Essentials for Blogging Success

Hello, I’m Sean Levinstein and I welcome you on my blog, where I intend to write on Internet Marketing, SEO, blogging, and various ways of making money online.

I’ll start things off with my list of essential elements of successful blogs. It is a list of things that I feel every successful blog and blogger should have. So without further ado, let’s get straight to business.

1. Great content: Great, valuable content is where it all pretty much starts, as far as blogs are concerned. Make sure that you choose the right niche – something that interests you, make sure that you do your research on a regular basis – things people are interested to hear about in that niche, and valuable keywords, and finally, concentrate all your efforts in producing quality and valuable content – content that is unique, relevant, and highly-informative for your readers.

2. Great design: Looks are as important as content. Having an online presence that looks great will be essential, which is why it is important to either have someone (a professional) design your website, or choose Wordpress, along with an attractive-looking theme to go with it. Wordpress themes are usually pretty cheap (or even free!), and can completely change the look or appearance of your blog. The best part is that Wordpress themes are available for all kinds of blogs. Check Themeforest for a great collection of Wordpress themes.

3. A great CMS: Speaking of Wordpress, it is essential to choose a good CMS for your blog as well. I personally think that if you go the self-hosted route, nothing quite beats or even matches up to the brilliant and ease-of-use of Wordpress. It’s free, open source, easy to use, extremely simple to manage, comes with a powerful backend/dashboard, gives you complete control over all aspects of your blog, is extremely SEO friendly, and has a ginormous library of free and paid-for plugins and themes that enhance its functionality and appearance. However two of its biggest competitors – namely Drupal or Joomla – might also be worth looking at (here’s a comparison).

4. Encourage comments: One of the best reasons for having a blog is that it allows you to speak and engage with other like-minded people out there on the internet. Which is why it is a good idea to encourage comments on your blog. Encourage your readers to post comments on your blog, and leave their thoughts and their feedback. Make it easy for people to do so. Your comments box should be present right beneath the post. Don’t ask readers to jump through a lot of hoops to post a simple comment – just a name and email ID would do. In addition, you might also want to look into using something like the CommentLuv plugin or the Disqus plugin to enhance and improve the functionality of your blog.

4. Building relationships: This is a two-part process: building relationships with other bloggers, as well as your readers. As far as the latter is concerned, inviting people to post comments (as mentioned in point # 4 above) and replying to their comments is the best way. On the other hand, you could look to build and cultivate relationships with other bloggers through social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus), as well as by linking to their content, sharing their content, leaving comments on their blog posts (valuable and thoughtful comments), and so on. With the passage of time, after you’ve made a name for yourself (as well as some authority), you’ll find that these relationships prove to be invaluable to you!

5. Building lists: We now move on to a couple of ways to generate traffic, one of which is list-building – an invaluable source for many bloggers to get targeted traffic to their blogs. List-building refers to the practice of capturing your visitors email address, by allowing them to subscribe to your blog and your posts. All you need to do is add a subscription box on your blog for this purpose, which asks for the name and email ID of anyone who wishes to do so – there are plenty of plugins on Wordpress which will allow you to do this.

6. Social media presence: The importance of social media cannot be ignored, and it is essential for every bloggers to have a strong presence on the likes of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, etc. Maintain a separate social media account for each of your blogs, and post updates to each page regularly, build more likes, and engage with your fans. Use a social media management dashboard like HootSuite to easily manage all your profiles from a single window. Add ‘like’, ‘share’, ‘retweet’ and ‘+1’ buttons on your blog as well, so that your readers can share your posts and the content easily on their social media profiles.

7. Content guidelines: All content that goes on your blog should follow strict and stringent content guidelines or content best-practices, regardless of whether it is written by you or someone else. This includes elements such as (but not limited to): breaking your copy down into digestible chunks, using multimedia, checking your copy for factual or grammatical errors, putting important bits of text in bold, using bullets for points or lists, accrediting the original source if copying/taking something from an external source, writing attractive and compelling headlines, and so on and so forth.

8. SEO best-practices: Search Engine Optimization is extremely important for the well-being of any blog. It is an integral cog of a well-run blog. SEO strategies allow you to optimize your blog for human visitors, as well as maximum search engine visibility. SEO involves a lot of different on-page and off-page techniques – such as keyword research and implementation, building backlinks, external and internal linking, etc. – and it might be a good idea to look for local SEO firms or freelancers to whom you could outsource your SEO to.