Blogging – Insider Tips on Building Your Readership & Improving Your Search Engine Ranking
July 17, 2010 by Mandy Swift
Insider blogging tips: Would you like to know how to attract over 2 million readers to your blog every month? Steve Pavlina hosts one of the most popular blogs on the internet and he shared the following blogging tips in a recent mastermind session:
Broadly speaking, your blogging strategy should be divided into 3 phases:
- early game strategy
- middle game strategy
- late game strategy
Your early game strategy is twofold: to build your readership and increase your blog’s ranking in the major search engines. Essentially, this can be done in two ways:
1) Link swops
2) Blog carnivals
Link Swops:
Link building is a fantastic way of building your readership as well as increasing your search engine rankings. Find other blogs in your niche and request a link swop. The easiest way to discover other blogs in your niche is to type your keywords into one of the major search engines. Visit the blogs that match your search results and begin interacting with these people, commenting on their blog posts and generally add value to the relationship. Once this rapport has been built, email the blog owner and ask if you can swop links. Perhaps the easiest way to do this is to add a blogroll to your site with a link to their blog, then email and ask if they can add you so that you can both introduce your readership to new content. Also, don’t forget to see who they are linking to (this can be done using Alexa.com, see below) – this can be an easy way of building your network fast.
The second reason for building links is to increase your search engine rankings, so that your site appears higher in the organic listings. At its most basic level, the more inbound links your site has (i.e. outside sites that link to you), the more ‘important’ the search engines perceive your site to be and the higher they will rank you in the organic listings. A word of caution here: the inbound links need to have an equal or higher ranking than your site to really be of benefit, and the links need to be from sites that are related to your niche (so, if your niche is ‘Personal Development’ there would be little benefit in linking to bathroom sites for example).
Use a ranking site such as Alexa.com to identify which sites are worth linking to: Go to Alexa.com, type in the URL of the site you are exploring and Alexa will instantly show the site’s popularity, from 5 million (worst) to one (best). Bear in mind that the top spots will be reserved for Google and the other major search engines (because obviously every website links in to them!) and also the top social media sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, my space. Any website with a ranking of 50,000,000 or above is generally considered very good.
Blog Carnivals:
Blog carnivals are basically ‘events’ held by other bloggers to promote their own, and other blogs in a particular niche. Essentially, the carnival ‘host’ will create a new blog in a particular niche and this blog will be made up of content submitted by other bloggers from their own site. The purpose is twofold: the carnival host gains exposure and credibility and the people submitting their posts gain increased readership and increased inbound links to their own blog. In reality, the readership to these blog carnivals tends to be pretty minimal, the real value is in the inbound links for search engine optimisation (SEO) purposes.
BlogCarnivals.com is probably the best known blog carnival site and is extremely user-friendly (even for a self-professed techno-phobe!). Simply log on and you can search for blog carnivals in your niche, select one of your blog posts and submit it to that carnival. You can submit to dozens of these carnivals each week. The carnival host will review each post before accepting it, so not all of you submissions are guaranteed acceptance, but work on around 70% acceptance. If you are submitting multiple posts to multiple carnivals, there is now software available that allows you to do that quickly and efficiently.
Essentially then, link swops and blog carnivals work to increase traffic to your site in two ways: First, by introducing other people’s readership to your site and second, by improving your visibility in the search engine rankings, allowing people to find you more easily when searching.
To sum up your blogging tips: Your strategy in the early days should be to network like crazy with other bloggers, either directly or via blog carnivals, to build your readership and your visibility fast. There is absolutely no point however working to build a readership unless that readership stays. The key to keeping you readers is content and we will be covering that in the next article on blogging tips.
Happy Blogging!
Author: Mandy Swift
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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