Blog Business Plan: How to Create One

Steve Pavlina writes that you need to remember that the purpose of each post that you publish is to create genuine value for others.

He adds that when he sits down to write he sometimes imagines myself standing on an outdoor concert stage before an audience of a million people. He then asks himself, "What shall I say to this audience of fellow human beings?" Even if you have nowhere near the traffic that Steve has, copying this attitude is one of the things that will help you increase the number of visitors to your blog.

In addition, strong content not only brings traffic to your blog, it also encourages other sites to link to you.

photo credit: darrenstone

Tina Su, who blogs at "Think Simple Now" wrote in her article "From 0 to 2000+ Subscribers in 90 Days" --published in Darren Rowe's "Problogger" --that she added a note about subscribing to her email signature, so it appeared at the foot of every email she sent out. Do the same; let every email that you send out help market your blog.

photo credit: Tim Morgan

It's not enough to sign up for twitter and simply hope for the best. Create a strategy for yourself on how you will use twitter. Here's an example:

• Spend fifteen minutes on twitter every morning.


• Send a direct message to one follower each day.


• Tweet two interesting links which will provide value for others.


• Retweet something interesting one of your followers tweets about.


• Tweet one interesting quote.


• Send one broadcast on your latest blog post.


• Check to see if someone has asked a question in your area of expertise; if so, try to help them.


• Post one or two tweets about your day-to-day life, such as what you had for breakfast or something cute your kid just said.


• Find five interesting people to follow each day. (You can follow me).

Although twitter is definitely a way to meet great people whom you share common interests with, as well as a way of keeping informed, remember that you're using twitter primarily as a marketing tool. Consider subscribing to Twitip.com for more ideas on how to use twitter to market your blog.

photo credit: tashmahal

Squidoo lenses rank high on Google, so if you link back to your blog they provide yet another way for people to find you. Simply take posts you've already written and turn them into squidoo lenses. For example, one of the main topics for this blog is creativity. I've turned several of my posts on creativity into the following squidoo lens: "How to Be More Creative".

Squidoo.com has a dashboard from which you can check your stats: how many people are visiting each of your lenses, where they're coming from, and what urls they click on (so you can see how many people who visit your lenses click on your blog url). Join squidoo right now, just click here.

(Top Hat Squidoo Credit.)

I'm sure you've heard of the 4 P's of marketing:

• Product


• Pricing


• Promotion


• Placement

However, there's actually a fifth "P": Packaging. No matter how good your product is, it will be more difficult to get people to buy it if it comes wrapped in an ugly package. Likewise, you can have great content on your blog but if the design is inferior many people will simply bounce off your site. If you're looking for a great theme for your blog, you can't go wrong with the Thesis Theme.

Remarkablogger has a great post entitled "Create a Blog Pack to Get Blog Traffic and Increase Subscriptions" in which he explains that a "blog pack" is "a loose, informal alliance between people who are all near the same level in order to help each other grow."

Members of the pack help each other to grow by subscribing to each others' blogs, submitting their friends' best posts to social media sites, linking to each other (when appropriate), commenting on each others' blogs, and so on.

Also, participate in the projects carried out by members of your network (without stretching yourself too thin). This year, I've participated in several projects hosted by members of my network, including the following:

• Stacey from Createabalance.com asked her network to participate in creating an e-book, and I contributed an article;


• Robin from Let's Live Forever asked her network to send in a recording of their voice, which I did;


• Melissa from Writing Forward asked members of her network for a creative writing tip to include in a post she was putting together, and I sent in a tip; and so on.

photo credit: luc legay

Take a blog post you've written, change it around a bit so that it's not an exact copy of the blog post, and submit it to Ezinearticles.com. For example, I took my blog post "14 Tips to Stay Young" and turned it into these three articles:

• "How to Stay Young: Three Things You Probably Didn't Know"


• "Five Secrets to Reverse Aging"


• "Five Common Sense Tips to Help You Stay Young"

From the "Author's Area" on Ezinearticles.com you can see how many URL clicks you get for each of the articles you have submitted to them. This makes it easy to measure how much traffic you get from them.

photo credit: hotshots.at

By encouraging people to leave comments on your blog, and responding respectfully to those comments, you can create a vibrant community on your blog. If people enjoy stopping by your blog and feel a sense of belonging there, it's very likely that they'll tell their friends and encourage them to stop by as well. Word of mouth marketing is one of the most powerful marketing methods that there is.

Also, follow up on first time commentators. Set a goal to send a personal e-mail to one new commentator each day thanking them for taking the time to leave a comment and encouraging them to subscribe to your blog. Invite people to return to your blog.

photo credit: mrflip

Make sure that you only email those blog posts that you're certain would benefit their readers, and that you lay the proper groundwork first.

• Comment on their blog frequently with comments that add value;


• Submit a guest post that does well;


• Answer their questions on twitter, and so on.

Here's an article on Copyblogger with great suggestions on how to get A-List bloggers to link to you: "Why No One Links to Your Best Posts (And What to Do About It)".

An offshoot of networking with other bloggers is that sooner or later someone will ask to interview you on their blog, which will expose you to their readers. (And if they don't, take the first step and ask someone in your blogging network to interview you, as long as you've noticed that they interview people on their blog.) For instance, I was interviewed on the blog MizFitonline.com here.

Using attractive headlines is one way of getting readers to visit your blog from Search Engines and Feeds.

You want a title that is attractive to human visitors, drives reasonable search engine traffic, yields relevant contextual ads (in case you have adsense on your blog), fits the theme of the site, and encourages linking and social bookmarking.

For the ultimate list of blog heading templates, go here.

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