5 Steps a Newbie Blogger Never Misses

This is a guest post by Jane Sheeba. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Blogging is an exciting thing. Even more exciting is being a newbie blogger. Every matured living being passes few stages before becoming so. For instance, there is a single cell stage, an embryo, new born, child, teen and so on. Similarly every blogger is a newbie before becoming a matured blogger. And there are certain stages every newbie blogger passes through. Here I discuss 5 stages every newbie blogger comes across.

1. Excited blogger

This is the very first step of every newbie blogger. He/She cannot miss the initial excitement when starting to blog. It won’t be inappropriate to call it over-excitement. In this over-excited state, a newbie blogger can go as crazy as he/she can.

For instance some or all of the following things can happen: Purchasing bunches and bunches of cheap domain names, starting blogs at every profitable niche prevalent in the world, posting three or four times a day, downloading all plugins and installing them (and getting screwed), downloading all free ebooks (or literally anything available in pdf format) that talks about blogging and so on. The list is not exhaustive. Even more crazy things can happen.

At this stage, the blogger is either excited about his/her own blog or even sometimes excited about an A-lister blog.

2. The stat checker

The first thing every blogger does after launching a blog, even before publishing a single post, is to check stats. That is purely human nature to be curious about who is visiting the blog. But this curiosity takes over everything else at the earlier stages of blogging.

Checking stats becomes the blogger’s irresistible thing. Even without concentrating on writing blog posts, even without worrying about the design and the misaligned pages of the blog, even without taking into account that it has been just one week after the blog has been launched, the blogger couldn’t resist himself/herself checking the stats every hour.

When there is one new visitor since the last check that is a great motivation. But if there are no visitors to the blog, which is what is to be expected at this stage, the blogger becomes disappointed and frustrated. This is a big factor that greatly affects the development of the blog, especially at its initial stage when extra care and effort are needed to build the blog without worrying about the stats.

3. The monetization phobic

The blogger at this stage does Google searches (hundreds of them) to learn about all types of monetization techniques for a blog. PPC, CPC, CPM, PPM, ABC or XYZ… whatever! The blogger ruthlessly reads about all sorts of advertising.

He/She struggles hard to get an Adsense account approved. If this step doesn’t turn out to be successful, then the blogger Googles for “Adsense alternates”. As always there are a bunch of them available. So the blogger starts accounts in all of those advertising websites, puts all those banners on the blog and BOOM! One gets a beautiful site that has misaligned banners which blink, change colours, flash kisses at you and sell you stuff.

That is not all. There are places where one can do direct selling of ad banners. There are also in-text ads, strip ads, interstial ads, you name it. The blogger sincerely tries them all out and gets frustrated to see that the earning for the past three months is $0.50.

4. Endless learner

This is when the excitement in down a little bit. The blogger’s focus is now not on writing for their own blog(s) but to know what others are writing about. That is good, but it is actually over done or done endlessly.

The blogger starts reading a killer article about “how to blog successfully” from a A-lister blog; the article ends and there are a bunch of related posts. Oh there is that interesting post about “how to earn $1000 dollars from your blog in less than a month” and that article gets a click. This goes on and on- reading comments, related posts, about the products the A-lister is offering and so on.

And, now the blogger looks at his/her clock when it is almost mid-night. He/she feels so tired and hence goes to bed. Great!

5. Stat-free minded blogger

This is the stage when the newbie blogger becomes a matured blogger. I call him/her matured blogger not because his/her blog is now getting 10000 page views per day but the blogger is very well aware of what blogging is really about.

The blogger exactly knows what it takes to develop a good blog, what it is about to write quality content, what are the factors that are to be taken care of at this stage of blogging, and what are the things that are not to be taken care of.

The blogger now knows that blogging is not about building it, forgetting it and earning while snoring. It is about developing a good quality blog which has useful and valuable content, developing trust and good relationship with the readers, maintaining the motivation at a consistent level and sticking to it without worrying about anything else.

How about you when you were or are a newbie?

The 10 Commandments to Successful Blogging

This is a guest post by Diggy. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

I’ll start off by saying that blogging is absolutely fantastic to do if you are passionate about a certain topic.

If you can write dozens or hundreds of articles related to the same topic without seeing it as a chore, then a blog is a great medium to build up an audience and establish yourself as an authority in a certain niche.

If you want to blog to make a full-time income, I can tell you that it’s possible but it’s not easy and it won’t happen overnight.

Let me share with you what I’ve learned since starting my blog

It’s been just over 2 years since I bought my blog domain. When I started Upgrade Reality, I had zero knowledge about websites, blogging or WordPress.

It took me an entire year of having a horrible theme, spending hours playing with code and tweaking my blog, and writing dozens of (in retrospect) terrible articles before I had a decent understanding of what a respectable blog should look like and what content it should have.

Looking back at some of my older screenshots and articles, it was so bad I can’t imagine how anyone ever read that I had to say.

I truly wish that I had spent money on a mentor or found a blog post like this one, because it would have saved me months of discovering things by trial and error. I can tell you that there is no point in re-inventing the wheel. There are proven methods and tactics that work, and until you know better…copy.

Here are 10 ‘Commandments’ you need to follow if you want to have a successful blog and dominate your industry.

1-Invest In Your Blog

With millions of blogs and websites to compete with, you need to set yourself apart from the rest in order to gain a big audience.

The first thing that a new visitor sees when he lands on your blog is the design.

I’m a big fan of a simple and clean, yet gorgeous design and pretty logo. Your blog should be easy to navigate and it should be 100% clear what you want the visitor to do (I.e. subscribe or click on your latest article).

Unless you have web-designing experience, don’t try to design your own blog layout. Find a web designer who will create a custom theme for your WordPress blog, and be prepared to spend $250-$500 on that. It may seem like a lot of money if you are just starting, but it’s the best investment you can make. Trust me!

2-Have A Specific Direction

Your blog needs to have a clear purpose.

What do you write about? (e.g. Self Improvement)
What are you trying to achieve? (e.g. Helping people gain confidence and get the life they want)

This direction that you have with your blog needs to be overly evident to anyone landing on your page. Every article you write should be related to the purpose of your blog (trying to help people) and it should be clear to anyone who lands on your blog for the first time (i.e. your logo or slogan should state what your blog is about).

3-Learn To Format Your Articles

One thing that took me a long time to realize is that articles on a blog are formatted in a completely different way to a book you buy in the store or an essay that you write in the office.

Articles on blogs are broken down into lots of small paragraphs, many sub-headings, list points and they often contain images.

The reason for this is that people don’t read massive chunks of text on their computer screens. In fact, the majority of people scan through an article, reading only the subheadings or bullet-points, and they will read the entire article properly if you managed to get their attention when they scanned the article.

For an excellent resource about writing and text-formatting, head over to Copyblogger.com.

4-Study The Writing of Successful Bloggers

There’s no better way to learn than by studying and copying successful people.

Take time to read and study the articles and writing styles of some of the top bloggers in the world like: Leo Babauta, Darren Rowse, Steve Pavlina and Jay White.

5-Start Building A List From Day 1

This is probably the biggest mistake I made with my blog and it is one that I regret.

If you do not have an email list, start today. The money is in the list. Not only will you be able to make much more money when you have an email list, you will be able to build a much better relationship with your readers and help a lot more people than when you only write articles on your blog.

I don’t mean a Feedburner email list, I mean using a professional mailing-list system like Aweber or Mailchimp.

6-Have a Free Report

Have a free report, a video or an ebook that you can offer to new visitors. People love free stuff, especially if the free stuff contains awesome content and information.

Offer your freebie as an incentive for people to sign up to your mailing list. It will increase the number of people who sign up to your updates dramatically!

7-Guest Post

Do you want more exposure and more readers to your blog?

Then you need to get your name out there. The easiest way to do this is to write great quality, useful articles as guest posts for other blogs in your niche.

Take a month or two and write 30-50 awesome articles that you are going to send to related blogs in your niche. You will see a massive increase in readers from a guest-posting campaign like that.

For a great resource about guest posting, check out this article on Viperchill.com

8-Network

It’s not about what you know, it’s about who you know.

This is such an old but such a true statement. Knowing the right people could result in massive growth and awareness of your blog.

Go out and find the top 10 blogs in your niche. Then go out and find another 20 medium-sized blogs in your niche. Then go out and find 10 smaller blogs than your own blog.

Leave a few comments on their posts and send the owner of each of those blogs an email. Follow them on Twitter.

Note: Don’t network for the sake of personal gain. This is very important. Be genuine, make real connections and make friends with these people without asking anything of them. Over time they will happily help you out if you have shown that you are trustworthy and shown them that you help them out too.

9-Create Your Own Products

Creating and selling your own products is by far the most profitable business model.

You can make some money with advertising space on your blog, and you can make decent money by promoting products and using affiliate links.

However, the most profitable is if you create your own products (ebooks, guides, videos, membership sites etc.) and you sell them to your readers.

Creating a product is hard work, but you don’t have to do everything yourself. You can outsource many parts, like the design, the sales page and even the content. If you know the problem you want to create a product (solution) for, you can give guidelines or a skeleton to an experienced writer and pay him to create the ebook for you.

Start with a small product, but start with it. Create your own products and keep creating them. Henri does it, hundreds of other bloggers do it, I do it and now you need to do it too!

10-Provide Value

This is the most important thing that I can tell you about blogging. You need to always provide value.

Whether you are making someone laugh, or helping them live a healthy lifestyle, or giving them information how to blog like a pro…make sure that your content is always useful.

If you are providing value, visitors will become loyal readers. They will return, and a percentage of them will turn into regular buyers of the products you create and recommend to them.

Parting Words

Before I end this article off I want to leave you with some final blogging advice.

If you are blogging to build up an online income, then you need to treat your blog as a business. A blog does not make money, a business does.

The blog is just the medium that you use to connect with the hundreds or thousands of people that could become buying customers. If you do not have the mindset that your blog is an actual business, I can tell you that you are doomed to make little money until you change that mindset.

Work your way through all the points in this list and you should notice a big difference in your blog’s traffic, readers and in the amount of money you make from it. (But it will not happen overnight).

5 Things You Need To Be Prepared For When Starting A Blog

So, you want to start a blog?

Becoming a blogger can be an adventurous and exciting endeavor. The entire process can be an adrenaline rush as you think about all of the visitors and ad dollars that will be coming your way. It sounds like the perfect career. While blogging can be a printable profession, there are however a few things that you need to be prepared for when you start blogging.

Let’s take a look at the top 5.

1. Guest Post Rejection

Every blogger will tell you that you need to write guest posts to attract more viewers to your site. While this is true, it can be difficult for a new blogger to be approved for a guest post on a larger site. If you get rejected by a big blog, don’t take it personally. Keep trying! You can always write guest posts for small and medium sized blogs. This will give you examples of your published works that you can show to bigger blogs. Eventually the larger blogs will open up their doors to you as well.

2. Delayed Monetization

There are lots of bloggers making money online. Most of them have been blogging for years and know exactly what it takes to monetize a blog. Most of the successful bloggers that I know learned a lot through trial and error. Finding out the best way to monetize your website takes time. Your blog may do well selling ads or it may be more suited for affiliate marketing. The only way to figure out what works best for your site is through experimentation. Don’t obsess over making money the first month or two. Spend that time figuring out your monetization strategy.

3. The Give Up Moment

Every blogger faces that moment. It’s the time when you ask yourself, why am I blogging? You get tired of writing posts day after day that no one reads. You start slacking off on your posting and blogging becomes less and less important. Your blog isn’t bringing in any money and you just want to give up. This is the moment that separates the bloggers that will make it from the ones that won’t. The key to surviving the give up moment is to push through and keep churning out content regardless of how you may feel at that moment. If you give up, you will never know how things would have turned out.

4. Traffic Plateau

Another obstacle that bloggers face is hitting a traffic plateau. It’s exciting to see your blog growing and gaining new readers. There comes a point when every website will experience a lull at some point. When this happens to you, you need to come up with creative ways to boost your traffic. You can try hosting a blog carnival, sponsoring a cash giveaway or making deal with similar blogs to cross promote posts. You can take time everyday and comment on different blogs which will help bring traffic to your site. All of these are great ways to give your blog a boost.

5. Content Criticism

One of the things that comes along with building a successful blog is criticism. You will be criticized as you grow your blog. Some readers will leave comments disagreeing with and even criticizing your posts. Other bloggers may criticize you for trying to duplicate the success of another blogger. These are all good things however because it’s all traffic to your website. If someone comes to your website to criticize you, it means that they are reading your posts. A little criticism can do wonders for increasing the popularity of a post.

Final Thoughts
These are all experiences that I went through when I first started blogging in 2008. You will be prepared to deal with many of these blogging hiccups by knowing what to look for in advance.

How Planning Helps Your Blogging

“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”

Do you plan? How important is planning in regards to blogging?

You probably know that having a plan is crucial to your success in everything in life including blogging. When it comes to blogging, you have to know what you are doing and where you are going.

Anyone nowadays can make a blog, put on some posts and starts to work on getting more traffic and make the blog popular. However, if you goal is to have your own e-business online then it is very imperative to have a plan and a vision to where you are going.

1. Plan your posts

Planning your posts is crucial. You should try to have posts that are ready for publishing for a minimum of one week. You never know what could happen in a week as you might get sick, go on a vacation, or get busy with family, among other things. This is why planning your posts in advance is a crucial part if you want your blog and e-business to flourish.

2. Plan to create products

If you want to succeed in your blog and e-business, then you probably want to create your own products. You would earn way more than marketing someone else’s products if your goal is to make money. It is crucial to know what products you are going to release this year and how much time it takes you to complete each product.

Personally, I know the products that I’m going to be releasing this year including how long it will take me to finish each product. Having a written plan is half the work.

3. Plan your time

One of the major excuses I hear is that bloggers say they don’t have enough time to write posts more frequently, find time to write their own products. The truth is you do have time. For instance, if you spend one hour a day writing content for your product, that is around 30 hours a month. You would be surprised what you can accomplish with those hours.
If you don’t manage your time correctly, then you will not be able to work on creating posts and products in a timely manner, which could harm your blog and e-business. Time management is crucial to the success of every business.

4. Plan how to market strategically

Are you going to use social media to market your blog and e-business? If so, how often? Are you going to work on writing guest posts? Are you going on building relationships with other bloggers? These are all questions that have to be taken into consideration.

Having a strategic plan is crucial to your success online. Many seem to create blogs without having a clear marketing plan. Think about it, if you don’t have a specific plan, how can you succeed at your blog or e-business? The more you spend time marketing, the more traffic you will get.

A Question Of Intimacy: How Much Should You Share With Your Readers?

There is an ongoing discussion among blogging circles concerning just how close you should get to your readers – it was actually suggested by a reader as the subject of the contest at my own blog this month. There are several advantages to getting more personal with your readers, as well as a few disadvantages. A lot of the time it is a fairly tight line – you need to get close enough to your readers to build trust, but you also want to be careful of just how much you share with them.

Connecting With Readers

Getting more personal with your readers can be achieved with the sort of content you write in your blog posts, as well as how you connect with them individually:

• Quite commonly, sharing stories from your daily life can bring a touch of humanity to your blog – even if it’s not a personal blog or diary. If you run a niche blog, try to use stories that have some relevance to the main topic of your blog.
• People can make their religious or political views known, and some even run popular blogs specifically on these topics. Many popular debates also give bloggers a chance to share their opinion, or bloggers may casually share their thoughts on issues they feel passionate about.
• Posting more videos and photos on your blog can give it a more personal presence, and readers will learn to associate your blog with you as a person.
• It is recommended that you answer as many comments on your blog as you can to help maintain that human presence. You might also connect with people on social networks such as Facebook or Twitter in order to strike up conversations and provide further social proof.

The Good News

The principal advantage to being more personal with your readers is that they learn to trust you more easily, as it shows that there is a strong human presence behind the blog – if that didn’t exist, many readers might almost think that a computer was writing your blog. You will also find that you always have some inspiration to draw from, and snippets of your personal life can become an interesting aspect for readers to experience.

Readers are probably much more inclined to connect with someone who is open and readily shares a lot about themselves. Responding to comments on a regular basis and giving readers individual help when it’s needed can also make them feel much more important. All of this can accelerate the growth of your blog’s community, and transform it into the sort of place everyone likes to be.

The Bad News

Unfortunately not all readers are the same – some will like that you share nearly every little detail about your life with them, while others be turned off very much by it. Moreover, not everyone is likely to agree with your own personal views. If you explicitly share your passion for a particular issue that some readers don’t agree with then they may find it offensive.

Focusing too much on bringing personality to your blog can also lead you to stray from your central topic. Readers are generally there to find information that helps or entertains them – if that describes your daily musings then that’s all well and good, but if it doesn’t then people are likely to lose interest fairly quickly. There is also a small issue of safety when you share too much information. Call it paranoia, but you never really know who’s reading and what they might do with any personal information you share openly.

Ultimately, it is up to each individual blog owner to determine just how intimate they get with their readers. Like I mentioned earlier, you don’t want to sound like your blog’s writer is a computer – so even a little bit of personality can go a long way to help establish a human presence, which is important to building both trust and your blog’s community.

I hope you’ve found these ideas useful. Have you got any more to add? Please mention them, or any other questions you have, in the comments section below…

How to Get Yourself Moving Again After a Knock Back

We’ve all been there at one time or another. You’ve had a bad comment or you’ve put loads of work into a project only to find that it really didn’t get the response you were hoping for. Sometimes after these events you can let yourself slip into the mindset that it be easier simply to give up or just surf the web and not try again. I’m going to share with you a few things that I do to get myself back in the mood and back on the road to building your blog again.

Ease Yourself Back Into It

If you have had that bad reaction to a project that you have put a lot of effort into then often I take a day and simply do research for my next post or project. The beauty part about blogging and why I’m sure a lot of you got into it is that you can set your own schedule. The only pressure is the pressure you put on yourself. If you spend a day researching for your next post or project then you can take things easy and get your confidence up that this is going to be some of the best work you have ever done.

Set Easily Achievable Goals

Instead of doing research and starting a big project again sometimes I decide that the best way to move forward is to do things that will get you results today and will last for a lifetime online. Things like blog commenting and forum posting are nice goals to set yourself for the short term. There is no pressure on you to complete any set goals and they will both give you an extension to your online presence and occasionally a do follow backlink to your site. While looking through the forum topics and blog posts inspiration could come to you for your next post and before you know it you are back on the road again.

Ask For Feed Back From Your Readers

This tip I have found is a great way of lifting my spirits after a set back. It will take some confidence on your part to ask for an opinion on your work but for the most part your readers enjoy what you have got to say and wouldn’t want you to change your direction or style. You could simply post a couple of tweets or a short post directly asking your visitors for their honest opinion on your site. I am betting that you will get more positive feedback than negative and you will hopefully walk away with more information about what your blog could do with changing to help improve it. It doesn’t hurt to ask!

Set Your Self A To Do List For The Next Week

After having said all of those things about taking it easy and getting back to your projects gradually sometimes the best thing to do is to plunge yourself straight back into work. Adding structure and order to what you plan to do over the coming days will help you to feel like you are achieving every step of the way. The very physical aspect of actually writing things on paper and then being able to cross them off when you have completed them can be very satisfying. This way you know you are moving forward and you know that you are succeeding in the goals that you have set for yourself (which are the only ones that really matter!). This can be combined with the other strategies I have mentioned in this article so for example write your plan for today as doing the easily achievable goals and thinking of a blog post idea and then plan in for tomorrow writing up that blog post.

I have used all of these ideas to help me at some point or another and they have all worked for me. It is simply a matter of picking the tip that best fits your mood at the time and ignoring the mood that is telling you to give up. If you give up you won’t get anywhere but if you keep going with your blogging journey there’s no knowing where it might take you.

Are there any other methods that you use to get yourself motivated after a set back? Have you used these methods yourself? We would love to hear your thoughts.

5 Bad Blogger Habits You Need to Break

Habits are behaviors you repeatedly do day after day. Some are good, some are bad. They transcend in all different areas of your life, including when you blog. Here are five bad blogger habits that you want to avoid or stop doing to become a better blogger.

1. Checking your stats and comments 100 times a day

As a beginning blogger it is not uncommon to be obsessed over your web traffic and comments. Of course you want a lot of people coming to your blog, a lot of people linking to you and you naturally want as many people as possible commenting on your posts. That doesn’t mean that you have to check your stats every 10 minutes.

This habit will waste you a lot of time that can be channeled in much more productive activities for your blog. Set aside a time of the day where you check your stats. My suggestion would be twice a day. Once in the morning and some time late afternoon. Use that saved up time for producing more content or networking with other bloggers.

2. Not replying to comments

When people are leaving a comment behind on one of your posts, see that as a compliment. They were emotionally compelled to leave feedback behind, good or bad. What I see is that most bloggers never respond to them. If there is one big thing that helps in building loyal readers, it is responding to comments on your blog. It shows you care about them, even to readers who didn’t leave a comment behind.

Don’t go overboard with responding to every single comment, but definitely respond to comments that are requesting your opinion or respond to commenters who leave valuable comments behind. If you don’t know how to respond then a “thank you” can go a long way.

3. Inconsistency in posting

It is a common mistake for new bloggers to start publishing a lot of content in the beginning phases of the blog and then take a break. That’s the wrong mindset to have and a bad habit. Avoid a “blog hiatus” as much as possible. You don’t want your posting schedule to be irregular.

Be consistent. Besides the fact that search engines love regularly updated websites, readers will love you for it too. By publishing on a consistent basis readers will look forward to reading your content. If you are new to blogging, pick one day where you will publish a new post and make the commitment of sticking to that. Don’t set the bar too high. Start off with one day and stick to it.

4. Not giving credit where it is due

I see too many bloggers copy and paste ideas and works of others without giving any credit. This is not a good way of building credibility. It’s very easy on the Internet to trace back to original sources and you will get called out on it. Give credit where credit is due. Mention the source where you got your idea or work from. Linking out to others is also not a bad idea. It is actually a great way to get on your fellow blogger’s radar and use that as a starting point to network with him or her.

This issue not giving credit especially goes for using copyright images. Verify to make sure you can use the images in your posts. There are a lot of resources (like Flickr) to get free images as long as you credit the producer. Search for Creative Commons copyrighted images. You can use those images without the producer’s consent as long as you give credit to the producer.

5. Not proofreading your posts

Nothing bugs a reader more than reading a post full with typos, grammar mistakes and a train of thought that does not go anywhere. You lose credibility and professionalism when your post contains a lot of typos and grammatical errors. Typos can easily be avoided by using a spell checker.

Make it a habit to proof read every post before you publish it. Do it especially when you are not in a hurry and you can focus on proof reading. A good way to proof read is to read your post out loud and do the editing along the way. What is even better is if someone else can proof read your post.

Why Do You Read Daily Blog Tips?

Yes, you are here again. Why are you here? Why do you want to spend your time reading this? I’m sure you have better things to do but you still want to spend some time reading daily blog tips. Anyway, since you are here, let’s get down to what brought you here.

One of the best thing in life is knowing why we do what we do. You might have asked a lot of how, when, what, who, whose, where on blogs, it’s time to start asking yourself why. This is because, until you know why, you will be abusing the use of daily blog tips. Did you get that? If no, let me explain further.

Knowing why you read Daily Blog Tips will help you achieve what you really want to achieve. This is because there are lots of information on Daily Blog Tips but you only get what you want if you really know why you are here. Let’s say you what you need is information about blogging and you open Daily Blog Tips through a search engine.

I am so sure you will be glad for finding the right information about blogging provided on Daily Blog Tips. But if you DONT know why, you would exit immediately simply because you don’t know why you came to Daily Blog Tips initially.

If you really know why you read Daily Blog Tips, please share your reasons using the comment box provided further below. It will help Daniel Scocco to know if he is reallly passing across the main aim of Daily Blog Tips. It would help you to know if you truly get what Daniel Scocco is delivering. It would also help new visitors to know what Daily Blog Tips is all about.

If you ask me why I read Daily Blog Tips, I would simply answer that I read Daily Blog Tips because I find useful information about running a successful blog. Also, anytime I feel like I’m losing touch with blogging, I come over to Daily Blog Tips get inspired to do more.

Now over to you, why do you read daily blog tips?

How To Fake It Till You Make It In Blogging

Building an active community around a new blog can often seem like an uphill struggle. You’re constantly working to create the best possible content and to promote your site yet often the initial returns are meagre. The fact is that most websites experience a “snowball” effect where the results can be slow to start but over time you will start to see your readership, natural inbound links and commenters increasing at an ever-increasing rate.

The problem is how to get to that exponential growth phase in the first place. After all, the internet is littered with “dead blogs” that have been forgotten by their owners due to lack of results. And even a blog that is still being worked on can look a bit sad with a feed readership of just 5 people and a total of two comments since it was launched (one of those being from your Mom).

It’s important to appreciate that “social proof” of the value that your blog brings is important and social proof can either be positive or negative. Visit a blog with hundreds of comments, a massive readership, a well-known name and so on and you’re likely to sit up and take notice. The evidence suggests this is a blog worth reading even before your eyes have glanced at a single article.

But the reverse is also true. And that’s what this article is all about; quite simply how to build up your blog without it suffering from “digital tumbleweeds” that are driving away the few visitors you currently receive.

Blog Comments

Blogs are built for comments; they’re built for discussions and interaction and a blog without that discussion is going to give a bad first impression. Worse, as anyone who has ever tried to start a forum will attest, getting your first few commenters is hardest. Nobody wants to stick up their hand and be first in line. But blogs that already have a number of comments are far more likely to receive additional comments both because of the “social proof” factor and because of course there is already a conversation going on. More comments mean there are more things for other people to comment on and so on.

There are a number of ways to deal with the lack of comments on a new blog.

The first is simply to turn off the comment function until you manage to build up a significant readership. Then once you have lots of people visiting you can turn comments back on at which point the discussions can start. This is simple enough to do but there are risks involved. One example is that if you operate in a niche in which there are lots of blogs your visitors will no doubt expect to be able to comment. Not giving them the ability to do so may frustrate or annoy some people, reducing the odds of them returning.

A second option is to start a blog comment contest. Offer up some kind of prize for the “top commenters” at the end of the month to encourage people to start adding comments. I took part in a contest like this last year where I spent significant time adding content-rich and useful comments to a new blog and ending up winning an iPod Shuffle for my efforts. Let me assure you there was quite a bit of competition so this method clearly works.

Commenting on other blogs can be helpful as many bloggers will check out the websites of those people who comment on theirs. We all know that commenting can drive traffic so there is a good chance they will return the favor and comment at your blog hoping to generate extra traffic as a result. So load up your feed reader and take some time each day to comment on other blogs.

There are a number of free plugins that will display comments about your content that have been made elsewhere. For example if you tweet about each of your new posts then Twitoaster will gather any retweets or comments relating to that tweet and display them as comments beneath your blog post. If you make a video version of your content and upload it to YouTube then the Genki YouTube Comments plugin will draw any videos comments that get placed on YouTube and display them as normal comments at the end of your blog post.

You can also use a number of WordPress plugins to reward your commenters. Examples of these include the Top Commenters plugin to show who has commented the most, the CommentLuv plugin to offer a do-follow link to any commenters blog and KeywordLuv which allows these links to be keyword rich.

Whatever you do ensure that you are actively requesting comments such as ending your blog posts with a specific question you’d like your readers to comment on and try to respond personally to every comment made.

Feed Readership

If you use Feed Burner then it’s easy to display a button that shows how many people subscribe to your blog. If it says you have 28,000 readers then paste it up nice and prominently because it’s another form of social proof to show how popular your blog is. But why do people add this same little widget when it says there are currently just 16 subscribers to your blog?

Until your subscriber numbers get into the hundreds I would strongly advise you *not* to display your subscriber stats publically even if indirectly anyone interested can find out your readership through Google Reader.

Twitter Followers

In a similar vein it is possible to use TwitterCounter to display how many followers you have on Twitter and of course the higher the number the better. So again until your follower numbers grow it’s best not to display these figures.

However this is one area where you have a degree of control. After all, when you start following other people a percentage of them will start to follow you back so simply by searching for, and then following, people with similar interests you can quickly grow your Twitter following.

Whatever your opinions on such software there are also automated solutions that with a few clicks of your mouse will start to find and follow hundreds of other tweeps. In a short space of time this can grow into a significant number of followers, at which point TwitterCounter can start to become beneficial to your results.

Post Regularity

Blogs that don’t get updated look unloved and forgotten. If I visit a blog that hasn’t been posted to in months (or even years) then I take it as a sign that the information on it may be dated, that the owner doesn’t really care about it and so I’m far less likely to visit it again or subscribe for updates. Why would I if there simply aren’t updates being made?

As a result of this, even if you currently only receive a trickle of readers try to post on a semi-regular basis at the very least so at most a few weeks have gone by since your last update. The more content you’re adding the more reason there is for your existing visitors to actually bother subscribing.

As Featured On…

One form of social proof that you can have some control over is who your blog is associated with. There isn’t always a direct link between the quality of your blog and the traffic that you’re receiving and it’s possible to leverage your great content into higher traffic and more community through th use of guest blogging.

If you really know your subject well and put the effort into your writing then there is no reason you can’t get some guest posts featured on the top sites in your niche. Doing so will not only offer direct traffic as a result of people clicking on the link to your website that is added to a guest post but also by association you will gain credibility. If you’re featured on ProBlogger for example then Darren Rowse thinks you know a think or too about blogging and other readers will pay more attention to you.

Furthermore you can add a section at the top of your blog navigation panel that displays a list of the authority blogs you’ve been featured on. If I see you’ve been mentioned or featured on the top 5-10 blogs in my niche you better believe you just increased my interest in digging deeper into your blog.

In closing try to think of your blog from a new visitors perspective. What do they see? What is the first impression? Does your blog suffer from “digital tumbleweeds” or does it give the impression of an active and valuable resource – irrespective of your current traffic levels?

What have you done to “fake it till you make it” on your blog? Are there ideas or suggestions you feel we’ve missed? Please leave us your opinions in the comments form below…

Why Blogging Helps Me To Build A Healthy Relationship

Married twice, experienced pain as well as joy and pleasure in my relationships – I’m definitely far from perfect when it comes to the ladies. I continue to strive for an ever increasing level of understanding and togetherness.

The most significant gain I’ve had over the past 8 months is how I better understand myself and the growing realisation of how blogging about the subject of healthy relationships actually leads to having one.

So what’s the top level advantages?

• You think seriously what you’re writing about – and concentrate more
• You’re openly expressing these thoughts to the world
• Honesty and truth
• Feedback from people you don’t even know
• Relationship growth from perfect strangers

Seriously?
Think about it for a moment. How many of you really consider what your relationships are all about? When you put your head down to write a blog post, you engage concentration, research and dwell on the subject to a much more intense degree.

When you write a blog post on relationships, the same mechanism comes into play. Take, for example, the area of simply how you communicate with your spouse. How many of you even give that more than a cursory thought? If you were to write about it, your brain springs into deep thought on exactly how , why, when and the reasons around your communication.
Do you think this is bound to make a difference in your every day spousal chatting? You bet it will!

Relationship Openness

When you’re blogging to the world, it’s an open book to everyone in your own world as well.
Blogging about relationships that are dear to your heart will mean you’ll also be expressing your true thoughts. Wow, that might well be something completely foreign to some people. Coming from the perspective of openness and honesty is the ultimate compliment you’re able to give your partner.

Relationship Truth

Just for openness above, truth is a byproduct.

And one person’s truth is another’s point of potential disagreement. You’re going to find this rips open your relationship to it’s very core. View it as a positive though. You’re going to gain some great learnings from how your partner perceives your truth when compared to their own.
Look at the middle ground. What compromises are you prepared to make so your beloved is in a healthy relationship with you. And the reverse is also true; what are they prepared to do to make you their happy and contented partner?

Comments and Growth

The ultimate in feedback is when you get it from people from all walks of life and points of view. You write from your own experiences and think you’ve got validity as well as being on the right path and all of a sudden, BAM, someone from another part of the world slams you into perceiving another paradigm.

It’s really a wonderful feeling knowing you’ve got a world full of experience ready to tell you the way it is, from their point of view. Never has there been an age when the relationship world is your oyster; to better yourself as well as your understanding of your partner and the intertwined feelings between both.

While we all gain from thinking within ourselves on how best to improve relationships and communication with our partner or spouse, I’ve found additional gain from blogging about the very same subject.