By Rob Mead
Whenever someone starts out on that long road to achieving their goals in life, they must take that essential first step. When you start writing your very first blog entry, that first step is a very uncertain and clumsy one. You have no idea who will be reading it, for one thing. Another unknown element with writing your very first blog is the fact that you don't know if the topic you have picked for your daily or weekly blog is ever going to be popular enough to drive readers to your site so you can sell them your products.
Even if the only goal you are trying to reach with your blog is just to get your viewpoint on gun control out to the general populace, you still need to be sure that you are not just wasting your valuable time typing out your views on your new laptop. Watching your words disintegrate into the virtual internet trash heap of articles and blogs that nobody ever reads is no way to spend your precious time. To make sure that this never happens to you, I've developed these six powerful techniques for acquiring new readers that will be a major turning point for your blog if done correctly.
1. LEARN HOW TO WRITE "PILLAR ARTICLES" AND HIGHLIGHT THEM ON YOUR WEEKLY BLOG
The term "pillar article" is a new catch-phrase that essentially defines a 500-600 word article on a subject or topic that is timeless and adds value and knowledge to whomever is reading it. This article style is not about a current news story, nor will it's true value diminish over time if written correctly. It can be a how-to article such as the one you are reading right now, or it could be an historical article written about a battle in WWII.
I wrote one such article called "Memorial Day- A Time to Remember True Heroism at 'The Battle of the Bulge'". It was a lengthy article about the hardships that our Army and Marines went through in 1944 to fight back the Germans during the end of WWII. It is a timeless piece that will not be negatively affected by the passage of time, because it gives the hard facts on the many lives lost on the battlefield, and describes the emotions felt on the German side and on the allied's side during that fateful and bloody battle. A lot of the people who read my article had no idea that it took 4 months of fighting for the allies to move the Germans back into their border, but that is a very important element of a "pillar article": give the reader knowledge he might not find elsewhere.
What is most important to remember about pillar articles is that they do form a strong structure, thereby giving your blog a strong foundation to build upon, hence the name 'pillar'. If you can write at least one of these articles per week, you will have over 50 excellent articles per year that your loyal readers will keep coming back for week after week. You can also more easily sell these articles to sites like Associated Content because they like the more substantial content that the pillar article usually contains, and that substance benefits their readers. Also, if you submit a pillar article to Ezines.com, the readers of that site will more than likely follow your url site on the bottom of your article page to your actual web site, and will be more open to buying your product. Be sure to archive all of your pillar articles so future viewers to your site can read them as well.
2. GET INVOLVED WITH LIKE-MINDED BLOG SITES
A very important step to self-promotion of your blog is to find other sites that deal with the topic or subject that you are writing about for your blog, and put comments on their sites. Most blog sites will allow your comment to be shown on their sites with your url linked to your main page. Once readers to the site that you wrote your comment on see your link, they will be curious as to how your site might be better than the one they were just on. If the main blog content on your site is more interesting than the one they were frequenting, then congratulations! You just stole a web viewer from somebody else's site, which is fair play in the world of the internet.
It's more of an even playing field for a content writer when it comes to blogging, because of the relatively short time that blogging has been around for. If you are a better writer than me, and can deliver more compelling advice on your blog site, I'd expect you to get some of my audience. It keeps us writers on our toes, which brings out a better writing quality to all aspects of internet content. And if you've seen a lot of the bad grammar and spelling I've seen lately on the vast majority of blog sites, any upgrade in the quality of internet writing is greatly appreciated by all web surfers who get tired of seeing all of the same spelling errors on everyone's site.
3. MAKE SURE TO HAVE A COMMENTS PAGE ON YOUR BLOG SITE
This is a mistake that a lot of new bloggers make nowadays. They don't see any real value in responding to an insipid comment or insult that a reader made about how they don't agree with the blog owner's view on abortion or gun control. The blog owner should always not only have a posting area on their blog site, but they should also respond to each and every comment someone makes. Why waste valuable time on such an effort? Because when new readers come to your site and see that someone posted comments there, it makes your site look a lot more important to them. Think about it. If you were looking for a blog about how to enhance your writing skills and you came across a nicely written blog without one comment written by an outsider, and then you left that site and found another one that had 25 comments behind a single topic thread, which one would you find more interesting? It would be the one that had more than just one view on the topic you were looking for, which would be the one with all the posted comments either criticizing or agreeing with the first posted blog.
You need to bring to your new readers a sense of exhilaration behind whatever your blog topic happens to be, and that means allowing all of your blog viewers to comment one way or the other about your main topic. And you need to respond to all threads because that conversation that was started by the first post has to be continued by somebody else to get more comments going. If you have to respond to get the ball rolling forward, so be it. It's all a part of getting viewers and customers to keep coming back to your site on a continuous basis.
4. USE A PROFESSIONAL DOMAIN NAME
I've already mentioned this in an article I've published before, but it does bear repeating because of how important this topic is. Using a domain name like "WritingTips@myblog.net" will make your site look more like a hobby than a serious business because it makes it appear as though you are too cheap or too uncreative to figure out a name for your blog site! Go ahead and splurge on the nine bucks it will take you each year to retain your professional blog site's name.
If you can come up with a name that perfectly describes the intent behind your blog, than that's great- go ahead and name it that. But if you can also come up with a name that contains a very popular keyword or phrase that the major search engines are always looking for, you've come up with a real winner that will immediately draw in a decent audience for your site within the first month of start up.
Another reason to always come up with a great name is the fact that web surfers always need a name they can remember so they are more easily able to tell somebody else about your blog site on another site's comment post. Word of mouth is probably the #1 way to acquire long-term viewers to your blog, so any possible way to generate positive word of mouth should be considered a top priority for you.
5. UPDATE YOUR BLOG ON A DAILY BASIS NO MATTER WHAT
Nothing turns off a casual visitor to a content-heavy web site or blog site than seeing a news story about an event that happened a month ago or even a few days ago. The sole purpose of having a blog in the first place is to keep your readers informed on a daily basis about events or happenings that effect the topic pertaining to your site. Most people think that if they are only getting 10 or 12 viewers a day to their site, than there is no need to start updating the news on their blog immediately, because who cares about having to appeal to such a small crowd of readers?
That theory is most definitely wrong, because the early viewers to your site are the ones that can tell others to go to your blog to read about your blog topic that his friends might have an interest in too. But the early viewers of your site won't give you good word of mouth because they think you are lazy or you're so ill-informed about your blog's subject matter that you can't even come up with any more content to put in your daily blog. In fact, they will tell their internet pals to avoid your site like the plague, giving your site the worst thing that can happen to an early start up blog: bad word of mouth.
Don't let bad word of mouth happen to you. When you first start out writing your blog, just imagine that you are writing for thousands of people who are hanging onto your every word, even though in the back of your mind you know this is not true. But by believing in that illusion you will in turn be capable of giving your content that extra edge that readers need to feel and taste in their mind that compels them to read your entire blog. That will make the early visitors to your site tell their friends all about your exciting new content web pages, which will allow you to see the future sales potential of your business through bringing in more viewers to your online company with great blog content.
But before you can get to that comfort zone of having more than two thousand hits a day, you will need to actually write much more articles on a daily basis to build up initial hits of a few hundred per day. You could take off Saturday or Sunday, but I would never take more than one day off per week as far as writing new content for your site during the initial growth of your business, because of the importance of building up new viewers to your blog through daily updates. And you must make sure that the new updates have something of value to bring to your new viewers. If they keep reading about the same news in the same way that another site they go to already is doing, why should they go to your site? Keep your content fresh and exciting and you will have no trouble attracting a wide viewer ship to your blog.
6. GET YOUR BLOG RANKED AT BLOGTOPSITES.COM
This promotional blog site has been around for a few years now, and it is highly recommended for any new blog site owner to submit their very best daily blogs to this site to get ranked by a cross section of your fellow bloggers. At the beginning of your new venture this tool will only get you 5-10 new visitors a day, but in the infancy stages of your blogsite getting any amount of new visitors to your company should be seen as a substantial growth pattern to your business.
After you register with Blogtopsites.com, you will have to make sure you submit your article in the right category. Doing so increases your chances of a higher ranking than if you submitted your article to a category that had nothing at all to do with your blog topic. To get properly ranked, you also have to put some html code into your article, but that task is fairly easy even if you don't know any html at all.
To wrap it all up, as long as you follow these specific guidelines, your future as a web site blogger should be a bright one.
Wikipedia
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Rob_Mead
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