Recently, I have been asked about blogging a few times, both from friends and professionally. I was asked how to make your blog searchable, how do people find the blogs, can a blog be found by searching on Google or other search engines?
There are so many really useful sites out there that teach you various tips and tricks of blogging that I really wondered what value I had to add. I am no authority in blogging, so IM’very’HO I shared my blogging experiences with them. It would be great to hear more from experienced bloggers with more tips for new bloggers.
Your blog needs to be up for sometime before it starts showing up in Google search results. Of course people need to be searching for something that is available on your blog. There are syndication sites where you can post register your blog. This enables your blog to appear in categories that might interest others. BloggerBarter has a fairly comprehensive list of such syndication sites.
There are hundreds of new blogs coming up every day so it is a little hard to imagine people are actively looking for new blogs, though I am sure some people do. You may find some of the tips below useful to get a larger readership to your blog:
- Publicize your blog to your friends – send email, put it on Facebook, put the link in your email signature etc. Direct your friends/colleagues/acquaintances to your blog and recent posts.
- For people to return to your blog, it must have interesting things to read. Have a theme for your blog. If it a rant so be it, but then it needs to be interesting, spicy, saucy, or something that will pull the readers.
- Good writing is critical for people to return to your blog. Poor writing is a great turn-off to the reading experience.
- Read other people’s blogs. Read many different blogs. Then start commenting on them. When you comment, you leave a trail back to your blog and other people start visiting your blog.
- Liberally refer to other people’s blog in your blog. Eventually other bloggers will start mentioning your blog in their blog, increasing your readership.
- For readers to return to your blog, it needs to be updated frequently with new content. I have been reading blogs and many bloggers post practically every day. I started with posting once a month but now I post about 5-6 posts a month, which is low compared to many other blogger. It is quite hard work trying to keep pace.
- Write about something that people are searching for. Surprisingly I wrote a post on iPhone that is the post that has most hits through search results. Set up Google Analytics on your blog. This will help you track keywords that are being used to reach your blog.
- Become member of various online groups. Basically build your digital footprint.
- Read about blogging as such. There are also many slides on Slideshare. These give you tips to become a blogger. Interestingly a recent post from Sue Waters has some interesting insights about Technorati and searching for blogs. Blog Bloke also seems like an interesting site with lots of resources about blogging.
Happy blogging... :-)
3 comments:
Thanks Manish for linking to my post on Technorati. I'm glad you my insights into technorati interesting. An additional tip would be twitter -- it is amazing how many people are now relying on links posted in twitter.
Thanks for your comment Sue. I have just started on Twitter a few weeks ago. I guess to realize the power of Twitter is to 'follow' many people and have people following you. But I have been intimidated with the phenomenal number of updates on Twitter. I also visited pages of a few people who I might have liked to 'follow' and was amazed to see the number of updates. At this time I think this is far too much info for me to handle. I am taking it a little slow on Twitter. Let's see how it goes.
The key with Twitter is to find the tools that help you cope. I suggest if you only have a low number of followers that you use Twhirl and you will soon see that it isn't so bad :)
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