Blogging success factors for new bloggers

There are millions of blogs in the Websphere. The original term was weblogs, which was used by John Barger in 1999. Then, the term was shortened to blog. Listing some statistics about the Blogsphere, will assist the understanding of the significance of the blogs’ presence:

Technorati Blogsphere/2008

Due this massive number of blogs, an emerging blogs will face difficulties attracting readers. A new blogger should take special consideration of the following factors to improve his blog status. These factors can be listed in three categories:

Blogging success factors summary

1- Content:

The blog content is its key success factor. The content is the element, which encourage visitors to return to the blog.  Good blog content has four main characteristics:

Focused: Professional blogs concentrate on specific and related topics. The lack of topic concentration will decrease search engines rankings. Also, it will make difficult for readers to follow up your posts.  In addition to that, single posts should be short and focus on a single topic.

Creative: This means that it not copied from other blogs, well presented and adds value to the reader.

Engaging: It encourages readers to contribute and add comments.

Consistent: blogging is all about consistency. Bloggers should be able to add posts and reply to comments in a timely fashion.  Consistency will increase blog visits, users’ loyalty and RSS subscribers.

2- Socializing:

Blogging is all about socialization. A successful blogger is the one who can attract readers who share the same interest. Some of the ways to socialize a blog are:

Commenting: Constructive commenting on other blogs that share the same interest is very useful to attract readers.

Communities: Facebook, MySpace, BlogCatalog, Wordpress, Blogger, Entrecard and many more are examples of blog communities that could be used to increase traffic.

I will elaborate on the use of social networks in another post.

3- Blog Statistics:

In order to measure the progress and performance of the blog, there are some metrics that every blogger should monitor. An example of these metrics:

Visitors: keeping track of the visitor (unique and returned) is a good indication of how well the blog is performing. There many plug-ins that serves this purpose.

Comments: the number of comments is another good indicator on how engaging the content is.

RSS Subscribers: RSS subscription is a key metric to measure readers’ loyalty. A subscriber is a unique reader because he has the intention to read more of your blog. There are many tools such as Feedburner, which facilitate statistics about RSS subscribers.

Google Analytics: This amazing tool facilitate endless statistics of a website or blog. Read more.

Google Webmasters: This unique tool provides webmasters with resources that assist them with crawling and indexing enhance and increase traffic, and connect them with visitors. Read more

References:

• http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html
• http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere//
• http://onlinebusiness.about.com/od/contentcopywriting/a/blogger-pay_2.htm
• http://ezinearticles.com/?6-Specific-Blog-Performance-Metrics-to-Measure-Your-Online-Marketing-Efforts&id=2510187
• http://michaelhyatt.com/2009/08/focus-on-blog-content-before-traffic.html

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