Chapter 1: Blogging Bonanza
If you haven’t been living under a rock for the last couple of years you know that blogging is a very popular thing to do. Why? Because it works. You can have a blog, get traffic from Google and have ads and affiliate offers on the blog and make money from that.
In this chapter I will not cover all the great things with a blog, but I will focus on why a blog is great for getting traffic to your websites and landing pages.
Your Own Blog
Having your own blog could be the best thing ever. If you don’t have a blog, I suggest you go get one. As I said, there are many benefits of having your own blog but the greatest of them all is the traffic you can get. By having a blog and having good content you can get free
traffic to your blog from Google, Bing and many other search engines.
A blog doesn’t require as much work as you might think. Many big blogs are not updating every single day; they make a new post about once a week. So you could basically have a blog and once a week you write a post with about 2000-3000 words. Having a post that size will tell Google that you have lots of information in the post and Google prefer to show results where they can get much information.
30-Day Challenge
If you are starting out however, you want people to find your blog. A great way to get your blog boosted and to get some content up is to use the 30-Day Challenge. The challenge is to write one blogpost every day for 30 days. Now, this requires work and it is not as easy as you might think. Writing posts with 2000 words for 30 days is a TON of work and you will quickly burn out if you don’t plan accordingly.
I suggest that you open an Excel document (if you have a Google account, which you should, you can use Google Docs which is basically the same thing and it is free) and then you make a list of topics you want to cover for 30 days. Look for topics to cover on other blogs in your niche, find news and other great stuff that you can cover in your blogposts. Do your research for every topic.
I mentioned that the word count should be about 2000 words. One thing you can do is to write 5-10 posts and schedule them in WordPress. This way you are not forced to write a new post every day, but just one every second or third day. If you want, you could write all 30 posts and schedule them for each day. Then you will not have to do anything during the month because you have already done the work.
Keyword Targeting
One thing you want to make sure of when writing your posts is to target specific keywords. You want to make sure that when people search for top 3 exercises for weight loss they will find your post about the top 3 exercises for weight loss (as an example). To find the best keywords to target you should use a keyword tool such as Google Keyword Planner. Here you can search for your keyword and see how the competition is and other suggestions related to your keyword. What you want to do is to try to get as many keywords as you possibly can in your post without it being ridiculous.
This is how you should not write:
“This is my top 3 exercises for weight loss. These top 3 exercises for weight loss are great when you are trying to lose weight. Just do these top 3 exercises for weight loss one time every day and you will see quick results.”
As you can see this is just weird and Google will quickly find out that you are not doing anything else than trying to get ranked for the keyword. A better way to write is this:
“When I was trying to lose weight fast I were looking everywhere to find a good way. There is so much information on Google about quick weight loss and so much of it are crap, so I decided to share my top 3 exercises for weight loss that I used to see great results.”
Read both of the sentences out loud and you will see what I mean.
Social Sharing
If you are just starting out I recommend that you focus on writing good content, because that is what it all comes down to in the end. If you post crap content, you will not get traffic.
One thing you can do however, as a new blogger, is to make sure that it is easy to share your content. By having sharing buttons on your posts your visitors can quickly share your posts with their friends. Friends trust each other so if person A see that person B has shared something, he will be more intrigued to click and read the post than if he just saw something random (like an ad) in his feed.
If you already have an established blog and you are regularly writing good content, you should expand to other social sites. Create a Facebook Fan Page, a Twitter account, a Google+ account and make sure that when you have a new blogpost it is shared to all the platforms. This way you can create a bigger audience on multiple platforms. There are many plugins that can do this for you and in the next part I will list some great plugins I use on my websites to share the content on multiple platforms.
You can also manually share your content to social sites. If you have a blogpost that you are very proud of and it is getting many readers, go on and share it. Maybe it has been shared before, but who cares? Since then you might have gotten new followers and then it can be great to share some old content you have in your blog archive. Of course the content in the post should still be relevant, not outdated.