The Art of Great Blogging – How to Blog Successfully

The simple truth of what makes a successful blog is high quality content. Blogs that can provide consistently good articles on popular topics are going to naturally gain status. Blogs are the perfect extension for a business website. Your blog should be seen as a marketing tool but it’s a big mistake to see your blog as only that. A visitor to your blog is soon going to lose interest if the only articles to read are promoting your latest products, telling of discounts this month and so on.

A blog must engage the audience through user interaction, comments, questions, polls, views, interests, how to guides, trivia, interesting facts, links, videos, likes, dislikes and many other factors that make up human emotions. This is the personal touch and when we take a step back, that’s what social media networks are all about. Everyone has a voice within the world of blogs, the trick is to coax out people’s opinions and get them talking.

The great thing about Social Media is that ideas can spread like wildfire. If you can manage to come up with a unique, controversial or ground breaking article, within days or even hours your exclusive content can be linked to, from all over the web, due to the powerful influence of sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Many blogging sites allow you to compile your entries online although I would veer away from this method. On the odd occasion that you lose internet connection, your computer freezes or crashes you’ll lose everything which can be rather frustrating. Take more time over an article and construct it using a program such as Microsoft word and take advantage of the spell checker and thesaurus to ensure your blog post will be as successful as possible. Once you have your finished article, copy and paste your writing into which ever blog host you use. These days most blog hosts and article repositories have a rich text feature that will allow you to transfer fonts types, sizes, links etc. to make sure the finished piece looks just right.

Blogs are a great place to take advantage of links and keywords. Link to relevant information about your writing and not forgetting to make sure you link back to your website if you have one. This will make sure you get the credit you deserve for writing a good piece of copy. Using specific keywords within your title and throughout your content is also important if you want to promote a product or a service you may offer on your main website. A good place to find popular keywords is the Google Adwords tool, use this to find the best words with least competition within your field.

If you can manage to post a steady stream of quality content on your blog you will definitely see an increase in traffic to your main website.