4 Pillars of Successful Blogging

by Michael Scottsdale on August 22, 2011 · 26 comments

This is a guest post by Michael Scottsdale from InterMedia.net.

Blogs are like journals where we could express and share our thoughts with people. But these have come a long way from its humble beginnings and have now become one of the most effective marketing strategies available.

With the growing popularity of blogs both as a medium for personal expression and marketing, getting to the top could be a daunting task even for the seasoned professional.

Blogging is a cost-effective method of promoting goods and services. Because of their personal nature, it gives you the opportunity to market products in a simpler and friendly tone. Unlike hard marketing websites, blogs offer you a subtle way of increasing your reader’s interest in a product or service.

For those having difficulties improving blog traffic, here are 4 simple tips on how you can optimize your blogs:

Great Content

“People read blogs not search engines”

It all starts with writing good content. SEO gets people to your visit your blog but content is what keeps them coming back. Writing is much simpler once we get to write about topics we generally are interested about.

Specializing in a particular topic may mean a decrease in potential visitors but they offer you a more targeted approach to traffic generation. This will leave you with a better chance of gaining an audience that is genuinely interested in your blog. If you’re planning to use your blog as a medium for selling products or a services it would be a good idea to keep these within the context of your blog.

Feedback

Blogs give us an excellent way of communicating our thoughts and effective communication is a two-way street. Provide your readers with options for giving feedback by opening your comment box or providing an email where they could throw you a message.

It gives you valuable insight into what your readers are thinking and gives you a source of possible future topics. It also makes them feel important building trust and loyalty among your readers.

Blog + SEO

For website developers and bloggers, SEO is an important consideration in optimizing a website. This is certainly essential but should not be the only focus. Everyday bloggers who may not have the technical prowess in this field maybe intimidated at first but this should not be too difficult with a little bit of research and patience. Keywords are the secret ingredients in helping your blogs get better visibility over search engines. This is perhaps the easiest of all SEO techniques and is essential for any serious blogger.

Write Regularly

Readers like you would love to visit websites that has always something fresh to offer. You wouldn’t want to buy yesterday’s newspaper or watch a show that’s been running the same episode for weeks. If you’re running out of fresh ideas why not write about personal experiences, they excellent for light reading and gives your readers an inside look into you as an author.

Putting up new content regularly spurs interest in your readers but more importantly helps you get ranked higher in search engines. Each blog post are like little votes that help you get better page ranking while keeping your readers interested in visiting your blog regularly.

Putting It All Together

Blogs are created for various reasons. Some use it as a medium for expression and others for marketing. But whatever the reason, driving traffic to the website is the ultimate objective. If you’ve been blogging for a while and don’t see the type of numbers then it might be high time you start re-evaluating your strategies.

Getting them to visit to your website is one thing but turning them to devoted readers is another thing altogether.

This post is a part of SmartBloggerz’s guest blogging contest where you can win cash prizes for earning the most points. Help this guest author win this contest by commenting and sharing this post using the buttons below.


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Article Written By Michael Scottsdale

Michael Scottsdale is an online marketing manager and currently works as a consultant for online businesses. When he’s not writing for Intermedia’s Hosted Exchange, he could be found blogging about simple tips on how people could take advantage of the internet’s numerous business opportunities.

Michael Scottsdale has written 1 superb article(s) on this blog


{ 26 comments… read them below or add one }

Garish August 22, 2011 at 1:59 pm

hmm, nice tips. Regularity is where most bloggers fail as they get out of ideas most of the time. One must focus on this. Thanks for sharing.
Garish recently posted..7 interesting ways to generate new ideas for your guest postsMy Profile

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Charlie August 29, 2011 at 8:22 pm

I agree Garish! we see thousands of great blogs lying ideally there, which really stated well, but now the blog owners have abandoned them, i guess patience is the key as far as blogging is concerned!

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Benjamin Hübner August 22, 2011 at 3:04 pm

Writing a Blog wiothout ltots of traffic is just like writing a bestseller book just to take it and never show it anybody!

But like I see on a good friends of mine, is high quality and enticing content copletely enough to make his blog popular! He didn´t knows anything about SEO, löink building or Social media….but it works!

Just SOme Enticing Content (It isn´t highly valuable nformation, more like oppinions!)
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Cally August 22, 2011 at 3:08 pm

Wow it amazes me how great the guest bloggers are here at Smartbloggerz! this was an outstanding article on how to successfully create and maintain a blog with loyal readers. If you can get feedback on what you write thats always the best way to improve your blog as well as on a personal plane. Its all really a mix of your toolset that has to be implemented for your blogging to be successful and you structured it perfectly Michael!
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Michael Scottsdale August 22, 2011 at 4:37 pm

Thank you Benjamin and Cally for the wonderful feedback. Much has been said about SEO but I believe that content writing will always be the heart of a website. Kudos to Sushant and the other great writers here at smartbloggerz. Always been a great source of information.

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Melly Lifshitz August 22, 2011 at 10:11 pm

Driving traffic is indeed the ultimate strategy but you should have great content so that that traffic will become loyal visitors and will recommend your blog through word of mouth.
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Jenny August 23, 2011 at 1:31 pm

Hi Michael,

If the site contains great contents, then everything will follow because people or even bloggers will look after the useful and informative contents like this post you made. Thanks for sharing :)

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Michelle Sterling from Green Valley real estate August 23, 2011 at 2:29 pm

Brilliant article Michael, blogging indeed is about communicating with the other readers and this is the reason I like visiting blogs. I don’t think a blog which thinks only about monetizing would survive for long. I agree that good content and SEO works are equally important but its the readers which keeps a blog alive.

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bhumika August 23, 2011 at 9:30 pm

I do all of these..yet somehow coz of the panda effect or coz I got a domain..my traffic fell down 50% :( (
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Barry Wheeler August 23, 2011 at 11:22 pm

Great advice. I’ve seen major improvement with my own personal blog and several of the other sites I run now that I’m writing regularly. Feedback and engagement is increasing and I’m very pleased with how things have improved.

These may seem like simple tips, but they are very effective.
Barry Wheeler recently posted..Get Rid of Headlines that Suck Once and For AllMy Profile

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Chris August 23, 2011 at 11:23 pm

These are definitely the most important factors when it comes to blogging success. Many people think that if you just write great content, it will find its way to go viral. You need to consider SEO before you start your blog, then fill it with useful content, promote that content via every possible channel and then see what people are saying about it.
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Kostas August 24, 2011 at 1:45 am

Content is by far the most important factor of a successful blog but the second most important is networking with other successful bloggers on your niche, in that way you can get a lot of traffic if other blogs write about or if bloggers share your content with their followers
Kostas recently posted..Your Blog – How to Make Search Engines Love ItMy Profile

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Mack August 24, 2011 at 9:21 am

I just have a question. One of the four pillars for successful blogging that you stated is “Feedback” But I’ve seen blogs and websites who are successful, established and ranked well on the SERPs yet they don’t have options in their articles for a feedback or comment. Is it possible to be successful without the “feedback pillar”?

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Jean August 24, 2011 at 12:53 pm

Consistency is huge in my opinion. I am positive all of us have in it us to write that one great article, but can you do it on a consistent basis? If you can consistently write quality content you are well on your way to have a successful blog!

-Jean
Jean recently posted..The importance of running correct tire pressuresMy Profile

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Janett Brown August 24, 2011 at 2:37 pm

The biggest mistake a blogger can make is to pay more attention to SEO and forget about content. Let’s take one strategy of SEO, blog commenting. Well, you will be commenting on the same blogs for a period of time. And this means the same visitors. Well, if they check your blog more than once and see that you have the same content all the time, they will never come back again. And this means that you’ve lost those visitors forever.
Thank you for this great article. :)

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Nazmus August 25, 2011 at 10:28 pm

That’s so true. I’ve seen some people just fill their blogs with keywords and try to get as many visitors as possible. It works for them but usually the visitors just come in once. You should try to build a user-base that continues to visit to read your new content.
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Sherry August 24, 2011 at 10:22 pm

I actually love what you quoted up there. Find it striking since more and more web marketers tend to get concern more on the robots than the humAN readers. To think that robots have this greater concern to give the best quality of searchers to his masters– who happens to be human readers.

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Brent August 25, 2011 at 2:50 am

I agree with Jean. The hardest part of blogging for me is being consistent with posting new content. I’ve always been a bit, um, ADD, so I have a calendar appointment set for 1 hour twice a week for “research” and “writing”.

Hopefully that helps my productivity :)
Cheers,
Brent

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Loc August 25, 2011 at 2:01 pm

15 or 20 years ago where if you post great content then people will come. Now a days, there’s so much competition that you need to promote it with SEO, have great contents, reply to comments and so on. How quickly time have change.

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Emily August 26, 2011 at 11:09 am

You are so right loc, nothing is possible these days without promotion. Even if the content and stuff is really good and a must read still you need to promote it by many ways. Not only that , your work doesn’t end with writing and posting you need to accept comments reply to those comments etc… then only you can receive success.

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neo August 26, 2011 at 5:01 pm

Hello Michael

I believe consistency is most important… Most of bloggers fails because of lack of consistency…. But if you dream of having a career with your blog, It’s important to have passion. You can’t stick to anything until you are not passionate about that thing..I will put that #5 & #6

BTW thanks for putting this tips altogether
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Shiva August 26, 2011 at 11:47 pm

Nice tips Michael,
I think you have rightly titled the post as pillars of successful blogging. Really Good Content, Interaction, SEO and regular writing are quite important to keep a blog alive as well as successful. If a blogger ignores any of these pillars then the blog certainly will be facing failure.
Shiva recently posted..Top 4 Ways to Generate Steady Blog TrafficMy Profile

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Michael Scottsdale August 27, 2011 at 2:09 pm

–The Author–

Hi guys,

As blog owners and writers I know that we all have a fair idea on how to make our blogs a success. IMHO these are just the basic foundations of a good blog. What we do after this is what differentiates our blog from others.

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Edward Rhidwan August 28, 2011 at 12:25 am

Hi Michael
Thanks for this great stuff.

This is what make blog successful. And i believe in order to do all of that pillar, First you have to know more about your reader. What make a great content? Whether one content is great or not, decide by readers, not by you. So it’s really important to know what is your goals in make an article post.

Great Post.

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Richard August 29, 2011 at 12:26 pm

I agree that the content needs to be informative and is important but I guess to let a user to look at your content, he has to be attracted by your page titles. It will help them get a quick idea of what your blog actually contains. And yes feedback is equally important to know how many people liked your blogs motivating you to write more.

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Massy September 26, 2011 at 5:25 pm

Nice post..!
if you want your blog to look alive then you need to have a really good and informative content. If your blog is rich in these factors then no one can stop it from becoming popular and successful. On the other hand the blog’s success is also depends on the reader. If he likes it then that thing helps a lot in making a blog successful.

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