Step 1: Define Your Niche

Before you create a blog, it is important to decide on the theme or subject area your blog will cover.1 Two main factors should be considered when picking a topic to blog about, your audience and what you are passionate about, be it work or pleasure.

Determine Your Audience

Who your audience is will determine which type of blog host you use, the content of your blog, whether or not you publicize your blog and what success means for you in respect to your blogging endeavors. To determine your audience, ask yourself these questions:

Are you creating a blog primarily to keep in touch with family and friends?

Do you want to create a blog for people in your profession or who share your interests?

Is your blog an extension of your business?

Decide on a Subject

If you want your blog to be more than an online diary or a means of staying connected with family and friends, you will need to decide what subject matter your blog will cover. How focused your blog is on a particular subject is entirely up to you. Your blog can simply cover the stuff that is interesting to you and need not be defined beyond that. If, however, you would like to target your blog to a particular niche or audience, here are some things you might consider:

What are you interested in?

What are you an expert in?

Would your occupation be an interesting subject?

What do you think is currently missing online?

Do you have a goal that you’re trying to achieve that could be documented online?

Will you be able to blog about the subject matter consistently over a long period of time?

How many other blogs exist on the subject matter you’ve chosen? Do you have a fresh take to stand out from the rest?

If you need some inspiration, check out some of the most popular blogs on the internet through Technorati’s Popular Blogs page or the Webby Awards’ list of blogging nominees.

PLEASE NOTE: Take heed if you choose to blog about your workplace. Unless you password protect your blog, it is a public document. Most employers are web savvy, and even the most well-intended comments could run afoul of your workplace’s rules and regulations. Time and time again bloggers have been disciplined and even fired for negative or improper comments about their job posted on their blog.

SEO simply means search engine optimization or search engine optimizer. You might be saying okay now I know what those letter stand for but how the heck does it work?

I’ts the process of increasing the amount of visitors to your website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine (SERP-Short for search engine results). The higher a website ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that your site will be visited by a user. It is common practice for Internet users to not click through pages and pages of search results, so where a site ranks in a search is essential for directing more traffic toward your site. SEO helps to ensure that your site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine.

Now doesn’t that sound good?

Here are some helpful tips for your blogs to increase traffic and use SEO correctly.

Creating a SEO Friendly Blog

When creating a blog choose a title and URL that is search engine friendly and use keywords. Pick a topic and use it in your URL. Remember, a URL should not be more than 20 letters in length. This way the URL is easy to remember and type.

By using keywords in your URL and blog title, the search engines can relate searches to your blog.

If you are using WordPress there are many SEO plugins that give multiple options to help your search engine friendliness. Some themes have search engine options built into them already. Make sure you visit all the options and set them up. Just having the plugin or theme with SEO options built in is not enough if you do not set them up. Choosing a theme that is not complicated and that does not have “dirty CSS” coding is key also. You want the web crawlers to be able to read your content easily.

Creating A SEO Friendly Post

Each post you write on your blog is another chance for more traffic to your site. Create on topic posts using the topic as the keywords in the post, slug, tags, and categories. you can search for related keywords with Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Make sure you have keywords in the first sentence and last sentence. You can also use bold and italics to emphasize keywords. This helps the web crawlers understand the topic of the post. Link to content that is related to your blog post that is outside of your site. This will build relevance to your post.

If you have SEO options, fill them in with your keywords and create a description that is attention grabbing that includes your keywords. People searching for the topic will see the description. You want them to choose your site over the other search engine results.

Tracking SEO Results

You need to know if your SEO efforts have paid off. There are several ways to do this. Doing a simple search for your keywords is one way to see if you come up where you want to in search engine results. You can also use tools like Google Webmasters tool, your analytics program, and plugins to track your visibility. You should be looking how many times a certain keyword or keyword phrase was searched and a visitor arrived to your site, how much traffic is from search engines, and the most popular topics searched.

SEO is a very large topic and there are many steps involved in getting it right. You might not get it all at first but continuing to learn about it and finding with works for you is key. Search engine optimization is key to gaining more exposure and traffic for your blog.

Do you have

• an ugly blog that makes small children cry and your dog cover his eyes with his paws?

• a boring blog with zero zing?

• or a blog that fails to stand out in a sea of sameness?

It doesn’t have to be that way! Massive Lifestyle can help you.

Massive Lifestyle is now offering to critique your blog. Why? Two reasons.

1) We’re kicking off our own Remodel-Blogging services to help revive your blog.

2) There are countless blogs that could greatly benefit from a simple helping hand.

If you want your site exposed  to a no-holds-barred, honest critique with a helping of humor at your blog’s expense, post a comment here with your blog address and simply ask.

Along with our reviews, we will offer a few tips and tricks to make your blog awesome. If you decide to hire us to help, we’ll even give you a discount!

What we will do

Check out your site for design and visual appeal. Does your site hurt our eyes? Does it look like one those AOL pages from the late 90’s? We’ll tell it like it is and spare no feelings.

Look over your site’s content. Are your posts too long? Is your site’s purpose immediately clear? Do you have lots of obvious errors?

Review your site’s layout and usability. Is your site’s design intuitive or do first time readers have to jump through hoops to figure things out? Is your blog full of clutter? We will tell you what your friends won’t. The unbiased truth.

We have no idea how many people will take us up on our free offer, so we’re going to take them on a first come, first serve basis. In some cases, blogs on life support may get rushed to the front of the line. In other words, if you’re in a rush to get your blog reviewed, you may want to hire us.

If you would like a private consultation, our services can be had for a small fee of $50 via PayPal. You can choose whether you want your review publicly posted on our site or private, sent to you via e-mail. And, if you pay us, you can choose how you want your advice: Straight up and a bit kinder (for those who don’t appreciate criticism) . We definitely understand a lot of people don’t have the time or skills to devote to making their blog pretty and would never want to make anyone feel bad.

If you decide to hire us for a consult, we will deduct $25 from your first custom design order.

Some of the things we can do to make over your blog

• customize your WP Thesis theme

• Install Thesis on your self hosted WP site

• create custom banners and other site graphics

• custom SEO and landing pages to help your blog be found by search engines and readers

• devise a custom color theme for your WP blog

• help you determine which items to keep on your blog and which to get rid of

Got more questions or want to hire us? Contact us at 866.538.0868 or e-mail support@massivelifestyle.com

Many times, when I receive those requests, the blogs that are shown to me are either on Blogger.com or WordPress.com – Free blog hosting websites. Usually, when I receive these requests, my response is the same – get away from those sites and start your OWN hosted blog, one that you control and are free to do whatever you want with. This is advice that I received from one of my Mentors when I was getting ready to start my blog. In this article, I want to address why this should be done, however, lets first talk about these Free Services.

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A Little about WordPress and Blogger.

Blogger and WordPress.com (not to be confused with WordPress.org) are amazing systems. They make it extremely EASY for anyone to sign up for an account, and start a blog, even without any significant technical expertise. Blogger, owned by google, has a very simple three step process to setting up a blog. You create and account, name your blog and then choose a template – That’s it! Your blog is up and running. WordPress is very similar to Blogger, and also allows for anyone to set up a free account and start blogging.

These blogging solutions are considered externally-hosted blogs because they are not hosted by YOU. The benefit is that they take care of providing the blogging software automatically. They also have some additional benefits of helping to drive traffic. However, there are some downfalls to using services like these.

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Why you should host your own blog

Free is good! However, Free is not always best. The problem with using blogging platforms like Blogger and WordPress is that you do not own your blog. They are owned by Blogger and WordPress and they have the power to shut down your blog, whether you like it or not. When I first thought about getting into blogging, one of my mentors told me about a guy that did a lot of work with a blogger blog to grow his business to where he was making around $2,000 per month. Now, that’s $2000 extra dollars that can come in handy.

One day, he woke up to his blog being shut down by google, and never got a full reason why it was done. Because of that, his income dropped from $2000 to $0 overnight, and there was NOTHING he could do about it. Well, I guess he could’ve decided to start all over and grow it again to that point, but trust me . . . that can be a long a painful process. This is the biggest reason why I recommend for everyone to get their own self-hosted blog, but there’s more.

When you own your blog, you have the ability to do a lot more customization – something that comes in handy as your business grows. The possibilities are limitless and it provides you with much more space to grow. Owning your own blog is like having your own piece of virtual real estate. If you are serious about building an online business, this is essential.

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WordPress’ Self-hosted option

I spoke earlier about WordPress.com, but there’s another side to WordPress, and that is WordPress.org. This is THE industry standard for self-hosted blogs and is also a free script that you can install on your own hosting account. This is the route that I’ve chosen and is the preferred option among bloggers today. One of the great features of wordpress is that it’s a system where anyone can develop plugins to work with wordpress, which gives you a significant amount of options to what you can get your wordpress Blog to do. If you have an idea of something to add to your blog, chances are, there’s a plugin for it, and if not, one can be developed.

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The cost of owning your own blog

One of the great things about having an online business, is that it does NOT take a lot of money to get started. In the past, if you wanted to start a business that is to be successful, you needed to have a significant amount of startup capital, and in many cases, you needed to rent a physical building, and the costs just kept adding up. Fortunately, in this digital age we are living in, it’s quite affordable to have your own online Real Estate. Typical hosting accounts start around $5 per month (much less than renting a building for your business). For a few dollars more (around $8), you can host an unlimited amount of domains. In other words, you can have as many websites as you want.

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As a marketing tool, blogs are full of all kinds of potential. Blogs have some truly unique characteristics as a marketing tool. First of all, they are much easier than newsletters when it comes to getting your idea across. They can be added to, and they can be updated at any time and from virtually anywhere. Blogs also have long lasting shelf lives, as they exist on the internet until you decide to remove them. This contrasts well to newsletters which have extremely short shelf lives, because once you send it out, it’s sent, then trashed, and gone. Unless you are just posting marketing materials that are deglossed, most blogs offer a large amount of credibility. Whether your blog is a personal blog or a business blog, viewers come to blogs expecting to find frank and personal perspectives on a topic that you are passionate about.

If you maintain your viewers and you respect the idea that you should be passionate about the content of your blog, then your credibility will go up, and this is what blogging is truly all about. Blogs are easy to syndicate, meaning that you can get your information and opinions out there, and can allow them to spread like wildfire. If you have an opinion to share, a product to sell, a brand to market or something else to say on the internet, and you think that people are going to want to read what it is that you have to say, then blogging is an excellent option for you to consider.

If you do not already have a blog that is associated with your business or your website, then now may very well be an excellent time for you to start blogging. You should not think that blogging is unnecessary simply because you are employing other strategies for marketing or communicating online. There are completely different dynamics when it comes to e-mail communication and blogging. Nothing facilitates conversation, communication and community the way that blogging does. There is no confusion about blogging being spam the way e-mails can be looked at as spam. Blogs have a long shelf life, meaning they last longer than e-mail correspondence and blogs work very well in conjunction with other forms of communication and methods of marketing as well.

Think about this, things online move rapidly. Spending 2 months to promote a blog and get traffic would only take 1 week of full absence to have that traffic diminish. With that in mind, we’re in big trouble. But of course like anything else, there are smart fixes and solutions for that and in this blog post I aim to talk about those things.

Write in one sitting

If you’re really busy, there’s a good chance that you can still have a day or two where you can write some blog posts. Believe its more than enough.

The way I do it most of the times is write my blog posts in one sitting. So basically you could pick your most productive day, in most cases, its every Monday, and then sit down and don’t do anything other than write blog entries. You would be surprised how many high quality articles you can pump out in that day.

For me I usually do it every morning mostly in my home office (anyone can call their room their office ) and spend almost 6 hours in writing articles. I can then come up with 5-8 blog articles that I can now set on queue. The important thing here is that you have the continuity of content which will definitely help with consistent traffic and awareness around the blogosphere.

Utilize Social Media accounts

In the event that you cannot really go out and market your blog through commenting or other things, you can simply just utilize your social media accounts such as Twitter, Facebook and etc.

Most people can access this through their mobile phones so just a simple tweet maybe every three hours can do wonders. Social media is still a hot commodity when it comes to traffic generation and if you have good following on social sites then there’s a good chance you can benefit from it a lot by doing it consistently.

Make things Structured and Automated

One thing that I learned a lot ever since having a job is making things automated and structured. Of course before, I thought I was very structured but I know I improved a lot.

Here are some of the things that you can automate so you no longer need to do it manually.

• Automate your tweets – This can be done in various ways. You can signup to a service known as twitterfeed. What it does is simply just automatically tweet your latest post published so there’s no need to do it manually. Another is by utilizing this plugin called as Tweet Your Old Post. This brilliant plugin simply just tweets any random posts of yours in a certain time interval and the beauty about this is that you can have control on types of posts that you want to publish. Let’s say you just want to continually publish your top posts. What you can do is filter it using your categories so that you can eliminate your personal posts from being tweeted.
• Structure your newsletter series – Just like in posting blog posts, you can actually do your newsletter of one week or 2 in one sitting. In my experience, the best way to do it is every Sunday since you are much more relaxed to write a series of newsletters.

Seek for outside help

In an event where you feel you really need outside help, you can simply just hire a freelancer out there to do things for you.

Contrary to what most people think, its actually not that expensive. You can simply do a contract that would pay a freelancer on a per article basis so you don’t need to shed a lot of money for something that is not done daily.

You can also hire virtual assistants that can oversee minor operations on your blog such as publishing blog posts, deleting spam comments, answering emails and maintaining small things. Hiring someone can be really really helpful especially if you want to maintain consistency in your blog.

There ya go! Those are the 4 things that you can do to be able to maintain your blog even when you don’t have time to do it on a daily basis. Strategic blogging involves being wise enough in facing certain problems mentioned above. If you can make yourself involved lesser than ever while still reaping the same benefits, then you’re doing it right.

Give the Gift that Keeps on Giving!

Look at all you get:

JibJab personalize holiday greeting w/ gift card

Hosting Set up

WordPress Installed

Search Engine Optimized

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