100 tips for building and maintaining a successful blog
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This document provides 100 tips for building and maintaining a successful blog. It discusses topics such as choosing a content management system, domain name, web hosting, plugins, content creation, promotion, design, monetization, and community building. The tips are part of a larger upcoming eBook on the same topic that will provide more detailed guidance and be commercially published and marketed in September 2012.
100 tips for building and maintaining a successful blog
- 1. 100 Tips for Building and Maintaining a Successful Blog is the 2500th article published on this website.Free Infographic is also included so that you print it. 100 Tips for Building and Maintaining a Successful Blog is not any Blockbaster name, but it will be really for the beginners and will work as a reminder for to do list for the experts. Are You Celebrating with this 100 Tips for Building post ? I am quite professional about blog and its not really any celebration. This 100 Tips for Building and Maintaining a Successful Blog is a post with a free Infographic. There will be a small e-book with the same name 100 Tips for Building and Maintaining a Successful Blog, that will be more detailed, there will be SEO tips, Link building tips, will be marketed and published by a standard publishing company and will cost really less. The profit will not go to my wallet. I hope that e-book on 100 Tips for Building and Maintaining a Successful Blog will be available around September 2012. Lets Start 100 Tips for Building and Maintaining a Successful Blog Building a website means buying a .com domain, a good webhost like Rackspace and WordPress with Genesis Framework. I am a consumer of all but not an affiliate of any. 1. Use WordPress as CMS be it a personal, Money making through Google AdSense or an Enterprise Blog. From Yahoo to Rackspace all uses WordPress for blogging purpose. 2. Buy a .com domain with intended keywords in the URL and Install WordPress on a good webhost which provides white lebelled IP. 3. Sign up for Google Services including Google Analytics, Google Plus, Webmaster Tools, Adwords and Feedburner. Other includes Technorati, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook (Page and App), Stumble Upon, Digg, Delicious. These are minimum. 4. To be technically right, always make an arrangement for automated and manual Full Backup including MySQL and FTP contents. 6. Always check whether your Blog is displayed properly in all major browsers: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari. This is very important if you are using a Cache Plugin. 7. Optimize the page loading Speed by revision of your Theme, using a CDN and cache plugins with manual tweaks. 8. The logo is very important part. May be spending money by hiring a pro will help you to get a good logo. 9. Always be enthusiastic, informative, honest and positive. I specified few brands, none of them pays me or will pay. But they seems to me the best. 10. Sometimes success is incredibly fast, sometimes it takes more time. The key is to stay active and never to feel discouraged. 11. Rediscover new sub categories where you can write.
- 2. 12. Never allow spams, troll on comments. Delete option is always there. 13. Your personality is also relevant to readers. Many a times, I critisized Google very badly. They are among my most popular posts. I have passed it rightly does not mean you can even try it. It is my practical life's charector. It never means I hate Google. Criticizing is an art and it requires high level of normal legal knowledge - what you are saying should remain up to a limit and convey your depth of thought. 14. Celebrate your success with your readers bur on a professional blog never tell your sad stories and hardships. 15. Unlike print media, blog entries can be edited within a snap. This is a big advantage. 16. Read the blogs of your niche and try to understand why the hell the blogger wrote the post. May be the Keyword or Keyphrase is important, may be something other. When Ads are used, no one writes without a proper reason. 17. Analyze your statistics from Google Analytics regularly to identify top landing pages that bring you the most traffic and find out your niche of success. My niche is to write about core articles and Guides on Computing. 18. Nowadays many professional web blogs uses hired writers to write. As these writers never has the degree or knowledge like you, their quality will always be bad. Just find such blogs and get the keywords. 19. Read authoritative text books to develop your expertise in your niche. 20. What the Newspapers are writing are important. Often you will get clues on ongoing trend as they are written by very efficient journalists. 21. Make a a to do list. Right now, on my to do list is to write more articles on Digital Photography. 22. Never try to repeat posts. It happens knowingly or unknowingly. 23. Hire a professional for getting more ideas. 24. Never write posts or create blogs on hot trending topics only. This will give instant traffic boost and sudden fall. In front of my eyes, a blog on Windows 8 went to sky and its condition is very poor now. Two years ago I estimated, in 2012 the trend will be towards smaller devices and Linux. Today it appears to me I was right. A successful Windows Vista blog is no where in search result today despite it writes about latest version of Windows now. 25. Never try to immediate bigger News websites like CNN. Journalists writes the posts. They are trained how to ignite and how to control it. 26. Try to write on varied topics within a limit of niche, more is the chance that you have to be mentioned on the web. Limit means, on this website I can not write on a Cars automatic transmission.
- 3. Its a separate niche. 27. Boring theories can be delivered in digested way. This makes a blog evergreen. 28. Quality and quantity both are important. Logically 30 thousands of original posts will bring at least 30 thousands visitors per day. 29. Write drafts of articles in advance, it is very important. 30. Whether you will write the title first or body first, totally depends on you. In print media, body is written first when a compelling title is written. But on Internet, the Keyword is a big factor. 31. Make your articles attractive and neat by the usage of pictures, lists and sub headers. Number of sub headers should be limited, otherwise it will loss its merit. 32. Relinking your old posts needs a bit perfection. Never push an old article, if only needed manually link it. WordPress Plugins are quite great to do some autolinking. 33. Write in a way so that you never have to revise it 4-5 times to correct it. 34. Related posts are best listed under the post. YERPP is a very effective plugin for this purpose. 35. Submit your articles to all the social websites I mentioned above, manually. 36. Understand yourself. One keyword might have big value but you are not really right to write it - I mean to say - Engine differs. 37. Talk with mass audience in real life to get what actually people wants to know. 38. Giving an option for Downloading the post as pdf is becoming a norm. If possible, create the pdfs manually and link them instead of using plugins. 39. Offer evergreen download-able resources : for example wallpapers. 40. Facilitate submission to online bookmarks by the visitors by using Socialize like Plugins. 41. Never offer influential bloggers to post on your blog. You are yourself an institution. 42. Rel Tags are becoming more and more important. Give importance on this fact. 43. Use original headshot of you in Author Biography. 44. In the same way, use an original avatar in other areas. 45. Logo and your pictures - both are icons. Its very important to understand where to use which one. 46. Use Google Double Click to deliver Ads instead of using Google AdSense codes directly. It has many advantages - faster page loading, possible high revenue and you can set to open the Ad website in new
- 4. Window when clicked by a visitor. 47. Install newest good Google XML Sitemap Generator plugin to facilitate the work of indexing search engines. Today, the norm has been to use a sitemap index. 48. Permalinks are very important part. thecustomizewindows.com/my-article/ is memorable and optimized, thecustomizewindows.com/my-article1267 is more optimized but difficult to remember, thecustomizewindows.com/index.php?my-article is none. 49. Use Adwords to get traffic, increase SERP (yes, good webpages gets good SERP if promoted through Adwords) and use the Keywords tool. 50. Optimize the keywords of your webpages. 51. Use keywords in alt tags of your images and file names. This is very old trick. 52. Give importance to only one blog, then choose the second one carefully. You might have to buy several domains to test. Reject bad growing, select good going. Darwin said it many years ago. 53. Write in a calm room. 54. Content is the king. Create textual content to get traffic. 55. Fighting with normal life might become difficult as others will not understand how much time is needed for keyword research. Its you who can refer them to a Psychiatrist as its your website which brings the AdSense cheque every month. 56. Create a plan for future development of design, promotion etc. 57. Organize server directories properly for backup storage, download resources etc. 58. Never try to imitate the Design oriented blogs - Smashing is a Design oriented blog for example. These setup is not for an individual but for a bigger team. 59. Create a checklist of things to think about when you post an article. 60. Do not waste time in searching, commenting, reading emails, playing on Internet. 61. Instead of getting stuck on a problem, ask for professional assistance. 62. So to stand out, design of a blog is important. 63. Highlight content in a polite and neutral way - if I put a flickering button here, it will disturb you to read the list. 64. Avoid false promises. 65. Navigation menus must be clear, bigger, attractive and Search Engine Optimized.
- 5. 66. Wikipedia and WordPress are perfect examples how websites should be. 67. Do not overload your pages with your 125 x 125 ads. The Ads really disturbs. 68. Learn from other blogs to get succes. 69. Study the usability of your site through the web tools. 70. If your website's name is a bit difficult to remember, like ours - TheCustomizeWindows.com, try to help users to remember it. Even, use a different domain and 301 redirect it for using it offline. Anyhow give clues so that the visitors at least can search on Google to get the full url. I often forget the url of quite good websites. 71. Experiment with business after a level of success on blogging. 72. Advertise on this website shows the advertisers that you are open to partnerships. 73. Reinvest a portion of your income to buy links, put 125 x 125 Ads on others websites. 74. Use YouTube Videos to promote your website. The casting females can be found on all over the Internet. 75. Create a forum, if possible a premium forum without Ads. 76. Create an effective slogan. Its a difficult step. 77. Take proper Copyright of your own trademarks. 78. Stay consistent in your articles. Every regular reader knows, one Wallpaper will be posted everyday among 4-5 posts / day on this blog. 79. Promote your RSS feeds like doing a war. RSS feed is so effective tool to spread your honey (or poison) that your backlinks might be increased automatically by the scrappers. 80. Give visitors the option to subscribe via email. 81. Show the number of your subscribers. 82. Do not publish your full articles in RSS feeds, it will attract scappers. 83. Sign up for your own RSS feed and check them religiously. 84. Publish regularly. The standard for highly completive niche now is around 4 articles per day. People advised two per day before. 85. Some people likes to divide the article in to 1, 2, 3, 4... numbered subpages. It can be pathetic to the visitor.
- 6. 86. Advertise your future projects. 87. Reply to important comments. 88. Send emails to your readers using Mail Chimp like services. 89. Avoid link exchange on sidebars towards poor quality blogs or websites. 90. Promote Open Source, Help Open Source by funding and get promoted. 91. Never Spam with comments on other blogs. 92. Help other bloggers. 93. Website's rank increases and decreases. Try to find out why it was increased. 94. We wrote about the four important static pages before. 95. Ask readers to suggest ideas for tips and topics. 96. Encourage readers to comment at the end of each article. Closing comments is not what today's readers like much. 97. Moderate the comments and Optimize your database. 98. Create surveys, questions to readers using PollDaddy. 99. Install subscribe to comments plugin for WordPress. Its a missile plugin to retain visitors. 100. A good blog is an asset, not only for you, but for all. In distress, ask others to help. To know more, please visit our website: http://thecustomizewindows.com/