Blogging is becoming an increasingly accessible activity. Setting up an account on Wordpress or Blogspot is very easy, to the point where one would not be surprised to see their grandmother start a blog. Registering and posting is easy, and the services even offer plenty of customizable design options to take care of the visual aspects. The tough part is attracting and sustaining readership. Apart from real life friends on Facebook that visit your blog regardless, new bloggers must accept that it will take some time to attract other visitors. In addition to the obvious (creating quality posts on a frequent basis), these three blogging tips will help shorten the waiting timeframe:
Embed Media, Often and Accessibly
Streaming audio is essential for entertainment blogs. Conveniently for these bloggers, there are plenty of sources online for uploading audio and converting the file to an embed-friendly stream. Soundcloud is one of the best, and even academia seems to know it. Berklee College of Music partnered with SoundCloud last year and had 75,000+ students upload, share, and gain feedback on their songs. With SoundCloud, they can also see whenever a particular song gets posted on another web site or blog, which happens often due to the ease of embedding the Soundcloud player. Berklee is implementing this not only for their students to gain constructive criticism of their own music, but also as a lesson in modern music marketing. By familiarizing students with cloud-based services and the potential of online music marketing, Berklee is teaching essential knowledge for any aspiring musician: how to get your music heard by others. Bloggers should follow suit.
Embedded video is helpful for every type of blog, whether its topic is gardening tutorials or biomechanical complexities. YouTube is the most popular option and offers content in every niche imaginable, but there are other sites like Film Annex and Dailymotion that provide additional content you won’t find elsewhere; they reach deeper into certain niches. By providing readers with video and audio content, they experience your blog with more refined senses; it hopefully provides a lasting impression which results in a reader returning to your blog on a regular basis.
Connect to Facebook and Twitter
New bloggers may already have personal Facebook and Twitter accounts, but maintaining one for their blog is a different ballgame. After creating a separate account on those sites, your first priority should be to allow automatic updates from Facebook and Twitter update whenever you post something new on your blog. RSS Graffiti takes care of that on Facebook, while the Wordpress plugin Simple Twitter Connect does it for Twitter.
Now that automatic posts are taken care of, it’s best to connect to other blogs that interest you. Engage in those sites by commenting or tweeting on their respective Facebook and Twitter pages. Write useful information pertaining to the topic at hand, but NEVER advertise or even mention your site via comments. That’s just desperate. If you post or tweet engaging insight articulately and intelligently, people will be interested in reading more of your writing and blogging. Naturally, they’ll click on your site’s social media page, which is one step away from them visiting your blog. Do the same thing in the comments on other blogs or web sites. Again, never advertise your blog directly apart from including it in your name or a specified URL field.
Follow Basic SEO Guidelines
Most bloggers simply want to get their content read. Unless they’re looking to make a full-time career out of it, those new to blogging don’t need to dig too dip into SEO complexities. But they should still follow these easy tips and make a habit out of it. Search engines, and new readers, will love you a lot more if you do:
-Place the emphasized keyword of your article in the headline, and try to place it in the content’s first and last sentence as well.
-Make sure your keyword doesn’t take up more than 5% of the article. Many sites attempt to rise in the search engines by flooding their content with a valuable keyword. That doesn’t work anymore.
-Make sure all links open up a new window. You don’t want an engaged reader to go elsewhere, and you especially don’t want to be the one opening the door out for them.
-Write originally or don’t write at all. Search engines are aware if you’re copying content, or just paraphrasing it.
-Link to pages on your own site. If you have a new article that mentions your post a few months back, link to it. Search engines love external backlinks, but they also love these too. This is more useful for already established sites, but it doesn’t hurt new blogs.
Watch about another useful tip for blogging involving buzz scores:
