Archive for the 'Content Building' Category

One of the fastest ways you can generate content for your blog is by reading a few articles related to your blogs topic. Blogs are fast becomming peoples choices to recieve their news.

Would you rather hit up a newspaper.com where writers seem so distant and chances are you would try and contact them or would you rather head over to some Average Joe, check out his or her blog posts for the day and see 3 or 4 articles reviewing your topic of chioce.

People dig that way of writing and you shouldn’t be afraid of doing it.

One of the best ways that I keep track of many topics and many articles is by using my flock rss wonder machine as well as the flock “blog this” option. You don’t have to use these (although if you’re a part-time blogger I suggest it) but you should get yourself a RSS agregator. Bloglines, Yahoo, Google, Rojo, NewsGator, there are a ton of them out there and you should try and get one asap.

Once you have one, organize your feeds if you have multiple topics you write about, and begin filling it with news sources you dig and blogs you dig. Most news sources online have these and you can easily add them to your aggregator.

Then all you have to do is Read Blog and read some more. But keep them simple and review like. Read a story, link and review. Write 3 or 4 sentences, relate it and link it to some of your content and build your web of goodness.

With the recent launch of blogtown press, the network home of Blogging On Empty, I have begun to see “The Power of the Network.”

With the Link to a Coconut Contest helping gain traffic to individual blogs, I’ve been tracking visitors behind the scenes and noticing that the network helps! Having that nice little block of links in the bottom right of every blog in the network, I’ve noticed that one visitor will be linked into the network ultimately see the network box and click through to another blog, and do the same on the next.

This just continues to build awareness of other blogs in the network, building traffic, page impressions and repeat visitors with subscribers to their RSS feeds.

With each blog that I add to the network that’s another blog that I don’t have to link exchange with for the blogs already in the network and another link for each of those blogs as well. That will ultimately build pagerank in Google, which will increase my traffic hits, subscribers, so on and so forth. It’s great!

Being an individual blogger, getting 12 links into your blog would take a lot of emails and a lot of link exchanges with other blogs. These links are now automatic within my network and will continue to grow as my network grows, 12, 15, 20, 100 links! Just like that.

At first I wasn’t sure what the impact of having a network would mean. I’ve heard it’s great just to get linked exposure from a network. But if you can build a brand from the network, which I hope to do with blogtownpress and it’s many contests that are going to be coming up, you can have exposure on every blog and every site in the network that builds traffic to every other blog or site.

It’s an exciting process to be going through and I’ll for sure keep you all informed on what the contest has done for Blogtown Press and just what being part of a network does.

Following the latest trends in the blogosphere can be tough.

How should I tag my posts?
What’s the newest Social Bookmarking Site?
Is there a Web 3.0 yet?
Who’s number one in Technorati?

OK so maybe that last one doesn’t change much, but it seems like every time you turn around there’s a new style you should follow, a new way to make money from your blog and a new bookmarking site that you need to get listed on to be anything but yesterdays news.

There is one thing that seems to withstand the test of time though. Successful bloggers. After mulling over all the types of bloggers there are I could really only come up with three styles of blogging that seem to work well. I’m sure there a variations on these three styles but the top blogs are pretty much one of these:

1. Multiple Daily Poster - Niche Blogs

A Multiple Daily Poster is someone that posts multiple times a day on the same topic. Their blog is very focused. They’ve carved out a niche and they post about all the newest developments within that niche. These bloggers write so much on their topic they have thousands upon thousands of daily readers who check their blog multiple times a day just to keep up with the latest trends.

Some of the best blogs within this category are also some of my favorites focused around technology and blogging news. One of the best single person Niche Blogs with multiple daily posts is Problogger.net where Darren Rowse has a beat on everything that is happening in the blogosphere as well as providing readers with valuable information on blogging and developing a winning blog. TechCrunch.com is another one of those that gets their information before anyone else has a chance to write about. He writes multiple posts and gets his 70,000 some rss subscribers to check their techcrunch feed several times a day.

A few others of these high powered blogs that keep you updated on specific subjects better than most online news centers can are FreeMoneyFinance.com and BlogHerald.com. There are of course the main stream blogs like Gizmodo, Engadget, and A List Apart.

All these blogs focus on a niche and have built a media outlet that people have to go to every single day. It’s like getting your evening news. Our parents (and most of us now) watch the news daily. Now we have another daily fill of something newsworthy, our blogs about the world, tech, political or other.

2. Large Article Posters

Large Article Posters are bloggers who post usually 2 or 3 times a week, sometimes more, sometimes less, and their posts are just that, very large. They’ll occasionally give you updates and tidbits here and there but generally their posts are lengthy and focus on one topic at a time.

One of the best examples of this type of blogger is Steve Pavlina and his blog StevePavlina.com. It’s a personal development blog that is based on lengthy articles with a massive amount of information contained within each. His blog layout is simple. No flashy graphics or pictures, just content. He claims to have read over 600 books on personal development and from his posts, it shows. Even if he isn’t the worlds best at everything, his blog will surely help any reader learn a thing or two about leading down the right path.

Another good example of this type of blogger is Yaro Starak who Publishes both entrepreneurs-journey.com and SmallBusinessBranding.com. The latter of which he purchased from the previous publisher. He writes about making money via the internet and branding your business very well, and he rights a lot. Long information rich posts are contained within both of those blogs.

There are of course many more than this but these two are both ones that I read regularly to keep up to date with bettering myself and making some money. They write well and people listen. Simple as that.

3. Random Posters

The first two groups of bloggers usually write on a specific niche, be it technology, blogging, money, or life, they focus in on a topic and write as much as they can. The last blogger that becomes successful is one who writes about everything and writes a lot. When you visit these blogs you never know what you’re going to get. It’s like the Maury Povich of blogging or a car accident, you know it’s a waste of time to look but you can’t not look.

A random poster has nothing to say about everything. They often bring up great points that probably not even they know what they just wrote about. But they brought that random interesting thought to the surface and brought it to you.

The following are some great examples of random post blogs that do very very well. BoingBoing.net - it’s a directory of wonderful things and has an immense following. eBaumsWorld.com - pretty random and not for everyone. GenuineCuriosity.com - brings you things you can learn usually multiple times a day.

There are of course others but these blogs are quite numerous, some have large following some have cult like followings. Most of these are put on by one or two people but there are a few that are similar and put on by a whole slew of people, of which you could be one.

Conclusion

As you can tell from this list the successful bloggers built there successful blogs many different ways. But they stuck to a specific method and it brought certain types of readers. Some like multiple updates during the day, some like one large article a week.

The point is you don’t have to be great one way or the other but you do have to stick to a plan. People who blog all over the map and are inconsistent usually don’t end up lasting that long and their blogs archives are stuck on Dec 2005 forever. Get a plan and stick with it. People like, even in this fast paced world, consistency.

It is no secret, you don’t need to dig through all the blogs out there to know, writing consistent content is what brings readers to your blog.

Blogs are taking the Internet by storm because their setup provides for fresh new content. There are currently millions upon millions of blogs out there about thousands and maybe even millions of topics. What’s the key to getting your blog noticed?

Writing new content. Your content doesn’t have to be show stopping, call CNN type content, but it does have to be consistent and it does have to provide your readers with something useful.

Within the blog network that this blog is part of the writers, particularly me, notice one thing that attracts readers above all else to it’s blogs. Content. If even a day is taken off traffic drops. When all 10 blogs that are part of the network have new content readership is it’s highest. If you take two of those blogs and skip a day posting, traffic drops by 30%. If you skip posting on 4 of those blogs traffic drops by more than 50%. Yes 50% by skipping posting on less than half of the blogs.

When there is new content, maybe directing our readers to quality content provided by other users, like was done in a previous post about AdSense for beginners, traffic arrives.

To give you an example think of your blog like the gap (or abercrombie, prada, armani, guess, whatever). If those stores don’t have a new clothing line coming out people won’t go back. The clothing line is their content. The way they get people to come in the middle of the season is to offer sales. Sign-up for their mailing list (newsletter or RSS feed) and they’ll conveniently email you when skies are occurring. They try and keep their content fresh by offering it at a lower price.

You have to do the same but you have the ability to put out a new shirt every single day! People will always won’t to swing by to get the latest shirt from your store (or the latest scoop).

Just keep the content coming and your readers will follow the words.

When choosing a topic for a successful blog you need to try and focus you topic as best as possible. This will give you the most chances to be higher ranked in Google Search Results providing you with more traffic.

Although this may sound easy to accomplish for beginner blogs there is often too much temptation to stray from the topic of choice due to writers block, wanting to blab about your recent victories, or a number of other reasons. As a blogger with little time to waste on matters that don’t add positively to your blog I suggest fighting the temptation as best you can to blog off topic.

As you begin to blog more and more about your niche topic you may also find yourself writing as though the topic is implied. Although this may save you time while writing it will, in the long run, hurt your search result rankings. One of the best Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips you can follow is to keep up your keyword density within you niche topic.

Take for instance the blog in our network Wicked Backhand. We could easily omit referring to the word tennis since the site itself implies that it is a tennis focused site and words like stroke will refer to tennis stroke rather than paintbrush stroke. However, writing tennis stroke will help search engines “remember” that they are dealing with a tennis article and when someone searches for a tennis stroke we will have a better chance of being near the top of the results.

Don’t over due it though. You could easily write a keyword 50 times in an article but that borders on spam and search engine algorithms frown on that. Now we don’t know the magic keyword density number but as long as your sentences make sense you should be set.

A great way to keep posting through a writers block or just when you have nothing good to say is to write quick little posts. If you take a look at some of the top blogs, Engadget, TechCrunch, and Problogger, you’ll notice that they all post several times a day and have quite a few simple two paragraph posts.

These posts are more than likely linking to other information on the Internet that they more than likely got from their RSS feeds or just surfing other blogs.

All it takes is a simple subject that relates to the content of your blog that maybe your readers would enjoy reading. A few words about what you are linking to. And then just through a link up there and presto. You have a post where you’ve been stagnant for a few days, or maybe, gasp, a week.

You should check out Problogger.net and some of his speedlinking posts. I find those to be some of the most useful posts he writes and all they are are links and little blurbs to other peoples blogs or services. Simple, useful and keeps your readers coming back for more.