Top Ten Tips To Increase The Popularity of Your Blog
You may have heard the phrase: "Content is king" and that's very true when it comes to blogs. This is not for any content, but high value content that gives value to your readership. In this article, we're going to look at ten ways of creating great content for your blog and for raising your rankings in the search engines.
1. Content Curation: One topic that's been popular as of late is content curation, where you take part or all of an article that's on someone else's site and use it on your blog, with an opinion about it and attribution to the creator of the article, along with some links.
There's are several major problems with this approach. Unless you have permission from the article owner to use the article this is copyright infringement and it could expose you to litigation. An exception to this rule would be some of the article sites which have articles in place for republication and they have their own rules. If in doubt, check the fine print. Don't make the mistake of assuming that: "If it's on the web, it's free."
2. Google Alerts: On excellent way of finding new content for your blog is to make use ofGoogle Alerts.
Here's how they work. Just enter a keyword phrase in the Search Query box and you'll see a preview on the right of the articles that will be monitored. Choose the results that you want and how often you want to receive them. Enter your email address, then click on the Create Alert button. Google will now send you alerts on your topic of interest. It's also a good idea to create several variations. This is a great way of finding new content.
3. Add Share Buttons to Your Blog: When you set up your blog, make sure you install a plugin that allows visitors to share your content with social media sites. This will help spread the word about your blog.
4. Make Comments on Other Blogs: This is another great way to increase your popularity. Find other blogs in your niche and make relevant, thoughtful comments on them. When you do so, you're usually able to enter the URL for your site and when the comment is approved, you now have a backlink to your site, which will help in your rankings.
5. Guest Blog: When you guest blog, you'll have the opportunity to add links to your site. And when you do so, link to related pages to your post, not just the domain name.
6. Get an Autoresponder: While it's great to have a blog, many readers come once and never return. A way to make sure they do is to get an autoresponder. Here's how it works: With the autoresponder you create a free report or video for your site which you offer in exchange for a visitors email address. Using an autoresponder is a great way to build a responsive audience because email allows you to keep in touch with your readership and let them know what's happening on your blog. This will help build loyalty and a fan base. Some autoresponders to check out are: AWeber, iContact and Constant Contact.
7. Use the Autoresponder to Survey Your Readership: When you survey your readership, they will give you feedback on what they would like to see on your blog. This allows you to meet the needs of your users.
8. Test Ideas: Test out different topics on your blog and over time, check your results with your analytics software. This will gie you an idea of what pages are the most popular. Once you know what people like, you can create more content with that in mind.
9. Get The 10x10x4 Content Creation Formula: This is a great system by Traffic Geyser. Here are the basics of what the system does: Essentially, you create ten videos that people most commonly ask about your product or service, then you create ten videos of questions they should be asking. The remaining four videos are for selling a product, if you have one. You can take each video, upload it to Youtube and other video sites and include a link back to your blog. You can also take the text from each video and turn that into a blog post.
10. Be Consistent: A long-term success strategy is to be consistent with your posts. If you post haphazardly, you run the risk of losing your audience. And once they're gone, they might be gone forever. If you don't want to blog every day, one way to offset this problem is to use scheduled posts that go live on a given day and at a certain time. This will free you up from the task of daily blogging.
