I have been focusing on proofreading this blog recently, and I am pleased to say that I corrected a lot of errors. According to many people proofreading is tedious, and hard to do well. Yet, every blogger can benefit from some proofreading tips. That is because we want our articles to look professional. We want the respect of our visitors, and fellow bloggers. Here are some tips which might help you:
-Read a lot. I think this point is pretty obvious. The more you read, the easier proofreading becomes. This is especially true if you assume a proofreader mindset. Try to inspect every word and take your time. Reading newspapers or magazines may be a good idea.
-Write a lot. The more you write, the less you are going to repeat common writing errors. You can either write a lot of articles for your blog, or simply write about whatever you like for practice. Writing articles is an excellent exercise.
-Ask another bloggers or friend to spell check your posts. It might be even more effective than checking your own posts. You may want to return the favor and spell check his articles as well.
Proofreading well is tough, but in the end it is very rewarding. Of course, it is not that easy to spot all of the errors, but it is important to at least notice some of them. With time you are going to be a better and better writer so do not worry about that.
What would you do if you had one million dollars? This is just an example of a topic you could ask your readers to write about if you organize a contest. Contests and giveaways are a great way to increase the traffic to your site and obtain valuable links from all over the blogosphere. I would like to give you some examples of some contests and giveaways that other bloggers organized:
-A certain blogger was giving away USB flash drives. You may even want to preload it with software to make it more valuable. Ask participants to post about your giveaway on their blogs. You may also choose to ask them to subscribe to your RSS feed. Participants should also leave a comment informing you what they did. To make this giveaway more appealing you may promise each participant that you will link to his blog just for participate in the giveaway.
-One blogger asked his readers to write about what they would do if they had one million dollars. You could ask them to create a post on their blog with a link to your contest, or you could simply tell them to leave a comment on your website.
-A webmaster of a popular blog organized a contest in which the prize was free advertising on this popular blogs website. This can encourage many people to participate if your blog is indeed popular and has high Page Rank.
-Another blogger asked his readers to write an article on any subject that explains how to do something. The only requirement was to link to his website. In this particular competition, he was giving away cash prizes. Giving away cash prizes is always a good idea, as this way people can spend their money however they want.
If you decide to organize contents or giveaways, make sure that you clearly specify when you will choose the winners. Additionally, you should keep in mind that asking participants to link to your site is a good way to obtain a lot of backlinks. Even if your blog is not very popular that is not a problem, because there will be fewer participants, which means higher changes of winning for anyone who participates.
I would like to present you with blog directories that I found that might be useful to you. Some of them might accept only certain kind of blogs, so do not submit to directories that obviously deal with a topic different than that of your own blog. Here is the list:
-Bloogz allows you to search for blogs by typing in a keyword. You can choose from five languages.
-Icerocket is another blog directory.
-Readablog allows users can view blogs by new additions, most popular, top searches and recently viewed.
-Getblogs is a human edited directory of over 11000 Weblogs in 190+ categories.
-Bloggernow allows blogs to be listed under many categories.
-Fuelmyblog is displaying blogs of the day on their main web page.
-Blogsearch has a new blog, top rated, editor’s pick, and hot blog list.
-Superblogdirectory is listing Blogs from around the web broken down in easy to search categories.
-Findingblog is a searchable directory. It ranks the top 10 hottest sites in each category.
-Blogintro is another useful blog directory.
There are many advantages of having your blog listed in directories. Among the most important advantages are improved rankings and additional traffic. After all, those are the aspects that most webmasters care about.
The amount of traffic you receive to your blog is based mainly on search engines. You want your articles to be indexed quickly, and you want them to rank highly in the search results. It seems that blogs are favored by search engines, and there are many examples of that. There are numerous blogs that have not been that popular in the past, but have gained a lot of traffic after being ranked highly in the search engines for particular words. There was one blog ranked highly for the term cnn.com/uncovering America, and the actual CNN site has been ranked number two and three, while the blog was on the first place. Due to these circumstances, the blog received a lot of visitors and this whole situation permanently increased the traffic of that blog. The only conclusion I can make is that search engines love blogs and they are worth it, as they tend to rank highly. In order for your blog to rank highly, you will need to write useful articles people like to read and update your blog quite often. If you update your blog on a regular basis and write high quality articles, sooner or later some of them will get ranked very high for different search terms. Of course, remember that for a blog to rank in the first 10 results for a particular search term, the owner of the blog has to put a lot of work into it.
Stealing content from other people�s blogs is frowned upon in the blogosphere. By this I do not mean getting ideas from other websites. I myself got an idea to write this entry after reading someone else�s post. What I mean is copying and pasting other bloggers posts or part of them without mentioning who their author is, and without asking the writer for permission. Sooner or later, the visitors of such blog are going to notice that the articles were copied from another website. All bloggers should definitely want to avoid such situations. After all, having a good reputation is important if you want to have many loyal visitors. Writing your own articles is very rewarding, and there can be a lot of satisfaction coming from being a successful blogger. It is a pleasure to see visitors coming to your site, commenting, and subscribing to your RSS feed.
To sum up, I strongly believe that focusing on topic and having an original and unique blog is a way to be a successful blogger. This is what I have been trying to do since the beginning I started blogging. I got a lot of satisfaction from it, and it was worth it.
Is there any particular reason there are so many unsuccessful blogs? This is a broad topic, but I thought I would shed some light on it, since there are a lot more unsuccessful blogs than successful ones. The fact that a lot of them are unsuccessful can be proven quite easily, because most of them are abandoned. There are some common reasons this happens, and here are some things you can do to avoid it:
-Focus on your visitors. Your thoughts are important as well, but what do the visitors think about your site? Do they have any requests or wishes?
-Make sure your blog has a purpose. If you do not have a clear purpose of what you are trying to achieve, then how can you achieve anything? You can use your website to spread your work, thoughts, educate your readers, or for many other reasons, but remember why you are actually doing it. This should keep you on the right track.
-Avoid poor marketing. When it comes to a brick and mortar business, customers will be able to see your business near other stores, or near busy streets. This way the news about your company can spread quickly. On the other hand, if you do not market your blog, then the chances are that nobody is going to visit it. It will be like placing your business in a middle of a forest, where the only visitors that come are those who wander there by accident.
Many of you have probably seen a MyBlogLog widget before. It is a widget displaying pictures of your most recent visitors who are registered at MyBlogLog. There are many bloggers who have been using this widget for a long time now, and I wanted to write a few words about integrating this widget on blogs.
First of all, to add the widget you should go to mybloglog.com, and after registering/logging in, click on “Get This Widget Now”. After you do so, you will see many options to customize your widget. You can change the size of picture, background color, text color, width, rows title, and other things. This gives you a lot of power to integrate your widget exactly the way you like, which is important for those who want their widgets to match their template style. A good idea may be using a white background, small photo size, and width adjusted to integrate well with your sidebar. Of course, you can choose any colors you want, depending on what template style you have. It is quite a neat tool to check who is visiting your blog. At the same time it is considered an attractive widget to have on one’s blog. It adds a sense of community, and since many blogs are based on communities, it may results in your blog becoming more successful.
Spam is becoming a very dangerous issue these days. Did you recently notice a few spam comments on your blog, and decided to do something about it? Many blog platforms offer a CAPTCHA system to combat spammers. The way it works is that a commentator will have to input alphanumerical characters in a box that he sees in an image above. Since most spam comes from automated software that cannot pass this test, it is a good way to reduce the number of spam comments left on your blog. You can enable CAPTCHAs on blogger blogs by going to the comments tab and ticking “show word verification for comments”. On the other hand, if you have a WordPress blog you may simply wish to install a plug-in for this purpose. Some bloggers even decide to disallow comments simply because they receive so much spam on their blog. In my opinion, it might be a better idea to simply utilize CAPTCHA and this way allow your visitors to contribute to your blog. The WordPress platform also offers Akismet, which is a great tool to combat spam, but unfortunately Akismet is not able to detect all spam comments. That is why bloggers will need to consider using other methods to combat spam.
I was surprised to discover a service for bloggers called BuyBlogComments, which sell blog comments for around $0.25. What they do is look for blogs with a similar topic to yours that have do-follow links, and post a link to your blog in a comment or even comment in your name. Their service is quite expensive though. You will have to pay $25 for 100 comments, $124 for 500 comments, and $240 for 1000 comments. I would not use their service for various reasons. One of them is because I prefer to do such things myself rather than pay someone else for doing them. I think that in my case it would be a waste of money. The sad thing is that bloggers who will be tempted enough to use their service will have an advantage over other bloggers who post comments on other blogs by themselves. You will not find comments written in my name that are not written by me, and I do not believe that such service is ethically justifiable. Most bloggers would probably agree that posting comments in someone else’s name is not the right thing to do. However, I do not think that services like BuyBlogComments will cease to exist if they have a lot of customers.
If you started blogging just recently, there are a few essential things which you should be doing. A young blog can have an almost endless potential, so it is important to take advantage out of it. Here are some things I recommend you do:
-Write high quality posts. This is the most important aspect of your blog, and you should never neglect it. Your blog is going to be successful if you are going to have useful content. Take your time writing your articles, and make sure that they will be useful to your readers.
-Market your blog. You can do it by writing guest posts, commenting on other blogs, sending friendly emails to other bloggers, participating in contests, and being engaged in discussions. You will need to see for yourself what works for you.
-Do not be afraid to experiment in early stages. Try different writing techniques, change your template, experiment with implementing videos and images. In the meantime, you will be gaining valuable experience. Try to observe how your visitors react to various changes. It is better to experiment when your blog is relatively new.
Ultimately, the most important things you should focus on is writing high quality content and marketing.