”
It is when your website can be accessed with www and without www in front of it (such as improvetheweb.com and www.improvetheweb.com) and you, the visitors and the search engines are not redirected to only one version.
To the visitors, this doesn’t matter a lot, unless they prefer to identify website addresses with ‘www’ or without (there are pros and cons of either approach).
The issue is that for the search engines, both versions are two different versions of the website, because the search engines index URLs, not websites as a whole.
As the search engines see two websites, the number of pages with the same content doubles. As your visitors link to either of the versions randomly, both of them will have average amount of links.
Of course, the search engines will show one of the versions, but they will only count links that point to one of the versions, to which a specific page belongs to.
For example, if the page is http://improvetheweb.com/overdeliver, the search engines will count links that point to this page - most likely from the http://improvetheweb.com domain and sites that linked to that URL.
For the search engines to take into account all the links that point to your website (such as http://www.improvetheweb.com and http://improvetheweb.com), you need to redirect visitors and the search engines from one version to another.
Thus, the search engines won’t be taking into account all your naturally acquired links and won’t be showing your pages high in the SERPs as they rightfully deserve.
By redirect the search engines to only one version of the site, we confirm their suspicion that we only have only one version of the website (not two different sites with similar content).
This way, they treat links to both www and non-www versions as links to one website and thus, which ever version you redirect to, gets a boost of incoming link value from the redirected version.
That’s why you’ll get more visitors from the search engines, which will lead to more customers, links and profit within a week or two (Google, others may be slower) by 10-15% (the speed relates to how fast the search engines react to the redirect and whether the version you redirect to is fully indexed).
If the version you are redirecting to is not indexed for one reason or another (except outright ban), you’ll need to wait while Google and other SEs index the site and start taking all links into account.
This may take a week more or longer, depending on how large your site is. In this case, and if the version you are redirecting from is stronger (has more links), you may notice a slight drop of traffic, which will later return to normal and start increasing.
Even though the search engines tell us only to do what is right for the visitors and want us to ask ourselves “would I do it if the search engines didn’t exist?”, this particular improvement is designed to specifically help the search engines understand how our website works, also bringing more search engine visitors to the website.
Naturally, you need to only have one version by redirecting one of the site versions to another.
If you want a shorter domain and your customers will be able to memorize and identify your address with the web, then you can go without www.
However, if you want to make it clear that the address belongs to the Web, use the www version.
Opinions split on which one to use, really.
To redirect from one version to another, you either need to edit your httpd.conf file, if you use a dedicated server, or update your .htaccess file in the root of the domain.
Ron Carnell suggests using two blocks in the httpd.conf file:
‹VirtualHost 192.xxx.xxx.xxx>
ServerName domain.com
DocumentRoot /home/domain/www
‹/VirtualHost>
‹VirtualHost 192.xxx.xxx.xxx>
ServerName www.domain.com
Redirect 301 / http://domain.com/
‹/VirtualHost>
Basically, you only need to insert the correctly tweaked code in the corresponding part of your httpd.conf file (make sure you back it up first).
Please note that if you go this route, you’ll need to tweak both parts, if one of the details changes.
If you are not familiar with the terminology and the whole process of fiddling with the Apache server, you’d rather designate this to your web admin.
If you read what Ron Carnell has said about this issue (you really should), you’ll gain more insight why and how this is done.
But if you don’t control the server, you can use the three lines of code:
How to redirect to www from non-www version:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com [nc]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
(replace yourdomain.com with your domain)
How to redirect from www version to non-www version:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^yourdomain\.com [nc]
RewriteRule (.*) http://yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
(replace yourdomain.com with your domain)
Note: using .htaccess adds overhead to the server, since it’ll be processed on every request to the server. However, large websites are bound to use dedicated servers, so it is pretty smooth here.
The .htaccess file is a file named .htaccess in the root of your domain. It has various directives used to tweak server performance. You can edit it, insert the corresponding three lines of code at the top of it (change yourdomain.com to your domain) and upload it back to the server.
To test this, you’ll need to refresh the page in the browser. If everything loads fine and you can go from one version to another by entering the redirected URL, it works.
If you get a 503 error, you need to make sure you have inserted the code correctly. If you can’t do this after repeated attempts, remove your edition to let the server work again and contact a professional.
You can also read a mod_rewrite manual from Apache about redirecting with .htaccess.
Frankly, it amazes how many sites I see often that don’t redirect to only one of the versions, thus leaving plenty of money on the table. The thing is, the amount of money doesn’t matter, because it takes a couple of minutes of work to implement the changes by the web developer.
And the funniest thing is that depending on the site total traffic, the profit increase can be very noticeable, comparable to general marketing activities, such as increase of conversions, promotions, etc.
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by Jennifer Laycock - Studies show that online shoppers conduct more than half a dozen searches before making a purchase. That means a shopper may visit your site once, twice, or even six times using various search terms before deciding…