Having a successful blog is a matter of luck, of course, and a hard work. But you can use some tips to avoid common mistakes, such as poor initiative or bad organization of the process.
Discipline
To get people visit your blog regularly, like it and, in case you’re really interesting, pinning it on their walls, you need to always feed them with something new. Post regularly and never forget about your blog because you’re sick, depressed, your boyfriend has left you or you’re getting married next month. Either your blog is your child, or just forget about it and get yourself a twitter.
Workflow.
Being serious from the very beginning, try a workflow automation solution. You will have several workflows. One of them, for writing your own posts: schedule a new article via an issue tracking solution and get an email notification saying something like “Time to post new article in 2 days”. Process this task. An issue tracking solution can be your personal boss who will also help you to maintain your discipline. I would suggest Comindware Tracker™ for this. The 30-day free trial is available on Comindware.com: this time will be quite enough for you to understand at all if you’re a blogger or you were just kidding. The solution will also help you with guest writers, as it is also a workflow which will include giving the task to write an article to the guest post, your proofread and the posting. Workflow automation will always keep you tuned to your project.
New Ideas
Search for them everywhere: read other blogs, better if you read the best ones in your field. Take part in conversations, wherever they are lead online. Nowadays you can find almost any community and surely there are several that will satisfy your needs. Get yourself a gravatar picture and be visible everywhere. Subscribe for RSS and email letters from good bloggers: somebody else’s idea + your idea = new idea. A new idea can come from wherever: even the last song you’ve heard can be an idea for the post.
Guest Writers
Go to the Guest Writing website and find people who write well but they don’t have their own blog. Deal with them, present them to your readers, make them write for you at least once a month each. Your team will keep your blog living while you are away, on vacation or in a creative frustration (avoid it if possible, though).
Careful with SEO
First thing people will offer you when your blog starts to be something more than just another WordPress, is exchanging links. As one of the threads on twitter says, #stopitbro. Accept links only from the blogs that speak about the same thing. This is golden rule number one. The golden rule number 2, the websites from which you accept links need to have Page Rank at least 3 and Alexa not more than 200 000. Or else Google will consider your website as a poor one and will never give you out for people who google for the relevant topics.
To sum it up, the 5 rules to make your blog work will sound like that:
- Discipline
- Workflow
- New Ideas
- Guest Writers
- Careful with SEO
Stick them on the wall in front of your computer and everyday check if you’re keeping to the point. Good luck with your blog!
Anastasia is 30 years old, and I lives in Moscow, she speaks 5 languages. She currently works for B2B software development company and enjoys testing various systems and products. One of her main duties with her company is to write for the company website. Because of this, Anastasia began writing for other blogs from around the world on various topics. In her spare time she enjoys dancing salsa, bachata, merengue and other latin and Caribbean dances.
