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5 Key Principles All Bloggers Should Know…
By Terrance Charles | September 19, 2008
If your new to blogging or have been blogging for a while, then there’s 5 things you must know in order to keep your blog relevant and appealing to people and the search engines.
What are the 5 Key Principles?…
#1 - Great Content - If you want your blog to get and sustain traffic. You need to always make sure that your writing great content which comes in the form of entertainment, debatable, hot topic, informative or how to etc.
You have to realize your not writing for you, your writing for other people who needs information on a certain topic, just like I’m writing on blogging. Great content lands you popularity, search engine rankings, backlinks from other websites and bookmarks to top social networking websites.
#2 - User Friendly - Your blog has to be user friendly. You ever went to a blog and although it may have some good content on it, it was either too cluttered or too much different fonts etc, that it just made you click the back button? This is one of the most important steps.
Your blog needs to tell people where to go, either your most popular post, categories, or rss subscribe, it should be in plain sight and easy to use. Your blog functionality should be simple to use, comments should be easy to submit, your post should be easy to read, your navigation should be clear so people stay on your blog longer, and your loading time should be quick enough for even dial up users.
The more personal you make the blog for your visitors, the better response you’ll get. If you make it easy for them to digg your post, they’ll dig it. If you make it easy for them to navigate through, they’ll check out more than 1 page. Adding avatar plugins is great too because it adds personality to your blog comments etc.
#3 - Blogging Platform - I see many bloggers make this mistake. They have great content on their blog but they are not using the best blogging platform such as wordpress to make their blog more viral and rememberable.
For example: thegreatblog.blogspot.com can be rememberable but when you use your own hosting and domain name, thegreatblog.com would in the long run produce better results. It would be easy to remember and it would be hosted by using wordpress script, so you get to customize it as you like and put any links you like on it.
#4 - Plugins/Widgets - In order to make your blog viral, user friendly, more personal, search engine friendly etc, you want to make sure that you have the correct plugins to do just that. Plugins are like add-ons to your blog such as a contact form etc incase you didn’t know, and widgets are more like a tool that’s uses html or php code to add to your blog to either make it display other information or function better.
You want to make sure that your blog is search engine friendly, search engine traffic is good for blogs because search engines love blogs, there always updated and gaining backlinks. You want to make sure your blog has all the POPULAR social bookmarking websites so that visitors and readers can submit your blog to them inturn bringing you more traffic and ranking, and there are plugins and widgets to do just that, take a look at my post that explains the most popular ones.
#5 - Automation/Updates - One of the most important principles in blogging is keeping your content updated. Search engines love it, and your visitors and readers love it too. You would REALLY be surprised how much times visitors come back to your blog frequently to see if there is something new, and if there isn’t anything new, how easily they will start to forget about your blog.
In cases it depends on your blog traffic and readership, but if your trying to build traffic and linkbacks to your blog, you just want to keep your blog active using all these principles above. Yahoo can update every 30 minutes if they want because millions have already passed through their website, but if your not getting that much traffic, you can regularly update based on that, which atleast 1 post a day would be ideal.
You now have 5 of the most important principles to take your blog to the next level. Follow these 5 principles and you’ll notice your traffic goes up, you get more backlinks, your blog get submitted to popular bookmarking sites, more subscribers and recommendations which will skyrocket your blog popularity.
To The TOP,
Terrance Charles
TerranceCharles.Com
Popularity: 78%
Topics: Blog Marketing / Web 2.0, Internet Marketing Tips, Search Engine Marketing, Viral Internet Marketing, Web Traffic Generation |
12:40 am on October 22nd, 2008
You listed it well Terrance, those are just the requirements to blog
8:03 am on June 8th, 2009
Terrance, you did it man. Thanks for the tips.
9:08 am on June 8th, 2009
Noted.
Write regularly and write well.
*bookmarks*