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.
As I stated before in one of my posts, various statistics are very helpful in determining whether a blog is successful. The more statistics to analyze, the better. As I like statistics, I enjoy visiting Google Analytics where I registered some of my websites to acquire data. I was also using sitemeter.com, but since I did not use it for a long time, there is not enough data available yet to decide how useful it is.
What I like the most about Google Analytics is not only knowing how many people visit my websites daily, but what countries they come from. The most visitors come from countries like United States and United Kingdom, which is not really a surprise. However, some of my visitors also come from such countries like Denmark, Malaysia, Philippines, Germany, and Spain. I get a lot of satisfaction knowing that I receive visitors from all over the world. I try to write my posts in an easy to understand language, and perhaps my hard work has paid off. It is really interesting to see and analyze such data. I encourage you to install Google Analytics if you have not done so already, especially if you do not use any other similar software instead.
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.
There are many bloggers who devote their time to discover new ways of making money online. Many of them are probably aware of the existence of various forums where people can discuss different aspects of earning money on the web. You can either search for forums using search engines, or you can look at some lists of such forums that are sometimes posted on websites. Often such lists contain names of dozens forums where you can learn something about making money online. However, in this article I would like to discuss different categories of forums devoted to making money. Generally, you can divide them into eight basic categories. Here they are:
1. Webmaster related. They focus on creating a website, and earning money from it. Those who like created websites will enjoy this way of making money.
2. Miscellaneous. Those are general forums that discuss all types of money making topics.
3. Domain name related. Some people buy and sell various domains.
4. Affiliate/Internet marketing related. Affiliate marketing can be a big source of income according to many experts. Of course, it requires some marketing skills and patience.
5. Work at home related.
6. Business related. Starting an online business can be a difficult task, but it can certainly be rewarding.
7. Online programs and HYIP related topics.
8. Money saving and free stuff related. You would be amazed how much money you can save by various means.
You never know from what type of forum you may benefit the most, so make sure you check out at least a few types of them.
There are dozens of languages that people use to communicate with each other on the Internet. In the past, you always had to pay to learn foreign languages. It was obvious that if you want to learn to speak and write Italian or Spanish you had to take a course and pay for it. Today, the reality is different. With the widespread access to the Internet many services became free, and you no longer have to spend money on them. There are free courses on the Internet that are 100% legit and can help you learn and understand a foreign language. I know that BBC offers such courses, and if you are interested you can check their site for more details. Apart from regular courses there are also other ways of learning foreign languages. You can, for example, visit a chat where people speak the language you wish to learn. You can then practice such language by talking with people who speak the language of your choice. This is in fact a very effective way of learning. While English is the most widely used language on The Internet is the Western world, the truth is that there are many valuable websites in other languages.
Some time ago Microsoft decided that it will abandon the plan to scan books in libraries in order to make their contents searchable on the Internet. The books that Microsoft was scanning were in the public domain and no copyright books were used without the permission of the author. On the other hand, Google not only is still scanning books, but it scans books protected under copyright law. In my opinion, it is always a good thing if people have access to knowledge and making books available online would be a step in this direction. It is unclear to me why Microsoft decided to abandon the project, but I hope that Google is not going to make the same choice, as it has a chance to contribute to the society by allowing people to have access to knowledge.
It seems that these days more and more people decide to scan their documents and pictures. Scanners are becoming more accessible each day and more people realize how useful they are. Overall, scanners are also more accurate each year so no wonder that they are so popular. If someone wants a high quality scanner he will no longer need to spend a lot of money on it.
The Internet serves many different purposes, and that is why people use it for many different purposes. Some only play online games, some only browse forums, some engage in chats. But how about social networking like MySpace? Apart from dangers that might await you there, there are many benefits that you can gain from participating in social networking. First and foremost, you have a chance like you never had before to meet the people that share the same interests as you. This cannot be usually achieve in a place where you live, because what is the probability that somebody in your workplace enjoys, for example, horse riding? If you have never tried social networking, I recommend that you give it a try to at least get a feeling of what it is like.
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.