Success at Blogging tips

First off: bloggers just starting out should start on one of the many free blogging tools out there. You could start with blogger, wordpress or even vox.

If you are going to blog mainly because you want to promote your squidoo lenses, choose your free blogging network wisely: choose one where linking out to only one domain is not going to be a problem. I recommend squidtop.

For lensmasters only there are also Crabbysbeach and Squidlog. The advantage of these squidoo specific places is that there's no problem with linking to numerous squidoo lenses. The disadvantage is that google will see you have mostly squidoo related links.

Squidlog and Crabbysbeach have added a lot of social features lately. I'm not sure yet whether these are an advantage or a disadvantage from a search engine perspective. They are certainly a distraction that I'm not too happy about personally. I mean - I'm friending people there that I'm also twittering with, on facebook with and see regularly at squidu.

You need to find out if you're enough of a writer to keep that writing juice flowing. This is best done on a free account - mostly because paid hosting is more of a hassle (it also costs a bit of money).

The free account you use should have the basics of search engine optimization automatically installed. This is true for all mentioned services.

Blogging is a social networking tool - and most social networking sites have mechanisms in place to prevent spam. What lensmasters call self promotion often fits the terms of spam for free blogging platforms like blogger and wordpress.

What you need to make sure of in order to be able to stay at your free blogging platform is that you should always link out to several domains on your blog. For instance linking out to your etsy pages, your ebay profile, your cafepress products etc. If you do that regularly, linking out to squidoo lenses will not be a problem.

There have been several lensmasters sharing at squidu that they had a squidoo related blog on blogger or wordpress that was closed precisely for this reason: linking out only (or mainly) to squidoo.

So - if your only online presence you want to promote on your blog is squidoo, you'd better find a squidoo friendly place to blog. That could be a self hosted blog or wordpress based squidtop.

Even though you might be starting your blog because you want to create backlinks for your squidoo lenses or your other online projects - you still need to write for people.

You need to write for people because you want to write stuff that's so good, other people will want to link to it. If they do, your links to your lenses will count for more in google.

Blogging is a way to network online. That just works better if you remember that social networking is about being SOCIAL. More about that below.

But think about it for a second: What blogs do you like reading? What bloggers are popular in your niche? Don't strive to be like them. Learn from what they are doing well and find your own style.

Be Social.

I'll start at this backwards.

A blogpost that's great will get links from other blogs. So think about what you are writing: will it interest people? Will it interest them enough to come back to your blog? Will it interest them enough to link to your site at some point?

That's really the basics. But it can be analyzed a bit more.

A blogpost is likely to get links if it:

Has great and necessary information on something people care about

Comes from a real emotion

Is well written

Asks an important question

Does all or most of the above

You should think about branding from day one. That is: you want to create a name for yourself and your product(s).

It could be your name is your brand. That's always a safe bet. Especially if your name is unusual. I did that on my first site: www.KatinkaHesselink.net. I knew I was probably going to put material on there about all kinds of things, so I wanted a domain name about what connected all that - which was me.

It could be that you have a specific topic you want to be associated with. From my handle here on squidoo you can probably guess that I want to be associated with 'spirituality'.

However, spirituality is such a general word that it's not good for branding. I picked spirituality as my handle because it's a great keyword.

If you have one topic you are mainly interested in, finding a domain name that includes that topic or keyword is a good idea.

However, you may find that the result is a very boring domain name. It may be more prudent to pick a catchy short phrase as the title of your blog. I started out thinking about that and came up with pondering first (but domainnames with pondering in them were all taken) - then my dad looked up 'pondering' in the dictionary and came up with various other word phrases that described the same thing. I looked up domainnames related to that and 'all considering' hadn't been taken yet. So I started 'allconsidering.com', which is my spiritual blog.

As a title for a blog it has the advantage of being catchy. It also has the advantage that I can go very wide in my writing about spirituality. After all - I'm implicitly telling people I'll be considering all. This is another way of saying that All Considering is a good choice for a blog that has branding.

This domain name has the disadvantage that it does not have a great keyword in there. But my family really didn't like the domainnames I came up with which had the word 'spirituality' in them. They seemed too impersonal to them. They instinctively went for branding over keywords.

If you can come up with something which combines keywords and branding: that's the way to go.

If you think you might someday want to sell your site: go for keywords.

If you think you might become big like google or yahoo - think branding. After all: neither yahoo or google are going to sell their domain names and those names didn't mean a thing when they started. They just made sure they were so good that there brands became household words.

This might seem like too much to do when you are starting your first blog on a free host. Still it's very different to have a blog on

healthy.wordpress.com
or
kh7.wordpress.com

The first means something: it includes a keyword. The second doesn't.
The second is more of a brand, but not a good one (it's mine by the way on several online fora).

So: start a weblog on a free blog and think about branding or keywords or both when picking that (sub)-domain.

Online social networking is all the buzz online. It can be summarized as 'you want to be popular'.

When blogging the idea is that you want to become popular with people blogging about your niche.

This means you have to become known.

People have to like you.

All this means: give before you can expect to receive (as in links).

Commenting
This means subscribing to blogs on your topic (or related to your topic). Comment on them (leaving a link to your site as your url).
Comment in ways that actually mean something.

In other words: read the post you are commenting on and say something interesting about it. If you can't say something interesting, at least point out what struck you most in the article you are commenting on.

Link Out
Link out to important blogs in your niche. Make sure that once the blogpost you link out from is published, you click on that link. That way the person behind the other blog can see in their stats that you linked out to them. Most of them will go to your blog to check it out. Perhaps they will even turn into regular readers and commentators on your blog. All the better.

The Conversation
You want your blog to be part of the conversation in your niche.

This means responding to the latest news.
It means (if possible) having a unique perspective.
Or just summarizing the various viewpoints very well.

It means - I can't stress this enough: do link out to others. Especially to posts you've read that were especially useful. This is a service to your readers. Your readers are more likely to come back to your blog if you are useful to them.

I've written about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) before. From a blogging perspective it boils down to this (this is merely an introduction to the subject):

Think about every piece of text you emphasize. Make sure there are keywords in there.

For instance titles: look at them several times before publishing. Can you work a relevant keyword in the title of your blogpost? If so, do it.

Links: Whether it's a link to your blog you are asking for or a link to a related website - make sure you link out with relevant keywords in that link.

Promote your blog like you would your lenses.
Drop the link to your blog whenever it's relevant (and polite).