Blogging: How, who, what, where, when and why? aka I’m no SEO expert, here’s what I do.

There is no secret to successful blogging. I’ve been asked this question a few times and my answer is always the same, “I dunno cus I’m not successful.” I dunno what the aim is for successful blogging. My aim is to have an audience. It’s not about making money. I do have an audience a tiny one but hey, I get to connect with them and they with me. That’s all I ever wanted and I have that.

If you want to make money from blogging and you’re starting from scratch my advice would be to get more hours at work or find a better paying job because you simply aint going to become an overnight blogging success and make the kind of money online that you need to pay the bills. That’s fact. Make blogging fun, make it a hobby, make it anything, but don’t try and make it your primary income cus unless you have the sort of start up money to pay for advertising you’re fucked… and even then you’re not guaranteed anything. Be happy to have the freedom to blog, and enjoy it. OK, with that in mind here are the tips I’d give to any blogger based on my own feeble blogging efforts. They may help, they may not, but cus I’m doing this for fun I don’t really care…. OK let’s crack on with some free advice.

Number 1. Content.

Content is what your blog is. It’s the flesh and bones on the nothing that makes up your blog. You have to write. If you have an agenda or a theme then stick with it and find out how can you break that theme up to allow you talk regularly about it and what lifespan will your blog have. Many blogs about specific ideas or subjects come to natural conclusions. Be prepared for that. Or you could try a personal blog. A personal blog like mine should roll on for as long as I (or you) want it too. The themes are random and crazy but it’s just a train of thought. So my advice for item one is simply this… write and write regular, once a week twice a week, every day but keep it up. It’s no good starting a blog and then leaving weeks and months between posts because the spiders at the search engines aint going to crawl the same old pages, they want new stuff to crawl. Do this and you’ll get posts that are not only read more but they are found more too.

Number 2. Titles.

A good title to your post is essential too. It’s like a newspaper headline. It’ll sum up broadly what the rest of the post is about. Look at these three titles, would you click on any of them…. 1: I wanna kill my neighbour, 2: I’m gonna kill that twat, 3: A thousand and one ways to kill your neighbour and get away with it!

I’d guess (and I’m no expert) the chatty, headline title number 3 would be more appealing to most people as it doesn’t suggest mentally ill serial killer blogging here. Titles are essential. I recently went with the fail title of “TV” which made me chuckle because I’m sure Google must hit the word TV about a hundred gazillion times a day. The hits and reads are there you just have to know how to farm them.

Number 3 – Tags.

I’m not going to go on about these cus I don’t think they are worth much but because they are available to bloggers you might as well use them. Add search tags that are relevant. Personally I don’t feel that the internet works with tags any more because millions of sites have tags such as “Britney Spears Naked” but offer no such thing and so it’s too easy for search engines to neglect tags in favour of content. Content and titles are key.

Number 4 – Twitter and Facebook.

Every single person is on Facebook. It’s only a matter of time before women giving birth are asked before they pass the placenta what email address and password they want to use for new little Kylie or Josh, yes it’ll be law soon that you’re on social networks just so e-corporations can harvest your info and know what you like, dislike and what you look like so they can target you with specific adverts to increase profits. So why not reverse this and use the very technology that is designed by people to make money and get a Facebook page and update your mates and followers about your blog. Seems organic and natural to me to do that, you’re going to join anyway so why not milk that cow until it’s a desiccated husk of beef jerky?

Then get yourself a blog specific twitter account, I’ve done this, and search for and add people into blogging, SEO, website design and media. You can get hundreds of followers a month this way and then simply tweet your latest blog posts to your masses. But be warned twitter does not like aggressive following. Add ten or twenty people a day and hope they follow back. But don’t go nuts or that twitter account with the great name that links back to your blog in such a perfect way, will be deleted and blocked from twitter. Take it easy, take it slowly, but use twitter for the marketing of your blog… I can hear Bill Hicks spinning in his grave at my even mention of the “M” word. Sorry Bill. I truly am.

Number 5 – guest writers.

Why not get another blogger to write for you and then mention in his or her twitter/facebook feed that they are guest blogging. It’s called sharing the wealth folks. You benefit from them and vice versa.

Number 6 – Get links.

Those guest writers… maybe you can talk them into featuring your link on their blogroll or links page or what ever on their page too. It’s worth a few clicks a week, but still worth it aint it…. Come on hit whores you know it’s worth it.

Number 7 – Celebrity endorsements.

Just get your blog re-blogged by Ricky Gervais like I did. I randomly replied to a blog he did on the Huffington Post and the rest is history. I never expected anything, which made my answers to him more open and honest, and it got picked up. Simple. It happened because it wasn’t meant to… if you get my drift. I didn’t plan it, it was just the randomness of the internet.

Remember folks, if you like blogging, do it, do it for you, do it for fun, but never try to do it for popularity or money because that will always fail. The greatest and most successful blogs come from the heart and start out as fun. Have fun guys.