Creating Succesful Blog & Business
Written by Raymond Tay on December 6, 2009 – 7:41 am -Anyone still write journals? Nowadays, I think blogging has replaced conventional journal writing. I did a research on blogging trend and LexisNexis found that blog was the most search in Merriam-Webster in 2004 and there are 31.6 million hosted blogs and expected to grow to 53.4 million by end of 2005. Here are some additional facts:
- 10 Million created in the first quarter of 2005 alone
- 66% of those surveyed had not updated in 2 months
- 1.09 blogs are composed of an initial post and then nothing else follows
- Only 9.9% are linking to traditional news sources
Perseus.com Blogsurvey discovered that 92.4% of blogs are created by people under 30 years old and majority of the bloggers are between 13 and 19 years old.
Universal McCann and Media in Mind Study responded that bloggers account less than 2% of adult population. I think this number will raise as the IT savvy young generation grow up.
If you want to succeed in the blog world, the bad news is many people are blogging and the good news is not many people are follow through & maintaining their blogs. If you are blogging what you love, I believe it won’t be much of a problem.
Interested to make money for what you blog? There are couple of ways and you really need to put in hard work. Nothing comes free. To me, blog is like a business. Your blog website is a shop and people sometimes come & visit your shop, but whether they purchase your product is ???.
Alvin Phang has managed to create successful blog and here are 10 mistakes in blogging that he shared:
- Using black & dark backgrounds for the Blogs.
- Didn’t evenly space the posts with paragraphs.
- No affiliate programs or products been sold on your blog.
- Didn’t use a hosting site.
- Failure to post articles regularly.
- Didn’t install tracking software to find out what visitors are doing.
- Didn’t interact with readers.
- Didn’t collect leads on your blog.
- Failure to get your blog.
- Didn’t drive traffic to your blog.
An important issue is to know how to drive traffic to your blog. Some ways that I’ve done are:
- Submit your blog url to search engines and directories (e.g. Yahoo, Google, Bing, Open Directory, Alexa)
- Leave comments on other websites/blogs.
- Follow people on twitter & send tweets.
- Post views on forums.
- Create blog facebook group.
- Sell products on eBay (with your link).
Have you heard of SEO? It’s “search engine optimization” and making your site to appear on top list of sites when people search for the related keywords on search engines. Alvin suggested there are 4 main things: meta tags, url tagging, title & backlinks. If your blog has many keywords like “building successful blogs” or “make money on blog” (when people who search those words), then your chance of being the top is higher. Personally, although it is useful to have SEO, it’s more important to create content consistently & do your marketing often.
Here is an useful checklist for your blog by Stephen Pierce.
Time magazine has selected 25 best blogs in the world and it’s the First Annual Blog Index. You can see the full list here. After looking through some of the blogs, I discovered a few common things in them: many authors, comprehensive & wide coverage, writing about the latest news/topics, niche/ weird areas (e.g. PostSecret, Freakonomics) and full of contents.
In order to create a profitable blog or biz, you must do whatever it takes, learn from your failures and take action consistently.
Tags: alvin phang, attracting traffic, blogging, First Annual Blog Index, make money, marketing, SEO, stephen pierce
Posted in Internet Marketing | 4 Comments »
