Week-2: Practical Tips on Building a Successful Blog.

Hello Friends.

My Name is Ramya Raparthy. Today i want to talk about how to build a successful blog.

Practical Tips on Building a Successful Blog.

What I will describe below is what I think to be the main reasons that made a successful blog. I have spent quite some time thinking what to write about to explain the process and instead of giving you some general advice I will try below to analyze the success of so that you can relate this with what you are doing in your blog or website.

Good useful content written by experts

I am sure you’ve read this a thousand of times but it is truth that everything starts with good content. Without having good quality content you cannot expect to go far so before making anything else make sure that you sort this out. Some tips to consider:

• Write for users but make sure search engines understand you as well 
• Not just publish, promote your content as well 
• If you are not an expert on the topic, find one! 

Clean domain

Usually the domain comes first but I wanted to give more emphasis to the content that’s why I am mentioning this now. What do I mean by a clean domain?

A clean domain is one that did not participate in any form of non-white hat SEO techniques for the purpose of either manipulating Google rankings or Facebook likes (for example by purchasing likes in bulk).

If you don’t understand what I mean by this then don’t worry you are good to go but if in the past you tried to get higher rankings by purchasing link packages then better start fresh on a new domain.

Good on page SEO

It is generally accepted in the SEO industry that after the recent changes to the Google ranking algorithm (aka Panda and Penguin), content and on page SEO have gained once again the importance they deserv

No link building

Links are still important, even after Panda and Penguin links are one of the most efficient ways to rank a website. The only difference is that any links that are not 100% natural are bad. In other words you still need links to get higher rankings but if you try in any way to purchase those links or get them the easy way it can do more harm than good.

Social media acceptance

Social media is very important these days for many reasons:

• It is a new way of building links
• A way to get more traffic and customers

It is also a good method to understand if your content is good. When you promote your posts in the various social media channels and provided that you already have a decent number of followers, then normally you should get social media mentions as well i.e Likes, Tweets etc. If this is not happening then this means that you need to work on your content more.

You can take it for granted that if what you are publishing is not accepted by social media then you have to go back and take some corrective actions otherwise you are losing your time and effort.

User engagement

Users can engage with a website in many ways. They can participate in discussions in the form of comments, provide ratings, write reviews etc. User engagement is a sign that the content is good and useful. Some ways to encourage user interaction:

• Make sure that you always reply to comments
• Encourage users from your articles to write comments

Incentives to come back again and again

A successful blog besides many visitors from search engines has another characteristic. It has a lot of direct visits. This means that people open their browsers and type the address of the blog directly.

Two ways to encourage visitors to come back again are:

Constant publishing schedule – You need to create a publishing schedule and stick to it no matter what. Your loyal visitors will know when to expect a new post and they will come to read it so make sure that you don’t disappoint them.

Free Services and tools – When you offer services or online tools, they will visit your website again and again to use the tools or take advantage of your services.

On CalorieSecrets we offer our users a free calorie counter, a BMR calculator and free diet plans and in terms of posting schedule, new content is uploaded every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help

One of the things I wish I had when I started blogging was someone to talk to and explain to me what I was doing wrong and could not get any decent results. If you are stuck, it will be very difficult to find your way out since there is so much and conflicting information on the web about SEO and website ranking and also you don’t know who to believe or not.

Conclusion

A successful blog is one that gets enough visitors to fulfill its purpose. There is no magic formula or magic tricks that can get you thousands of visits without effort and hard work. What I have described above is how I run caloriesecrets.net and why in my opinion the blog’s traffic is increasing steadily since the day it was created. Certainly there are many other methods or strategies that work but one thing is certain: You need to be patient and work consistently towards your goals always aiming for the forest and not for the tree

This is my first Blog. Wish it could help you. Feel free to leave a comment. Thank you for sharing such a fantastic spare time with me. Have a good day.

Pictures choose from:

http://www.guideandnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Blog-Plan.jpg