How To Have A Successful Blog, Part Three

Welcome to the third installment of my blog series. If you missed the first two articles about how to get started building your blog, and how to get started promoting your blog, you can read them here: PART 1, PART II.

We've already talked about how important it is that your blog profile is current, complete, professional in appearance but personal in nature. You should now have picked a site where you will host your blog, or you have created your own blog and will host it yourself. You have now filled in your profile, picked an attractive background, gave the viewers some information about yourself and what your blog is about. This was part one of the blog series.

In part two, we talked about how to start adding quality content to your blog first. After this, we moved on to how to add friends or buddies to your blog readership and then how to interact with those people to keep them coming back to your blog. We talked a bit about how to promote the blog through adding friends already on the site with similar interests and how to ping your blog to gain traffic and readers.

In part three, we are going to discuss some more advanced methods of promoting your blog, gaining readers and more importantly keeping them coming back. We won't go in depth on monetizing your blog, because that will be covered completely in Part IV of the blogging series, but we will talk about how to structure your blog to prepare it for monetization later.

By now, you should have a fully functional and useable blog that is attractive to viewers, clear about what topics your blog will cover, and it already has some quality content posts. You should have already started building a blog readership from reading part two - and now you need to know how to continue to expand your blog and promote it.

The first thing you must know and must fully understand is that your blog needs to have a theme or a primary topic. You may be involved in a lot of different things - politics, religion, writing, sports - any number of things, but your blog needs to pick a topic and mostly stick with that topic. If you are really an expert in or an enthusiast in many different activities, consider having more than one blog - one blog for each of these activities.

It's okay to post personal blog posts - in fact, it is recommended that you occasionally do this. Unlike a website or an advertisement or an article, blogging IS much more personal. You want your readers to know you, to either like you or hate you, and thus, give them a reason to come and read what you have to say.

"Hate you?" you ask.

You bet. It's proven that if you can handle the heat from holding an opinion that a group of people disagree with vehemently, you will gain readers and page hits and if your blog is monetized, you'll probably make more money too. Of course, you don't want to truly offend anyone, but blogs are personal, and therefore, it's okay to be personal and even a bit controversial without turning anyone off.

Another reason for having themes to your blog and sticking to them mostly is this: if I find a blog that has a lot of information about freelance writing and I get used to coming to that blog for that information, I don't want to wade through tons of posts about your dog or your kids. If however, I have found your personal blog that talks about your life and family and pets, and I enjoy reading that blog, I don't want to have to wade through all your work related posts on freelance writing. These are two different topics and should be two different blogs.

That being said, I do want to know more about you as a person, so it's okay to throw some personal information into your blogs. When I can connect to you on that personal level, your writing about the blog theme will have more impact on me. For example, I write a blog about freelance writing. Over the recent holiday break from school, I wrote on that blog about my son being home from school, and especially because he's ADHD and requires a lot of attention and time, how this affects my ability to write as consistently as I do when he is in school.

This is personal, but it clearly shows how it relates to freelance writing, and therefore, anyone who is a freelance writer, wants to be a freelance writer, or enjoys reading about freelance writing and also has children will be able to relate to and understand my blog post as it relates to my blog theme. Make sense?

Now, on my personal blog, that same day, I wrote a very personal post about how my son, who I affectionately call the Amazing Brat Boy, was driving me insane being home from school! I may have mentioned in that I was having trouble getting any writing done with him here, but that wasn't my focus of that blog post. You see, two posts, both containing the same information, but clearly geared toward my target audience without them having to read things that may not be of interest.

When you are ready to monetize your blog and make some money from blogging, having a theme or topic or main subject to your blog will make making money from your blog a whole lot easier and you'll have more clicks on your ads, convert more sales, and make more money if you have a central topic, theme, and good keywords for your blog topics. I'll explain this much more in depth in part IV of this blog series, which is coming soon.

I've already mentioned previously, but it's important enough to mention again, that you update your blog regularly. If you have a business type blog, I'd highly recommend you consider making at least one blog post per business day. For people who come to your business blog for business advice or information, they will likely check in once per day to see if you've updated. Pick a time and try your best to always have fresh content on your blog at around the same time everyday. Try not to post more than once per day though, so as to not overwhelm your blog readers.

Many people really only peruse blogs on the weekend, and if you update once per day during the week, they will only have five posts to read in order to catch up with you at the end of the week. If you update several times per day, the weekend blog reader will have to go through 15 plus posts in order to catch up, and this may become overwhelming. Now, if something really big or important comes up during the day, by all means add a second blog post that day, but save those multiple blog posts in a day for really major, important or special blog events.

One thing that is often overlooked by people who like to blog for money especially is the fact that it is okay to have more than one blog on different systems that are identical. For example, I have a MySpace blog about freelance writing, and when I update that blog, I copy and paste the posts from that blog directly into a Xanga blog with the exact same information.

Sure, a few people may use both blog services, and those who do will simply pick which blog service they like best and read that one, but this allows me to reach a much larger audience with the same information without taking but a few seconds more of my time.

Now, be careful if you are writing a blog for a paid-to-blog site in using this trick. You see, I only post to one paid-to-blog site, and I just started doing that in order to check them out. I prefer to monetize my blogs myself, and not count on other sites to do it for me and trusting them to pay properly. However, I noticed that the terms and conditions for that blog site and several other paid-to-blog sites indicate that all the posts to those blogs become the property of the blog site and you cannot use those blog posts on other blog sites. I recommend always maintaining copyright and license to your blog content - don't use a site that makes you agree to give your rights to the blog site.

Of course, after you update your blog each day, you do want to be sure to go back and ping each of your blogs at the ping sites I recommended on part two. Additionally, I did not mention social book marking and networking sites previously. Once you have some readership and content, go to the social book marking and networking sites, create a profile, and add links to your blog on those sites. You can find as many social networking sites on the internet as you could possibly ever want.

The ones I have found that help me the most with page views are: Friendster, Tagging, FaceBook, TagWorld, de.lirio.us, del.icio.us, digg, feedmarker, linkroll, Yahoo Search MyWeb, reddit, BlinkList, Furl, RawSugar, and many, many more. In fact, right here on this page, below my article, you will see icons that connect to social networking sites. Please, feel free to tag or book mark my article, but also, click those links and go to the sites and sign up to bookmark and tag your blogs too.

Another tip you want to consider - links. Content Producer Ryan Tinsdale, here on Associated Content, has written a fantastic article about how links, inbound, reciprocal and other help you with search engine rankings. You can read his article HERE. The point here is, in order to get indexed in the search engines for your blogs, you want other sites and other blogs to link to yours. So, if you are like me, and you have more than one blog, be sure that the links to all your other blogs are included on the profile or blogroll of each of your blogs. This will help you get all of your blogs with both inbound and reciprocal links and thus get you ranked higher in the search engines and directories for your blog's keywords.

That brings me to another way of getting some inbound traffic and readers to your blog: Press Releases. There are many free press release sites on the web. Do a quick Google search for "free press release submissions" and pick one or two that looks good to you. Then do a quick search on how to write a press release properly, they really aren't that difficult, and 'announce' in your press release the launch of your new blog, with a link back to your blog. This will gain traffic as well as adding an inbound link to your site - win/win for you!

The last thing I'll discuss in part three of this blog series is to reiterate how important it is to be active on your own blog and blog site. People will come to your blog and read your information. If you've come across as an expert in your field or you have said something on your blog that captures their attention, they may ask you a question or make a comment to you. Answer their question - respond to their comments. Be sure to visit their blogs too. I realize you may be busy and not have the time to visit everyone's blogs, and when your readership grows like mine has to thousands of people reader your blogs daily, you simply can't respond to everyone.

However, if someone takes the time to visit your blog and leaves a comment, do your best to at least return the favor and visit theirs. If they ask a question, try your best to answer it. This will help make your blog interactive, and if your readers know you answer your questions or comment on their comments, they will check back throughout the day and look for your answer. This will increase your page views and depending on how you monetize your blog, can also increase the amount of money you make, as well as increasing your ranking in search engines and directories.

Blogging is an interactive experience. You may be able to get and keep readers without commenting to any of them, but I promise you, you will have more readers, better readers, and make more money blogging if you take the time to interact with your readers rather than posting a blog entry and running.

It may be impossible to answer every question personally, so why not look at questions that are really good or have been asked frequently and make those questions the topic of your next blog post? You can give credit to the reader who asked the question and make their name linkable to their blog, which will make them happy, and provide the information requested to the larger number of readers possible.

These are just a few more tips to help you continue promoting and building your blog. As I said earlier, now that you have a readership set up and are beginning to really build your blog, now is the time to consider monetizing your blog, which we will discuss in part IV of this blogging series. Until then, happy blogging!