For some of us, a blog is a means of earning extra income, and whether you monetize your blog by affiliate sales, AdSense or other advertising revenue or by selling products online a blog can be both a great deal of fun and a source of income. However, writing for your blog is one thing getting anyone to see it is quite another.
One of the main requirements with any online venture is getting enough visitors, or traffic to it. If you are looking for a profit from your efforts, there is an absolute need for ordinary people to easily find your blog. Without this, no one will click on your links, respond to your ads or buy your products. For most of us, ranking well in the search engines is the obvious way of getting more people to find your site.
Unfortunately, the search engines have recently been very selective in ranking sites and many have fallen by the wayside. The old metrics of backlinks and more backlinks have been replaced with a presence in the social media, a demonstrable engagement with visitors and an active approach that keeps fresh, quality content appearing on the blog. If you are not being liked, shared, tweeted or pinned you are to all intents and purposes, invisible to Google.
Actively Participate in Social Media
Make sure you promote your posts in the social media by posting about them in Facebook, with a link back to the original post, and by Tweeting every time you add content. Keep your audience involved, encourage comments and start to build a reputation as a useful contributor.
Optimizing Your Blog
Use best practice SEO techniques as you write. There are a number of plug-ins which can help in this regard, particularly for popular platforms like WordPress, so take advantage of them and optimize each page and post you make.
Ensure that you have you target keyword in the page Meta tag, in the title and at least once in the body of your text. It still helps to make some formatted in a heading style, and it is also a good idea to have the keyword in the anchor text of a link.
Making Your Blog Interesting and Engaging
The final point is to keep people interested in what you have to say. Make your posts engage the visitor by spicing them up with images, but be very careful that you are not breaching any copyright rules. The last thing you want is a law suit hanging over you, and some image directories are well known for litigation.
Insert media like video and break up long passages of text with bullet points and subheadings. Don't let your content appear intimidating to the visitor, so make the text attractive and each paragraph concise. Use different fonts and colors of text to add a bit of sparkle, and your bounce rate will become lower.
Follow these points to make your visitors stick around and participate in what you have to say. The search engines will reward you with higher ranking and your visitor count will increase.
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