5 Strategies For Finding Success With Blogging

Blogs have become a widely popular form of communication on the internet. A blog is an information or blog site published on the Internet consisting of blog-style, usually informal text posts. Posts are generally displayed in reverse chronological order, which means that the latest post appearing first is at the top of the page, and the oldest post appearing at the bottom. Some blogs use thumbnail images to represent the contents of posts, and there are some that use status updates as their main features.

Because blogs can be informal and often descriptive, it’s easy for new blog owners to “get off on the right foot” and come up with interesting content ideas without too much prior planning. However, planning out a good blog architecture can be difficult because of the wide variety of blog structures available on the internet. There are many formats including blog forums, statuses (which tracks popularity by users’ votes), wikis (an online community with a wiki), hybrid blogging (which combines text and image postings on the same blog) and the old standby, the editorial calendar. The editorial calendar presents blog posts in the form of an article calendar, listing all the dates within the calendar that a blog post was created or published. The calendar gives users a clear idea of when to look for new content ideas for a blog and provides search engine optimization (SEO) value by helping the site return higher to higher rankings when searched for.

In addition to providing useful information for readers, bloggers should also take the time to carefully select their keywords so they can attract the target audience for their blogging. Keywords help optimize a blog for the search engines and help attract visitors to the site. While most bloggers have a strong sense of what keywords they should use, learning how to choose keywords for a blog can involve a lot of trial and error.

One other important aspect of blogging is social media. Many bloggers use social media in addition to their blogging efforts and these bloggers should consider using some type of social media tool such as Twitter, Facebook, Orkut, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon or Digg. Social media allows a blogger to interact directly with their target audience, something that is difficult to do for a blog. Social media allows a blogger to share links to their blogs through these social media outlets, which helps boost traffic to the blog. Social media can also give a blog owner the chance to build up a network of followers.

Bloggers should also try to blog according to a schedule. Although it is easy to be spontaneous when creating blog posts, it is better to take the time to plan each writing session. A blogger should ideally schedule their blog posts to coincide with a period of time (or sometimes an event) when they are more likely to write about a particular topic. For instance, if a blog post is due the day after Thanksgiving, a blogger might schedule the post to be written around this time. As a result, many blog posts are written around various holidays.

A final strategy for success involves building links within the online community. By building links with other bloggers within the online community, a blog can gain exposure by gaining inbound links. Many blog owners choose to engage in link exchanges, where they exchange links with another blog so that both gain inbound links. These links are valuable to the search engines and help to increase a sites ranking.