How To Make Super Affiliate Commissions

When embarking on a new blogging project there are a few things that you’ll need to think about early on. What are you going to name your blog? What topics will you blog about? How often will you publish posts? What kind of writing style will you use? In the remainder of this article I’ll look at these questions more fully.

What To Call Your Blog

The first decision to be made is of course the name (and domain) of your blog. There are general two choices – using your own name or using a name related to the primary topic of the blog.

If you are branding yourself with the intention of marketing your personal services then naming your blog after yourself is a great move as you will always be able to use it to promote what you. This is especially useful if you’re not sure what direction your blog will move in over time. But if you are building a blog around a specific topic which may not be part of you long-term then you may be better off with a niche-related name and domain.

What Topics Will You Blog About?

Many new bloggers start their first blog by just blogging about anything that comes into their head and end up with a broad range of largely unrelated topics. This is not all that efficient as many readers simply don’t have time to wade through posts they are not interested in and it makes it more difficult to target monetization efforts.

It is much better to spend some time outlining a small group of related topics to cover. You can then categorise your posts which makes it easier for visitors to find what they are looking for.

Deciding on a Posting Schedule

Many people advise you to blog every day when launching a new blog with the theory being that the more you post the more people will come to your blog. However many blog readers find that blogs that post every day or even multiple times a day are simply too much and they can’t keep up with them.

To be honest it doesn’t matter so much what your posting frequency or schedule is, as long as it is consistent. There are some blogs that post only once a week and do very well as they readers look forward to that weekly post and others that find that they do best when publishing multiple short posts every day. Every blog is different.

Another danger with trying to post too much, especially in the beginning, is that you may not be able to maintain your pace. You may run out of ideas, find the time committment to be too much or simply burn out and if you start posting less and less, this looks bad and it looks as though the blog is dying. Many readers will unsubscribe when this begins to happen.

It is much better to start out with a much gentler blog schedule and see how it goes for a few months rather than over-commit yourself at the beginning and then burn out a few months down the line. My recommendation would be to start conservatively and then increase it gradually if you feel the need – not the other way around!

Do You Have a Particular Writing Style?

Some people suggest that you alter your blogging style to fit your target audience but in my experience I find that it never works to try to blog in a style that is not uniquely you. Your blog is a reflection of you – your thoughts, your findings, your interests and passions.

As for the style of the content itself, again this is highly personal. Each of us is different and you should write in your own style and not how you think your readers want you to write. Some people like to use humor, others prefer to stick to dry facts, some people like to rustle up some controversy and so on. Do what works for you.

Similarly, I see people asking questions such as, how long should my posts be? This again is down to personal style though it is perhaps influenced by your posting frequency. Short, snappy posts may be best if you post very often but if you only post once per week you’ll probably want to publish something with a bit more substance!

It really doesn’t matter what your style is because the readers who like your style will stick around and subscribe and the ones who don’t, wont! Simple as that really! There is no way that any single style is going to appeal to everybody so don’t try! No matter what your posting style is, there will be people who like it and some who don’t, but it never pays to try and be something that you are not.

Some people think that SEO is something that can just be ‘done later’ but SEO goes into the way your blog is setup and into everything that you write so it’s a good idea to get an idea about it right at the very beginning so that you don’t have to go back and correct mistakes later on which can be very difficult if not impossible in some cases.

Does SEO Even Matter?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and it is very valuable for bloggers because search engine traffic doesn’t cost anything and once it begins to flow it can continue for months and even years to come. However it can take a while to get that momentum going.

SEO is all about ranking content in the search engines so of course you need content and this is why blogs can do so well with SEO because they are full of content! However SEO is about keywords and its quite easy to write a blog post that doesn’t rank for any useful keywords and the traffic potential is never reached.

Optimising Your Posts For On-Page SEO

The first step in optimising your posts is knowing what keyword phrase you want to target. It is possible to target more than one but much more difficult. Now one thing that I would emphasise here is that as a blogger, particularly if you are starting out, if you have no idea about what keywords you want to target then just don’t worry about it as its best to concentrate on writing good content than thinking about search engines.

However if your blog is more specialised then it might be obvious what keywords to pick. For example if you had some kind of photography blog and you were reviewing a particular camera then it would make sense to optimise the post for the brand and model of the camera as that it what people would search for. There are several places in the post when you need to place your keyword:

1) The title – as near to the beginning as you can. This is the most important keyword placement.

2) The post content – your keyword should sppear a few times throughout the body of your post but don’t go over the top with it.

3) Tags – WordPress and other blogging platforms allow you to add tags to posts and this is a great way to add keywords to any post.

4) The URL – it is preferable for your keywords to be embedded in the actual URL rather than having something like www.myblog.com/?p=123

What If You Have Already Written Lots of Posts?

If you already have a blog and this is the first time you have thought about SEO there are some things that you can do to tweak things. One thing that you should NOT do is change your post URL’s because Google will still be indexing the old ones and if you change them you will have broken links.

However what you can do is change your titles and the copy text in your posts. One mistake that people often make is putting their keywords at the end of their title rather than at the beginning for example if you are targeting the phrase “make money blogging” which is best out of these two titles:

- 10 Great Ways to Make Money Blogging Today! – Make Money Blogging – 10 Killer Ideas!

The second one is better as far as SEO goes because the target phrase comes first in the title. Have a read through your article and make sure your keyword is liberally sprinkled throughout the copy text and don’t forget to add a tag if possible.

It can take a while for Google to pick up changes in a post though so you won’t necessarily see changes in your traffic straight away.

Some people think that SEO is something that can just be ‘done later’ but SEO goes into the way your blog is setup and into everything that you write so it’s a good idea to get an idea about it right at the very beginning so that you don’t have to go back and correct mistakes later on which can be very difficult if not impossible in some cases.

Why Bother With SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. Search engines are an excellent source of completely free traffic that continues to pour in for years to come but it usually takes a long time for a brand new site to begin getting traction in the search engines which is another reason why it makes sense to consider it from day 1.

SEO is all about ranking content in the search engines so of course you need content and this is why blogs can do so well with SEO because they are full of content! However SEO is about keywords and its quite easy to write a blog post that doesn’t rank for any useful keywords and the traffic potential is never reached.

Optimising Your Posts For On-Page SEO

The first step in optimising your posts is knowing what keyword phrase you want to target. It is possible to target more than one but much more difficult. Now one thing that I would emphasise here is that as a blogger, particularly if you are starting out, if you have no idea about what keywords you want to target then just don’t worry about it as its best to concentrate on writing good content than thinking about search engines.

However if your blog is more specialised then it might be obvious what keywords to pick. For example if you had some kind of photography blog and you were reviewing a particular camera then it would make sense to optimise the post for the brand and model of the camera as that it what people would search for. There are several places in the post when you need to place your keyword:

1) The title – as near to the beginning as you can. This is the most important keyword placement.

2) The post content – your keyword should sppear a few times throughout the body of your post but don’t go over the top with it.

3) Tags – WordPress and other blogging platforms allow you to add tags to posts and this is a great way to add keywords to any post.

4) The URL – if you are using WordPress then this is very easy to do because it has a feature to allow you to convert your post title into the URL.

What If You Have An Established Blog?

If you already have some earlier posts that you wrote before you learned about SEO there are still some changes you can make retrospectively. One thing that is very important is to ensure that you do not change your URL as this will cause broken links to appear in search engines.

However you can change the text within your posts. You can tweak the titles, the text within the post itself and you can add and modify the post tags. Probably the most important change would be to alter your titles to make sure your keywords are as early as possible. For example, which one of these two is better if you want to rank for “make money online”? :

- 10 Great Ways to Make Money Blogging Today! – Make Money Blogging – 10 Killer Ideas!

The second one is better as far as SEO goes because the target phrase comes first in the title. Have a read through your article and make sure your keyword is liberally sprinkled throughout the copy text and don’t forget to add a tag if possible.

Once you make changes it can take a while for Google to pick it up and act on it so don’t expect results overnight!