Blogging began as a way for individual writers to express themselves online, with each early \u201cweblog\u201d being almost like an internet diary.\u00a0 In the Web 2.0 age, it has since developed into one of the most important social media formats on the web.\u00a0 Blogs are now used not just by individuals to express thoughts and ideas or tell stories, but also by businesses to promote their offerings, build brand image, and to engage with customers.
\nWhat is a Successful Blog?<\/p>\n
The power of blogging comes from its immediacy and its interactivity.\u00a0 A blogger can publish a post about something as soon as it happens, meaning news found on blogs is about as up to the minute as it can get.\u00a0 Most blogs allow readers to comment and get involved in other ways like voting in polls.\u00a0 Essentially, the success of a blog can be judged in two ways \u2013 how many people see it, and how many people interact with it.<\/p>\n
The other measure of a successful blog is how well regarded it is.\u00a0 How many other blogs are recommending it?\u00a0 How many times does a tweet about a new post get re-tweeted?\u00a0 You should aim for your blog to be respected as an authority on whatever you are writing about, or, if your blog is for comedy or entertainment purposes, as a must read site for people looking for a laugh.<\/p>\n
Making Your Blog a Success<\/p>\n
To get your blog seen by the most people possible, you need to make sure you are posting regularly about interesting or topical things, and that you are writing in a way that will make the popular search engines place your pages as high up as possible in the results for relevant searches.\u00a0 To do this you need to learn the techniques and methods around search engine optimization (or SEO) and apply them to your writing.<\/p>\n
Secondly, you need to allow and encourage commenting and any other interactions from your readers, such as giving them the ability to follow you on social networks like Twitter.\u00a0 This way you can open up a dialog with the people who are reading your site and show that you take their interest seriously.<\/p>\n
As a third point, you need to promote your blog.\u00a0 If you already use Twitter, at the very least start tweeting about your blog, and sharing links to any new posts, but if you are really serious set up a new account just for the blog itself, and use it to share not only links, but other thoughts and comments in the same \u201cvoice\u201d as your blog.\u00a0 This gives a bit of a value add for your readers as they get that little bit of extra content from you, and also allows you to promote what you are doing as much as you can.\u00a0 You can also consider, once you start becoming popular, having a Facebook Fan Page for your blog, but only do this once you have built up a decent following, it could be counterproductive to have a Fan Page with only you and two of your friends listed as fans.<\/p>\n
Measuring Your Blog’s Success<\/p>\n
You can generally analyze how successful you blog has become by using analytics tools to see how many hits you have had on each of your posts.\u00a0 These tools, such as the version of Google Analytics you get on Google Blogger blogs, can also tell you things like which search terms people who found your site were using, where they found links to your site on the web (for example you can see, if you use Twitter or Facebook to share links to your blog, how many users each of these is bringing in) and where in the world your readers are located.\u00a0 Sometimes the results can be quite surprising, for example you may find a lot of users coming to your site because of a search term that has nothing to do with what you are actually blogging about, because of a collection of words you just used in your content. It is not just interesting to see this information, it also helps you work out areas where you can make tweaks to get more viewers.<\/p>\n
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