Making your voice heard
Way back when WWW was an embarrassing typo, publishing your work was about as easy as convincing a panther to become a vegetarian. Many different “gatekeepers” (as we call them) stood between the common man and the world at large.
Then the wall came down. WWW came to mean World Wide Web and letting your voice be heard online became easier than getting new credit card applications. It wasn’t long after the Internet started becoming widespread that web logs or “blogs” also became popular. Anyone from anywhere can create a blog. In fact, it is estimated that more than 150 million public blogs exist.
Nevertheless, not all blogs are created equal. Early in my Internet career, I myself started a blog. After all, it’s both easy and free. Why not? I thought. So I sat down and did it! I went to www.blog.com and within minutes I had my own blog. I wrote my first post and . . . there it sat for days . . . then weeks . . . then months . . . and finally years. I would give you the link but I don’t remember it. I don’t think I ever got any followers either. My blog was a pretty lame.
So how do you make a “non-lame” blog? How can you boost the number of people that follow it? How can you make your blog appear more readily in search engines?
5 Tips for Young Bloggers
- Keep your readers in mind — While writing your blog entries, remember who you are writing to. Are you writing to teenagers wanting to jazz up their skateboards or to retired people researching different types of dentures? You will certainly use a different style of writing for grandparents than you will for high school students. Even in a certain age demographic, your style will vary. My roommate knows what a cytoplasmic membrane is and might be interested in reading about your recent frog dissection. I, on the other hand, might recognize that cytoplasmic membrane was a biology term and would have no interest at all in whether or not the appendicular region was present in the frog you recently dissected.
- Don’t “wax eloquent” — Most people don’t like reading online epistles. It is better to write seven one-paragraph posts in one week than to write one seven-paragraph post in a week. Break up your text into paragraphs to make it more readable. Keep your paragraphs short; seven sentences tops. It helps to stick to one topic per blog post.
- Develop relationships with other bloggers — Find blogs that are similar to yours or that cover topics that interest you. There are many different places where you can search for other blogs and also list your site. These include Blogdex, DayPop, Digg, and Technorati. Comment on the blog posts of others. Ask questions, give compliments. Once you’ve developed good relationships with other bloggers, set up cross-links between your blogs. This will help increase both your readership and the readership of your friend’s blog by making your sites rank higher on different search engines.
- Use multimedia — Adding a picture, video or other link makes your blog more interesting and give your blog a little more variety. Linking to other articles keeps your blog fresh and can introduce other voices to your site. It also shows your readers that you are making an effort to research the topic you are writing about and adds credibility to your blog.
- Keep writing! — My first blog (the one I mentioned earlier) could have revolutionized the world . . . but it didn’t because I didn’t keep it up. Start a habit of writing just a little bit each day. As mentioned earlier, you don’t have to write a novel each time you open your blog. Write a few paragraphs and call it good.
Blogging is a satisfying way to share your experiences online. It can also be a rewarding way to connect with others and read more about topics you are passionate about. Following these five simple tips will help you connect with the world.
Good luck!
Guest post by: Derek Gurr is a writer for MyCollegesandCareers.com. My Colleges and Careers helps people determine if an online education is right for them and helps them understand which online courses and online schools they can choose from to reach their goals.
As with anything in life, if you want to be a pro it pays to start young. Blogging is exception and although the most successful blogs are ran by well established, authoritative, big players, there is no reason why you, as a young blogger, can’t get your content out there and make an impact. Internet usage is extremely high amongst teens and even pre-teens so if you are aiming for this demographic there is plenty of opportunities out there to gain traction. The blogosphere is heaving with content and popular topics include tech news and posts about how to make money online, despite the reams of content out there, there are in effect an infinite number of niches, if you can generate a healthy following by blogging about a particular topic, you will have a captive audience on which you can begin to build and improve.
So what are my top tips for all the budding young bloggers out there?
Pick a platform, and stick to it
There are many different applications out there which can facilitate your blogging adventure. You could easily spend months trawling through all the different platforms to find the one that’s perfect for you, but in my experience you’ll just be spinning your wheels. At this stage, the relative merits of Tumblr over Posterous are irrelevant. A successful blog isn’t grounded on bells ‘n’ whistles, but great content. Pick a platform and start writing, you can make changes to the look of your blog at a later date.
Stick to a Niche
Pick a subject you want to write about, and stick to it. Writing solely about that subject, exploiting every little intricacy, and keeping up with the latest news is far more valuable than going off on a tangent. Doing this alienates readers and will likely leave your blog with very few visitors. It doesn’t matter if the subject matter is Apple products or pet Newts, immersing yourself in a niche is far more rewarding than taking a scattergun approach to blogging.
Keep an Eye on Your Traffic
If you really want your blog to be successful, you need to know how it’s performing, the best way to do this is to keep tabs on your traffic with Google Analytics. Despite its scary sounding name, the software is free and easy to use. With analytics you can get an insight into traffic fluctuations which can go some way to helping yoyr blog become more successful, for example if you recognised a traffic spike on the same day as you published a post about the best feed for pet Newts, then you’ll know there is a demand for information on this particular sub topic. You can then leverage this knowledge to gain more traffic in future.
Promote your blog
If you don’t promote your blog, no one’s going to know about it, and no one’s going to read it. The best way to promote your posts is through existing networks you might already have in place. This means publicising your posts on social sites like Twitter and Facebook. You could even create dedicated feeds that compliment your blog, which will get you more targeted followers.
Be Regular
If you can, make a post everyday. It doesn’t have to be a considered, one-thousand word article, it can be anything from a top 5 tips post, few sentences accompanied by an image, or a funny video. Whatever it is you chose to post, regularity is important, if visitors come to your site, see a great post but recognise that your blog hasn’t been updated they will be more likely not to come back. If you can’t post everyday, make it every other day, or even twice a week, so long as your posts are spaced evenly and are predictable.
Respond to Comments
If your posts are funny. Controversial, or informative as they all should be, the likelihood is they will attract comments. Reply to these comments. Ignoring comments will not only turn readers off, it will make them think of you as rude and arrogant, hardly the way to build a large following.
Heed these tips, sprinkle in a little passion, dedication and knowledge and you as a young blogger will be able to take on the best.
Guest post by: Joe is a blogger working for a company that specialise in personal car leasing
Once you’ve set up your website the next most important thing to do is to start to build links. SEO link building is just as important as website optimization and is an ongoing process that needs to become part of your weekly routine in order to make your site the best it can be. To make matters more difficult, long gone are the days when you could just farm out link building to a company and buy hundreds or thousands of inbound links for your site. With Google having recently adjusted their algorithm to ensure that quality trumps quantity, it seems that SEO and link building will become more and more about quality over the coming months and years. With this in mind here are five tips to get the SEO and link building strategy of your site just right:
(1) Quality Content. It seems ridiculous to have to even have to suggest that quality content is important but most people think about content last. But read through most sites dedicated to SEO or Blogging and the concept of good quality writing is always treated as an afterthought. However Google’s change of algorithm makes this issue even more acute as it is their aim that original, good quality writing should be further up the search results and not hidden in a mass of terrible, keyword-obsessed, scraped content. Good quality writing will naturally create good backlinks and will bring more users to your site. What’s more, they will want to keep coming back. If the content is good, people will naturally link to you and recommend it to other people.
(2) Research Backlinks. When planning your SEO strategy & backlinks always go to your competitor’s website first to check which sites are providing them with backlinks. This is a great way to get your SEO campaign under way – anyone that is linking to your competitors will probably own a site that will link well with yours too. Then all you need to do is offer content that is better than your competitor. There are all kinds of tools out there to help you find these backlinks, from SEO Back Link Analyzer to SEO Spyglass.
(3) Quality Backlinks Only – Where possible, try to only go for higher quality backlinks. SEO links that are higher value will obviously bring greater link value to your site. Look for sites with a high PR rating, (at least PR 2 and above where possible) are a few years old, are not link farms or article farms. Also, ensure that your anchor text is of benefit – link on a search phrase relevant to your site, and not on ‘click here.’ Lastly, try to choose sites where there will not be numerous other links on the same page, as these will dilute the value and link juice of your link.
(4) Directory Submission – Though not as important as it used to be, there are still advantages to be gained by submitting your site to as many directories as possible. You can either submit your site yourself to directories you consider to be reputable or you can use a directory submission service that will automatically handle the submission process for you to more than 100 directories. Bear in mind that the most popular directories will not normally accept automatic submissions however.
(5) Local Directory Submission – Just as important as the global internet directories are local or national based directories of businesses which will help you appear in regional searches, improve your search ranking and also give you more specific and higher quality links.
Guest Blog by: Alex Simmonds is a copywriter and freelance journalist based in the UK. He can currently be found writing a daily financial blog on everything from mortgages to umbrella companies
Every now and again we find ourselves a little bit bored. Not quite knowing what to do. If only we had something to keep us occupied on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Well luckily for you, you have the internet. And that means you can access instructables.com – a website dedicated to giving you great projects and letting you submit your own for others.
There are several categories as you can see from the screenshot. Projects range from making your own office greenhouse to building a light up, LED word clock that literally tells you the time. Each guide comes with numerous pictures and detailed instructions. Often, if it’s related to technology, and more specifically coding or programming, then the guide creator will upload all the necessary files for you along with the guide.
So if you’re bored and want something to do. Or if you want to mod things around your home so they’ll work ten times better – check out instructables.com .
