15 Quickstart Blogging Tips Pt1

If you want to start a successful and profitable blog there a few things you must do to accomplish this goal. This quickstart hotsheet of tips will give you a jump start on the things you should pay attention in the beginning and throughout the life span of your blog. Follow these tips and your blog will get indexed quicker, gain more followers and ultimately be successful and profitable.

1. Specialize your blog.

A lot of people will start a blog on a great niche or topic that is too broad or general in nature. It's best to specialize your blog for the audience you are trying to attract. For instance starting a blog on pets when your real goal is to write about dogs for the most part. You would be much better off to start the blog on the topic you care the most about instead of trying include it later. Many new bloggers often pick too broad of a topic and find their blogs ranking lower than they could have had they specialized the blog in the beginning on a specific topic.

2. If you can't engage or provoke interest your reader won't stay past the first article.

A new visitor to your blog is giving in most cases one shot at making your blog a frequent stop. If the articles you post are dry or unentertaining it is unlikely they will ever return. This point sort of relates to the first one in that if you have based your blog overall theme around a niche you are interested in and are passionate about you will write more engaging articles. Don't be afraid to inject your opinions and experience in the article's topic. People would much rather read a real life experience that to read a manual of dry step by step instruction.

3. Post titles are the first attraction to your blog, be title conscious.

You may or may not have heard this but the truth is you have less than 30 seconds to capture the visiting blog readers attention. The first thing they see are your post titles. Use attention grabbing post titles as much as you can. The use of numbers and human emotion triggers are very effective in grabbing attention to your titles. For instance a title like "10 Ways to A Happier, Healthier Lifestyle Through Fried Foods" is a much better title than "Healthy Fried Food Tips". You don't want to use both numbers and emotional triggers for every post title, such as a title like "A Happier, Healthier Lifestyle Through Fried Foods" also makes a good attention grabbing title even though it doesn't include numbers. A general rule of thumb is if you can include both numbers and emotional triggers in one out of four post titles you are doing a great job.

4. Launch your blog with no less than 7 to 10 articles/posts or your visitors will never come back.

Queue up a minimum of 7 to 10 articles before you ever try to promote your blog for readers and followers. Wordpess and most all other blogging formats will allow you to schedule posts in the future. A good rule of thumb is to have 3 - 5 posts live with another 3 to 5 in the queue for at least one new post each week. Take some time before you launch your blog to sit down and write out an outline of topics you would like to cover initially. Spend a day or two writing the posts and then posts a few as live and queue the rest for later. Doing this gives you ample time to take a small break from writing while you either create a list of your next posts you want to submit. This is not to say that if during the schedule of postings you think of a topic you'd like to post you should wait, by all means if it hits you to post a live article here and there off the top of your head do so, your readers will love the spontenaiety. A good general rule of thumb is you want at least one new artcle to be posted every week. This keeps the search engines coming back on a regular basis for indexing your new content. After you have 60 to 100 posts you could drop back to a schedule of a new posts every 7 to 10 days.

5. Use graphics and videos where appropriate, don't make your blog too animated.

Statistics show that heavily animated or graphic intense blogs will get 50% less traffic than blogs that use them where necessary. One reason for this is because of load times. Search engines now measue and monitor load times for your sites and this time plays a small role in the listings rank for your site in search engine results. If your blog takes more than 30 - 60 seconds to load because of graphics or video it will hurt you in your blog's indexing. Add to that your visitors to your blog will become annoyed and leave if your site takes too long to load. While having good graphics and usuing videos adds an entertaining value and enhancement to many blog posts too much of it is overkill and will cause less visitors and lower search engine rankings. To be continued...