Top 5 Habits of Successful Bloggers

Do you have what it takes to emerge on top in the blogosphere? Five dominating qualities have proved themselves to be necessary to succeed in this quickly-changing industry. Although there are arguably many more critical aspects of blogging that are imperative to some extent, these five are the first few that stick out in my mind as important: * Be your own promoter: Why should you pay John Doe from Anytown, USA to promote your blog when you can do it yourself? Hundreds of thousands of content-starved readers use social networking sites every day, bringing unforeseen traffic to your blog with much less effort than working out a payment plan with John Doe. When you do the work yourself, you can also be assured that the job has been completed, and you know that you have not been cheated out of the $x that you paid John Doe (I have had this happen to me in the past, hence my emphasis on this point). I can not emphasize enough that it is your blog, so there is no valid point is letting someone else do your work, especially when you can do it better. * Establish your content, then your users: Guilty as charged. I have tried to launch many sites “as-is,” with no content whatsoever. “If you build it, they will come” may have worked in Field of Dreams, but there is Hollywood, and there is the real (virtual?) life. You wouldn’t jump out a window to see if you could fly like Superman, would you? Apply the same principle to blogging, you need a content base before users will come to your site. Don’t try to promote a blog without sufficient content, or you will be left in the dust. * Update regularly: You don’t need to update your blog daily. You don’t even have to update it every other day. You can update your blog as often as you feel like it, as long as it is regular. Why do you think web sites like Engadget get so many views per day? It is because they update 5 times per day. Visitors can anticipate how often (on a day-to-day basis) a blog will update, and they will visit you when they anticipate an update. If your new post is not there by the end of the, let’s say, day, then you have just lost one, two, a hundred, maybe more visitors forever. People by nature expect regularity and some form of order. If you update one day, leave your blog alone for 6 months, then update again, don’t expect any readers to notice. * Have consistently good content: So, you wrote a 10-page report on the affect that Google has on the Internet. Your report is said to be “amazing” and “spectacular.” Your very next post is “Man, Google is the shiznit. Peace out!” Absolutely no consistency in content. First of all, I don’t think that many people in the blogosphere will enjoy the contrast between your professional report and your street talk. Secondly, the professional report instantly looks plagiarized when noticing the contrast between the two posts. What kind of person would write 10 pages in perfect English one day, then the next suddenly shift gears? * Guest post on other blogs: By far, this is the best way that I have found to generate targeted traffic to your blog. Find a list of 10 blogs on your topic, and send an e-mail to the blog’s author(s) asking if you can make a guest post on their blog. Rule of thumb here is to never charge for this post. The moment that the author looks at your e-mail, the first thing that (s)he will look for is the cost for them. If there is any cost, and you are a relative nobody in the blogosphere, you are out of luck. When your offer is accepted, ask the author(s) what kind of content they want. Don’t just tell John Doe that you want to write an article on “Making Money on the Internet.” Say that you want to write, and you can write on many topics. This will give the author(s) more options in what you write, making (s)he more likely to accept your generous offer.

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