How often should you be blogging? What does it matter whether you write today or not? What factors determine your blogging frequency?

I suppose that blogging updates actually break down into two parts – updating your blog with new posts and updating your blog as part of its general maintenance. Whilst the second part is probably the one that is most forgotten, it is the easiest to talk about and can be very beneficial, so I’ll start there.

Maintenance Updates
Running some simple maintenance updates on your blog can be highly beneficial. By doing so you can maintain more of your visitors for longer, which increases your page hits and your overall visitor levels and experience.

So it is well worth looking at some of your most popular posts at least once per month. Just go over them and make sure that they are linking out to other relevant posts. Keep an eye on the new posts – can they linked to from the most posts? By concentrating on the popular posts and working through the list you hit the posts most likely to make an impact. As you become happy with all of them work through the list.

New Posts
For some blogs how often you are posting is dictated by the content. If you are blogging about news or current affairs, then as and when things happen you will be posting. But, what about informational blogs?

Many of these will not actually have a great wealth of new information coming up once they have existed for years and it might be tempting to leave them static, but that is a big mistake for two reasons – first, the search engines get fed up of your blog not producing new material and second, your readers do not have an incentive to keep coming back.

The Plan Is Formed
So that is our plan – we want to update our blogs often enough to interest both our visitors and search engines. At the very least this generally means a weekly update. This is frequent enough to keep the search engines interested and readers will see a slow stream of new materials.

On the other hand, we could update several times every day. Is that a good idea? I actually think that unless your blog is aimed at news and events that are appearing daily, this could be information overload. You might notice that Google will appear as soon as you first post each day, then not come running for every additional post, not until the next day.

This is a sign that Google seems to like at most daily updates, unless you have a very popular website. So somewhere between a low of weekly updates and a high of daily updates is about right. Exactly where that is lies is up to you and how much you can handle.

Getting more readers to read more pages is far easier and more effective than trying to find brand new visitors. It is free marketing and often can lead to a good rate of return visitors. But, what can you do to make your blog ‘sticky’?

A ‘sticky’ blog is all about getting readers to read that first post and then going on to read more posts, whether that is straight away, at a later date or both. So here are a few important steps to encourage visitors to read more from your site.

Make your blog look good – A blog that does not look the part is a good way to scare off visitors before they have even read the first post. It must look professional and not spammy. There are plenty of free themes to use and make your site look great, just don’t fill them with lots of advertising. Just keep it to 1 or 2 advertising locations. Any more will say to visitors that all you are interested in is advertising to them.

Add RSS feed straight after blog content
Has the visitor just read to the bottom of the post and enjoyed what they read? If so, give them a way to come back for more at a later date, such as an RSS feed or a link to your weekly newsletter. If they have just read the post then they might be ready to sign up for more.

Related posts plugin
Along the same lines, after each post give a list of similar posts that they might like to read. There are plenty of plugins to do this automatically for you and by providing themed additional content, your reader might just want to read that little bit more.

Add Twitter link with RSS
Some people these days prefer to follow what is going on within Twitter, so add a link to your Twitter page so that they can find it and follow you there.

Tweet all new posts
And once they have followed you, make sure that you tweet links of all new posts. Again, there are plugins to enable this to work instantly, you do not have to worry about doing it yourself! However, doing it yourself allows a more conversational Tweet that can work better, so it well worth the slight bit of extra effort.

Most popular posts plugin
Most people display a list of their recent posts, but that part of the side navigation can be put to better use with a list of most popular posts. These are much better as they are popular for a reason so encourage more readers to sample your best work. Don’t worry about recent posts – anyone landing on your home page will be able to discover these anyway!

Write quality content
One of the fastest ways to lose visitors is through writing poor content and not writing frequently. Quality content should be available every week. Make it well written and something that your readers are desperate to read!

Is it worth you time and money running paid blog advertising? Can it help you blog, or is it money down the drain?

For many blog owners the desire for more traffic is always there. From the first handful of visitors to the jump to a regular 100 visitors a day, to 500 daily visitors and so on, always building the traffic. With traffic comes the pride of running a successful blog and the growing reputation. And if you are so inclined, the opportunity to earn more money through PPC, sponsored posts, banner advertising and many other schemes.

Advertising for websites is one way of getting more visitors directly to your site and if your blog is prepared and ready for these visitors, then there is a good chance that some will become regular subscribers.

When are there benefits of blog marketing?
So, is it ever worth paying for advertising to increase your blog’s exposure? A lot depends on your outlook. Are you making money from your blog? Are you just blogging for the fun of it? Would more followers increase the chance of you raising your income?

It also depends on your niche. If you are in a highly competitive niche then there is more chance of adverts returning you some cash, however advertising is going to cost more. Likewise in a hobby based blog advertising your blog might be cheap, but you have to be very imaginative as to how to get a return for your investment.

For the new blogger
For the new blogger, then especially if you can find some cheap advertising (or get hold of a voucher for free adwords advertising, for example), then you might be able to get your first solid visitors. You should only do this once you know for certain that your blog is running fully – your visitors will have a reason to want to come back and a method to do so. Without such preparation any advertising is certainly a waste of time.

But as a new blogger, seeing those first few visitors, especially regular visitors, can be important. More than just a way of increasing your return they can give you an audience to actually talk to, people that can reply back to your comments and a reason to keep writing your best possible work.

A few visitors through cheap paid schemes, especially if they become regular visitors, can be the inspiration to a bigger and better blog that a new blogger needs.

For the established blogger
For the existing blog, it very much depends on you, your budget and your desires. It might be that advertising can return a good profit, else it might be a waste of time. The only way to find out is to prepare your blog and give it a go with a small budget. Only then can you decide if advertising for your blog will be a benefit.

Writing daily is a good way to blogging success. So why should part of your daily routine involve writing your next post?

The purpose of blogging is to build a blog and by writing every day, you are certainly doing that. Daily blogging must be the ultimate aim, but why?

Is the effort worth while?
Well you could write many times a day and with a news blog, you probably would. But with other blogs daily is enough, without going to too much. However, writing daily is a lot of commitment, especially if you have multiple blogs each in need of some daily posts. Why is it worth the effort?

There are many reasons for writing daily, but ultimately they all boil down to one factor – lots more hits for your blog. By writing every day you are building a library of content, interest for your readers and search engine bait.

The benefits of writing daily
Let’s look at that in detail! If you are writing interesting content every day then subscribers through your RSS feed and newsletter will be receiving plenty of updates. Others will see that new material is arriving constantly and will be more eager to subscribe. Building your subscribers list is an excellent way of generating plenty of future hits and exactly what you want as they keep coming back for more!

But writing daily will also be seen by the search engines, who will determine that you have plenty of fresh content and will rate you more highly. Plus, because you are writing daily you will quickly build up a huge stock of posts on your blog and the more posts there are the more chances there are that one of your posts will match someone’s search query.

Does daily have to mean every day?
Does daily mean seven days per week though? Do you have to spend your Sunday evenings diligently writing a new post? Probably not! Most visitors will have a pattern of when they will visit your website and you may find that the bulk of your visitors only visit on certain days, maybe even at certain times of the day. I have had sites that get virtually no traffic at the weekend, but loads in the week.

Write as often as your reader want to read
So to target these sorts of traffic levels you can actually just be writing on those days that traffic usually arrives, say Monday to Friday, It certainly makes life much easier for yourself than writing 7 days a week, unless you are able to!

There are many benefits to blogging every day, but that only needs to be every day that your visitors are coming frequently to your website!

Many people ask how to generate more traffic. Well, there are 2 answers. The first is quick, expensive and generates lots of traffic. The second is slow, cheap (free!) and generates a little traffic.

But let’s forget the first method, of PPC, SEO, Article Writing and so on. Let’s today look at the slow, free, low traffic method.

Sounds daft to concentrate on it? Actually, it is not. It might not work very quickly and might not give you thousands of hits, but it gives you something more important – loyal readers.

If you put some of your marketing time and effort into looking after those visitors that are on your website rather than generating new visitors, you will see a slow and steady rise in traffic.

It’s not great, but these loyal visitors will come back time and time again. They will communicate with you and leave comments. They might even tell other people about your writing, bookmark you in their social media and spread the word of your blog.

How do you look after these regular readers? It is actually very simple. Watch your feedburner stats (use it, or something similar for your RSS feeds if you don’t already) and see which posts generate most interest. Concentrate on writing these posts and you should see your regular readers coming back more often.

Look at your traffic stats and see what pages other visitors are reading and again, write more of these.

It is a slow process and it might not seem as though it works as well, but by writing for loyal readers you are building the traffic foundations of a good blog. And best of all, it is free traffic!

Leaving comments on other people’s blog is a good way of getting a share of their visitors, with their blessing. So, what should you be doing?

No Spam Here!
Well for a start, no spammy comments. Spammy comments are likely to be deleted by the blog owner and spammy comments do not encourage traffic.

You are trying to encourage people who read your comments to see that you have something useful to say and then to click on the link to your blog to see what you have to say. This requires quality comments that add to the post. Not just generic how pleased you are to find the site rubbish.

Be Happy With One Link
Many comment leavers try to add extra links to their comment, not be satisfied with the main link. But, this is a flag for spam and looks tacky, meaning that you are more likely to be rejected. It also looks impolite and reduces your click through rate.

Finding Blogs To Comment On
This is the hard part of this process. Look through other blogs in your niche and see if you can comment on any recent posts. Trying to find high traffic blogs is the trick, but then you might find your comment buried amongst hundreds of other comments so that none of the other readers see the comment. Also, commenting on old posts might result in no other visitors popping by.

There is a trick that you can use here and that is to look at the people commenting on popular blogs and visit their blogs. It is likely that these people are commenting to raise the profile of their own blogs, so if you go to their blogs and start reading recent posts you might be able to leave comments.

When these owners see that they are getting comments, they are likely to wonder who you are and they themselves might follow your link to your blog (I know, done it myself). As you already know that they are going around blogs leaving comments, there is a good chance they are looking for new places to leave comments and so will try out your blog. Direct traffic creation! Best of all, they might even keep coming back to leave more comments.

Measuring Your Success
There is no point in leaving hundreds of comments that have taken you a while to read the post and then a bit more time to think of something constructive to add. So you want to know that the system is working and concentrate on just these blogs for leaving comments.

So make sure you have a decent traffic statistics package installed and use it to see which blogs are sending you visitors from your comments. You can then subscribe to the RSS feeds of these websites so that as they place a new post you can be amongst the first to comment.

Taking It A Step Further
If you look on a list of do-follow blogs, then the comments that you leave will not only generate traffic for you but will also give you a tiny bit of search engine favour. Maybe not must, but if you can leave a comment a day it soon adds up. This means that you are getting an additional benefit to your work.

Building traffic to a blog is essential and one of the great ways of doing that is through article writing. This process, along with guest posting, works on 2 ways.

But to begin with, you need to do your research. Before starting to write a random collection of articles that you can submit to you favourite collection of article directories and blogs, you need to prepare the groundwork.

Targeted Writing, Not Mass Waffle!
Just writing, writing and writing is not the best way forward. It might, long term, increase your Page Rank, but this is just an indicator of the trust your website has gained from Google and does not affect the traffic that you will receive.

Instead, you need to research keyword phrases and write about them. Use tools such as the Google Keyword selector tool and type in a couple of keywords that relate to your website. From this you can see the volumes of traffic that are associated with your preferred keywords and then pick some that are probably not that competitive and you might be able to perform well with.

Find The Longer Keywords
You should be able to dig around these keywords to find longer phrases that include these keywords, which have probably got less traffic and less competition. It is these longer keywords that you should start on, as by default as you work on the longer ones, your ranking for the shorter ones also starts to improve.

Not Just Search Engine Optimisation
But, this is only the first aspect of article writing for traffic. As you write and submit articles you are spreading your incoming links far and wide and it is these that the search engines reward you for with more traffic.

There is a second, huge, advantage of article writing. If you are submitting also to the high quality, high traffic article directories rather than just the low quality directories that exist only for page rank, there is a huge benefit that you might initially overlook.

Real People Read Your Writing
And this benefit is in actual traffic arriving from these article directories and blogs you are guest posting on. One article alone that I wrote a few months ago still sends me 1 or 2 visitors every day, just from one article directory.

For this to work you have to submit to quality site, produce useful and well written pieces that provide some valuable information that the visitors to the sites want to read, can find and then tempt the readers over to your site to discover more about what you have to say.

It Is Not Easy, But It Works!
No one has ever said it is easy, but it is possible to use article writing to increase your website optimisation and also directly increase the traffic to your website, if you take your time to research the subject and then write a good article.

It can be wonderfully rewarding to start seeing a trail of visitors arriving at your website because of your hard work. So try it now!

Have you ever considered how easy, or difficult, it is for users to find information once they arrive at your website?

There are various elements to consider here. Both the parts you want them to find (navigation, information, sign up forms and so on) and monetising your blog (Pay Per Click, banners and so on).

Whatever you want your visitors to find, you want them to see it as they are on your pages rather than having to look for it. If your aim is to make money on Pay Per Click, then obviously the adverts need to be obvious and high profile. Put them in the wrong position and no-one will ever see them and therefore, no-one will ever click on them.

An example ‘heat map’

So, where do you put important navigation, adverts and everything else that you consider vital?

Heat maps tell us what we need to know
That is where the so called heat maps come into play. On the one on the right, the red area is the top of the content of the page. This is where the visitor is almost certainly going to read before deciding to continue.

The orange areas are the ‘hot’ areas that they will probably see, even if they don’t actually take it in. These areas are good for placing important parts of the page that you want them to interact with. But the white areas are ‘cold’, these are the areas that they will almost certainly not see and almost certainly not click in.

An “artistic”, not realistic, view
Obviously, this is a very squared off heat map and is based on what Google and other providers offer. These offer square adverts and so the rectangular format suits their needs. A more accurate map (but a lot harder to put together in just a few minutes on Photoshop) would have graduated zones spreading out from the very hot areas. But even with these, you would see that the corner of the orange zone is a prime zone for placing vital content.

Benefit from this information!
Now that you understand where your visitors are looking, look through your blog and make sure your navigation and any PPC blocks are in an orange area, not a cream or white zone!

I’ve been reading today other people’s views on building blog readers through using Facebook. It’s not something that I have tried yet, maybe it is time.

I have to say that I steer clear of the social networking website as much as I possibly can. I do not have a personal page there and when people talk about writing on walls and liking whatever, I am struggling to keep up! Recent safety concerns do not exactly inspire me to change this position.

But, I’ve been reading on several other sites (I was researching the idea!) how it can really help a website / business if you have a Facebook fan page and I know of local shops (my own customers) that have and successfully use these to generate more sales.

So, it might be time to make that one small step and see if I can utilise the services of Facebook. I haven’t quite got my head around the total theory yet, but it seems that you get people to follow you then encourage them to discuss you and your topics. In doing so their friends see their comments and find out about you.

The problem – getting those readers in the first place!

It seems to be a sound idea. So if anyone already uses Facebook in this way or has any thoughts on the subject, do let me know. And if I get around to setting it up, not only can I share the tips of how to work it well, but readers can also promote their own blogs there!

Promoting a blog is easy! You can get loads of new traffic quickly and easily and improve your Page Rank whilst you are at it. You just need to know how. So follow these tips!

Promoting a blog is all about getting your blog noticed in as many other places as possible. The more places that your blog is mentioned the more likely it is that visitors will start arriving at your blog. Here is what you need to do.

Install A Stats Package, Or Two!
It seems daft that the first part of promoting a blog is installing a statistics tool, but you need to know which techniques are working for you to concentrate on them. However, one is not enough! I like to use two packages together. This seems like overkill, but if one stops recording or is showing strange results, the other works as backup. I use the WP-Stats plugin and Google Analytics together.

Target Some Keywords
Head over to the Google Keyword Selector tool, of a title suggestion tool on an article directory and work out some keywords that are being used that have traffic. Your own website stats will also reveal this information – look for keywords that the lesser search engines are sending traffic on and then target these on the higher volume search engines

Write For These Keywords
Now, write content based around these keywords for your blog. Use the keywords naturally in the title and throughout the post. Next, write more articles based on these keywords and submit as articles and guest posts, linking back to your blog with the keywords. Targeted writing will give far more benefits than random writing.

Take Part In Forums
Find a few support forums that talk about subjects related to your blog and sign up to them. Upload a picture of yourself to your profile and add your blog URL to the profile. Now look for questions that you can provide answers and suggestions to and start answering. Over time, people will see your answers, click your photo and visit your site. It really works,

You can also try the same with general discussion forums as well, but they don’t quite carry as much traffic to your site, although there might be more chances of leaving a post.

Join In With Blogs
Look for other people’s blogs that are talking about similar subjects and read their recent posts, If you have something sensible to add to the post then leave a comment. Comments such as ‘Nice post’ quite often get deleted and if they don’t, attract no traffic. But if you can leave a comment adding to the subject or backing it up with your own experience, then your comment is seen as being valuable and should be accepted, whilst other people will see that you are talking sense and might want to know more.

With all of these, be watching your traffic logs and seeing where your traffic comes from. If you see hits from certain forums, blogs and article directories then you know which you should be concentrating on posting to in the future to create more traffic to your blog.