Well three things immediately sprang to mind:

1. Write good content
2. Be consistent
3. Be consistent

They may not be what you would expect. But after blogging for just over a year now, I have come to the conclusion these three points are the most important ingredients, that you have to get right first. To successfully build a blog into something that will last and grow. Let me explain a little more:

1. Write Good Content

If you don’t write good content then you won’t be able to capture your visitors and turn them into readers. That want to come back again and again to see what else you have written. And most importantly tell others about your great content.

2. Be Consistent

You need to then consistently write good content so when the visitors do come back, there is more fresh content to entice them back again. There’s no point in drawing visitors in with a good article for the stream of content to then to dry up or become sporadic.

3. Be Consistent

I know, it’s not a typing error! I just felt this point was so important it needed saying twice. However you want to promote your blog through marketing and different types of traffic generation you need to be consistent at it. The more consistent you are at say commenting, forum marketing or guest posting the bigger presence or profile you will make. And the more chances you have of people finding your blog.

If you read any top blog you will soon realise that these ingredients are used by them as the basis for how they blog, and gives them a solid platform to their blogs, and they grow from there.

Sounds fairly simple and obvious…

The problem is that this is easier said than done. It’s one thing to know that this is the way to go, but another thing entirely to try and put it into action.

It all adds up to an enormous commitment in practice, and on top there’s all the admin and maintenance involved with a blog as well. But this isn’t bad news though, don’t feel overwhelmed, blogging is not a race.

It’s a huge advantage to know these important points from the start, and it gives you something to aim and plan for. I’ve been blogging for a year and it’s taken the best part of it to realise how important these points are, and get to grips with how to blog and the best methods to use for promotion.

If you don’t have a good foundation to your blogging using these three core points, then nothing else will work as well, or fall into place. It’s using these points well, as a foundation that will make the difference and take your blog to the next level.

Am I there yet, Do I use them?

No, I’m still working on it. These three points are so easy to miss or gloss over because they are so obvious. And they are the easiest ones to loose sight off, and let drop from your blogs daily routines. But as so often is true, they are the ones that you need to concentrate on the most.

Mandy

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Do you recognise the 3 most important steps to building a blog

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After writing the post the other day about branding your blog to raise it’s profile I started to wonder if I could find an example of what I was talking about. I could.

I’m talking about an easily recognizable blog due to it’s name/domain, logo etc… I decided I could pick almost any of the top blogs in their niches and you would find that they all had strong branding and identity. And obviously they were all popular blogs.

You could say what came first the branding or the popularity?

You have to remember a blog has to establish a readership by building it up with good content that people will find interesting, and want to come back for more. So it’s the popularity that has to come first, the branding grows and changes as the blog grows, adding to it.

I also think the earlier you start to set some branding up for your blog, the more it can help draw people in as the blogs readership and popularity grows.

So where’s my example?

The one blog for me that comes to mind when I think about branding is Problogger by Darren Rowse. You only have to see it’s logo, a ‘P‘ and you know what it refers to. He even has Problogger t-shirts!

I have followed this blog for a couple of years now and I’ve found it an extremely interesting place to find bogging help and inforamtion, and that’s the impression that hits me first. So it’s the blogs name that was the greatest branding and has made it instantly recognised. Which brings home the importance of a good domain name. It’s only fairly recently that the blog and logo etc has been redesigned, and has worked with the name to make it even easier to notice.

It would be interesting to see how many people would know about it outside the blogging about blogging niche. You would find that similar niches like make money on the internet and perhaps internet marketing would have heard of Problogger, but obviously branding is niche specific.

But that is the holy grail for most probloggers, to be one of the top blogs and instantly known within their niche!

Mandy

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Looking at a Well Branded Blog

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No, but it can be useful.

At the moment I am working on building the case study blog, I would like it to build a presence in the digital photography niche, although I do know it’s a competitive one. And to get my blog’s face known out there, even if I concentrate on a sub niche within digital photography.

I also want visitors to feel it is a blog to follow, that it will be around for a good while and it has an attractive design that is easy to read and follow. A professional feel in a relaxed atmosphere, if you know what I mean!

To help me do this I have been working on some branding for The Photographer Blog (TPB) to help people remember it easier (hopefully) and to help get it’s name out there. I am still in the process of working on it but so far I have added a logo which I created in Adobe Photoshop Elements 3, and also added that logo as a favicon (more about favicons soon) to the web browser bar that will appear in bookmarks and help it stand out more. I’ve got my photo as usual which I also feel is important for branding and getting a sense of who is writing the blog.

You may also notice I have added some advertising, like many other bloggers do, it would be nice to be able to make enough money to cover the costs of the site and be able to make more improvements to it, like a professional blog design!

These changes may only seem slight and I will do some more, but I feel they will all add up to building the presence and the impression that TPB (The Photographer Blog) will leave on people.

More to come on this…

Mandy

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Branding for your blog

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I know I kept reading about them and how they could help your blog to gain traffic but I never knew anything more about them. So I did some digging around and found some information on them. And I have now be using them for some time.

Basically they are a collection of blog posts all to do with the same topic and posted to a blog on a weekly, bi-monthly or monthly basis. Some carnivals have a different host each week so other blogs can take a turn.

Most carnivals have set rules for who can submit an article, mainly your article has to do with the topic of the carnival.

Do you use blog carnivals?

So that’s my next question, do you use blog carnivals? I first used a carnival through a recommendation, it was the All Women blogging carnival and as the name suggests it’s for any women who blogs no matter what it’s about. And I think referrals are the best way to find a good carnival.

The other place to find a blog carnival would have to be the Blog Carnival website which is the directory for blog carnivals. And that’s where I have found a lot of the carnivals I have used. Although it hasn’t had a spring clean for a while and there are a lot of old carnivals left on there that haven’t ran for a long time, but new ones are added all the time.

Are they useful?

I think they are, if you just want to get loads of traffic and aren’t interested in anything else then they are not for you. But if you are interested in finding new networking opportunities, making new blogging friends or finding new blogs in your niche then they are great. I was asked for my first interview because of submitting to a blog carnival. And don’t forget that they have loads of great articles to read as well.

They also have another useful purpose, every time you get an article accepted and published on a carnival then you are putting yourself in front of a new audience, with the added benefit of a link back to your blog which will help with the rankings and they will build up over time. So they might not deliver tons of traffic but they still have their advantages.

Photography carnivals?

I’ve not seen any current photography carnivals at the moment, I don’t know if anybody knows of any? But I still wanted to use this method of marketing for my case study blog.

So I am participating in slightly different carnivals but ones I still have something in common with. Whenever I can I am submitting to the All Women blogging carnival and also a new one I have found called the Mom’s blogging carnival.

I haven’t been submitting the case study blog articles for long but there are lots of quality posts on both of these carnivals, and I hope to get to know the bloggers behind them a little better over time.

Mandy

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Getting the most out of blog carnivals

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There are hundreds if not thousands of search engines although you wouldn’t really know it because most people are only concerned with 3, Google, MSN and Yahoo.

So the very first thing on my list once I had got a few articles on the blog was to submit it to the search engines, and in particular Google. At the end of the day everybody wants search engine traffic.

The reason for this being the first on the list is the Google sandbox effect, or in simple terms it can take a while for your posts to start appearing in the search results. So the sooner you submit your blog the sooner the process can start.

What is the best way to submit to Google?

Personally I think the best way to get Google to visit your blog, and quickly, is to use the Google XML sitemaps plugin for Wordpress.org blogs. This XML sitemap generator has also been adopted my MSN and Yahoo, and all 3 of these search engines regularly send their ‘bots’ to check my sites after using this plugin on both of my blogs. I know not everybody has a Wordpress blog but don’t worry I’ll get to that later.

To install it you just need to download the plugin and install it onto your wordpress installation, if you need any help doing this take a look at this article I wrote about installing themes and plugins. You can then track the progress of your sitemap by using Google Webmaster Tools.

Submitting RSS feeds to homepages

Another way to submit to search engines or to get them to send a ‘bot’ to your blog is adding your rss feed to the search engine personal homepage. If you set yourself up with a homepage on either Google, MSN or Yahoo then you will have the option to ‘add content’ to that page, that is where you can add the rss feed of your blog, once added the search engine bots will go check it out.

Use a submission service

There are a lot of these around some are free and some are paid for. I have only used this type of service once, a long time ago for this blog and I used a free service (although you could make a donation) called Self Promotion. I could choose which search engines I wanted to submit to and they did the rest.

Mandy

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How to Submit to the Search Engines

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Promoting your blog with blog directories is one of those techniques that can cause a bit of controversy, should I do it or not?

It is a tedious job and can take a long, long time to do, and won’t bring a flood of traffic in, but it could bring in a trickle of traffic and put your name out to a wide ranging audience. A lot of people tell you to submit to dmoz, an open directory project (if you do be careful because you only get one chance).

But is it worth it?

The problem is eveyone submits to blog directories so it’s not as effective as it used to be. Plus you may have to provide a linkback to the directory to gain submission, and that can make a blog look messy. And it can be regarded as one of the least useful link building techniques, due to the links being of poor quality. Skellie has an interesting article on link building called Hansel and Gretel link building.
I have found two articles giving a large choice of directories to choose from, an article on Blogging Tips listing 75 websites that you can submit your blog to. And I’ve also found a list of  RSS directories on Dotsauce that you can submit your feed to. So the choice is yours!

What am I going to do?

Now I had planned to go for it with blog directories and submit to as many as I could for the case study blog, to help get The Photographer Blog out there. But after reading Skellies article I have started to change my mind. I’m thinking about the time I will spend submitting to them all, verses the quality of links and traffic that I will get for my efforts.

So I am going to do things a little differently with the case study blog and stop my plan of blog directory domination. I am going to submit to just one dmoz and see if I get in, I’ve never submitted any of my other blogs to it, but I would still like to give it a go and see what happens.

I’m going to spend my time using other link building techniques to get better incoming links and traffic to the case study blog. This is quite a departure from the ‘bog standard’ information that you get and what I originally learned about blog directories as a traffic technique. But I want to take onboard what Skellie says and take my traffic techniques for the case study blog to a new level.
Mandy

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Promoting Your Blog with Blog Directories, Should You Do It or Not!

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There are loads of traffic generation techniques out there that I could use, but to make any of them effective I need to plan what I am going to use and how I am going to do it. And the quicker I do that the better. Here are some of the traffic techniques I will be looking at over the next couple of weeks:

submitting to Search Engines and Blog Directories
commenting
forums
guest posting
social networking
blog carnivals

I think strategic planning for a blog and looking to the future is very important, I need a goal to work to for the blog otherwise I will just be going around in circles. I am going to be using the techniques that I know and have learned. They are just regular blogging techniques but it will be interesting to see how well they perform in this niche and with this blog.

I said from the start of the case study blog that I was going to share what I was doing to create a blog and build it. And I have lots of information already about the case study blog and setting it up so far in the case study category.

The reason I am doing this is to help others with their blogging but also to help me as well. It will be really helpful to see which technique works best, and learn from what I am doing with the case study blog to improve my blogging for the future. And writing my experiences down helps cement what I am learning more.

I’m enjoying the process of looking closely at what I am doing with the case study blog, and learning along the way. I don’t know how well it will work but whatever happens to the blog it will be fun finding out.

Mandy

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How I Plan to get Traffic to my Blog

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After choosing photography as my blog topic for the blog case study, the next step is to do some market research on the niche. That is easier said than done due to all the different techniques and services that are available for market research. Market research is essential for me to learn about my chosen niche and it will help me decide on my blogs structure, it can make or break a blog so it needs to be done properly. It will raise questions about how I want to use my blog. Is the chosen topic saturated with the same information as what I want to use? If it is that means it will be harder to break into and gain an audience and rank highly. Remember I have chosen photography for the love of the topic, not because it is a hot niche!

It should also give me information on what my prospective audience wants, and is searching for. But it is easy to get lost in the choice. Below are the tools, and my top 5 recommendations that I have used in my market research for the photography case study blog. The two results that you will see are to give you an idea on how you can use the information, and they are for photography which is the main keyword for the niche and digital photography being a keyword within the niche or sub niche:

1. SEO book keyword suggestion tool.
It is a free tool that gives you estimated monthly search volumes for a keyword from Google, Yahoo and MSN. It is ran off the Overture keyword suggestion tool which is Yahoo’s search results, although at the moment it is showing results for Jan 2007. It then estimates the results for Google and MSN by estimating that Google receives double Yahoo’s search traffic and Yahoo receives double MSN’s search traffic. So it is not accurate, but it gives a you a good idea of what you could expect and also lists related keywords for your search. The big plus is the tools that come with it, you can link to keyword tools, Google traffic estimator and Google trends. So there is a lot of information in one place. Here are the results for two of the keywords I searched for:

• photography 1,091,426
• digital photography 287,042

2. Technorati blog search engine

This is the blog search engine. You can favourite the blogs you want to follow and it’s great for finding similar blogs in your niche. I have claimed my blogs on my free account and it shows my recent posts when searched for. You can search for blog posts, blogs, videos or photos using keywords. This is what it found under blogs when I searched for these keywords:

• Photography 39,721 blogs found.
• Digital Photography 2,619 blogs found.

3. Search Engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN.

I use the top search engines for investigating (what they feel) is the best match for a term or keyword. Look at the top 5 results in each one for your chosen keyword. Have a look at them and see what they do, because it obviously works for them to be where they are. The top 5 results may not be blogs, but you can still pick up some good information from normal websites that you could use on your blog. Also never copy what anyone else has done (obvious) just take the best bits and do it in your own way.

4. Look at products and advertisers.
I will be looking to monetize the case study blog at some point in the future. So I need to look at the options available for the photography niche, and would they fit my blogs structure. Again what do other blogs in the niche use for advertising? This is the best way to see what works and what doesn’t. Each niche will have different systems that perform better than others, and some just won’t work at all. I want to tackle this now and find solutions that I am happy with, and consider the impact they will have on the blog. I want to have ability to make an income from the blog, but I don’t want advertising in your face or to take away from the blog itself.

5. Look at Blogs in your niche
This is really helpful in cementing your plans for a blog. Find other blogs in your niche. These can become blogs you can comment on, your new blogging friends, future guest bloggers or joint venture partners. So have a look around and get to know them, get a feel for the conversations going on and whether they have the same ideas as you. This is a solid tool for building awareness of your niche and what’s going on in it, also the best way to get yourself known is to interact with other bloggers.

What are your favourite market research tools, let me know in the comments?

Thanks

Mandy

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Top 5 Market Research Tools

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I thought I’d just let you know about some interesting articles that I came across while submitting to blog carnivals. I think blog carnivals are the best places to find other blogs in your niche that are full of great articles and ideas, join in the conversation and make new friends. And it does work, the Blog Me Cash blog carnival that I did the week before actually asked me for an interview, and I would like to thank Satish for doing that, you can read the interview here. So you never know what can come from a carnival when you join in. Here are my favourites from these carnivals I submitted to last week. My article was – Here is a method that is helping me become a better blogger!

Blog Me Cash: Survival guide to Digital Point A really helpful guide to a forum that you really have to know what you are doing with, to get the most out of it.

Carnival of the Bumbling Newbie: Home Based Business Opportunity to Work at Home: 4 crucial things you need to do to build your list. You know you want one, but it can be hard to know the best way to go about it.

All Women Blogging Carnival: Manipulate your blog post timings for maximum impact. An interesting point of view and it gives me something to think about. I think an Articles Page is the best way around this one.

Better Blogging Carnival: Is your blog easy to read. Simple but often overlooked. Is this blog easy to read?

These articles really jumped out at me while I was browsing and there is some great information and points of view in them. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did.

Competition time:

You may also want to pop over to Problogger this week as it’s Birthday time (Problogger’s 3rd Birthday) and Darren is running competitions all week with a massive prize pay out of $54,000 (USD)!!! I know I am going to take a look…

Mandy

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Who Else Wants to Read 4 Great Articles?

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I don’t know about you but I did get caught out a couple of weeks ago by the new format change (I was on holiday when it happened). Submissions used to be through Mr Linky but it has changed to the Blog Carnival site. Where there is a deadline for submissions through a form (3pm Sunday EST), this is the same for any carnival submissions through blogcarnival.com (although the deadlines vary – obviously).

I like the new format as you don’t have to wait until Monday to submit your entry, you can do it at any point in the week before the deadline. But I still visit on the Monday it goes live, because there are so many good posts and blogs to have a good nose around at!

Here are 3 of my favourites:

New Chinese Invention: The Amphibious Bicycle!
The Year of the Sand Dollar
Calm you mind and? unplug? your stresses, worries and concerns in two and a half minutes?

Mandy

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It’s All Women Blog Carnival Time Again!

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