For the last couple years I’ve played with quite a few different ideas on the net. The more you learn about how different things work, what works and what doesn’t work, the better results you get.
The great thing about a blog is it can be a lot of things; an outlet for writing, a marketing tool for a business, or an income-earning business in itself. And the power and ease of using WordPress to build blogs or affiliate sites or whatever you can dream up is pretty much without equal.
What Works When it Comes to Building an Online Business
Lots of things work, and most of them are really hit and miss if you don’t get all the ingredients just right. But there are a couple of “internet truths” that never seem to fail when you put them together … content is king and traffic is queen. Period.
A blog with consistently great content (a voice), and significant traffic (an audience) can consistently play king-maker … and by that I mean; you talk about it and it turns to gold. As long as you’re true to your audience you can promote a lot of great things. And do it quite lucratively.
Building a Kingdom (er … Blog)
There’s a lot of great advice out there on how to build a successful blog. But a lot of times, it’s difficult to get a clear picture on exactly WHY you should do one thing and not another.
After doing a lot of testing and observation, here’s a list of the strategies I’ve used and will be using a lot more:
- Focus on building subscribers. Every internet marketer out there will tell you the value of having a “list”. Smart affiliate marketers today won’t even show you a product unless you sign up to their list to download a freebie first. Thanks to RSS, blogs are list machines and building up that audience is job one for any blog.
- Cut the clutter. You want a nice clean blog design. The biggest reason I’ve heard for not putting ads on a “young” blog is that it makes it look spammy. Truthfully, it’s all about the “Law of the Links”. You want to build your audience, not make a couple bucks a month. So the more prominent your RSS links and the more incentives you have for people to subscribe, the better. And the less links (ads) that pull new users away, the better. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t link to other blogs/sites in your posts. You should. That’s part of being a valuable resource to your readers.
- Knock on doors. Something I’ve done a bit with Zoomstart and highly advocate in any business venture. The famous line “build it and they will come” from the movie Field of Dreams is probably responsible for more business failures than anything else I can think of. Comment on other blogs and even more importantly write guest posts on other blogs. You’re trading content for traffic and it benefits them and you. It’s win-win.
- Post regularly. (Something I have to get back to). Successful blogs post at least daily if not 2 or 3 times a day. The big million dollar blogs post 20 or 30 times a day. It’s a numbers game. Great SEO is hit and miss at best, but the more pages of great content you have, the more you’ll bring in organic traffic from search engines or links from other sites.
So that’s the “how” and you’ve probably heard it all before. It’s the “why” that’s not always so clear and I hope this sheds a little light in that direction.
Now, don’t you have a kingdom to attend to?
Shane,
It’s nice to see you back……and with a nice new layout!
Posting daily is something I’ve never been able to do. I’m sure it would help in regards to building an audience faster, but I’ve never been able to keep fresh content that often….while also doing everything else I do. I know, that sounds like an excuse, huh?
Hey Anthony,
Glad you like the new layout.
As far as posting regularly, it’s all about priorities (obviously hasn’t been mine in the past couple months). But it’s only one link in the chain. It’s all the things I listed together that help build an audience – and if anything, I’d say #3 is the most important.
You might want to try some guest posting on some of the bigger blogs once in a while and see how it goes … the trick is to post in the right place and have relevant content on your own blog so that when people check it out it fits in with what they’re looking for.