Maintaining a popular blog means following the rules of the “i”s; insightful, innovative, interesting. If you can make each and every one of your blog entries follow one or all of those rules then you are well on the way to blogging success and maintaining a popular blog with great traffic, and lots of return visitors.

However, sometimes inspiration does not come easy, sometimes writers block can set it, your blog posts can start sounding a little stale, and worse, your traffic might start to drop off. If you ever find yourself in a place like that, with subscriber numbers slowing, follow my three critical steps for Blogging Success below and re-invigorate your blogging!

Step 1 – Fresh Ideas!

If you are suffering from writers block and cannot think of the next subject for your blog there are a number of ways to find new subject matter of interest to your readership. Do you use bullet point lists in your blog entries? I hope so because they are a great way of making your blog posts pleasing to the eye and less hard work for the lazy reader. Just make sure you get your points out in a nice orderly matter. There is another use for these bullet lists in old blog posts though, and this tip is gold – read on!

Revisit the most popular posts on your blog, identified either by visitor stats, or by comment count, and take another look at those bullet points you have in there. Every one of those listed items can be a blog post of its own! You have already proved the blog post was a popular one, so now create a new blog post for each of the bullet point items! In this way you can find inspiration for half a dozen, a dozen, or even more brand new blog posts. This is a golden tip that keeps your blog relevant, interesting and insightful! Trust me, this stuff really works.

Here’s another golden idea for finding inspiration for your next blog post – check print media for ideas! Offline sources such as printed media can offer a blog owner a lot in addition to online sources. Many bloggers will simply Google for related topics to find inspiration for their next blog post, but there are even more powerful ideas waiting for you in the offline world – namely magazines. There are magazines for just about every subject these days and there is almost definitely at least one for your blog’s subject matter. There are two major benefits with researching offline articles; First, your blog is less likely to be penalised for duplicate content. And second, Professional writers from magazines come up with some great titles and innovative content!

So, visit your local magazine stand, find the best magazine in your niche, and buy a subscription for a regular stream of new ideas for your blog! Or, just google it and you will find tonne of good ones related to your niche.

You don’t have to steal any ideas or copy other’s stuff; instead, you can curate it

Step 2 – Connect with your Audience

When I say connect with your audience, what does it mean to you? When you are blogging, you are writing for people and not bots. When you write about a topic, try to solve a problem, direct a problem and seek solution or talk about personal experience/story. Post questions that people can comment on, post something that can be related to a group of people. Always remember your target audience for whom you are writing. You have to get this straight: connecting means relating to another, helping, answering questions, getting back, responding to emails and feedback etc. Here’s some more tips for making that all important connection:

I’ve already told you the first way to connect, that’s right, the three “i”s – insightful, innovative, and interesting. If you re-read your latest blog post and you can honestly say it has at least one of those elements, it’s all good. If it is lacking by either not having any, or perhaps having all three, but in diluted form, you have a decision to make. Do you publish the blog post and let the search engines put a value on it, but at the expense of boring your readers and losing a subscription opportunity – or, do you scrap it and go back to Step 1? Only you can decide, but for a long term successful blog, you should take the brave step of scrapping it and starting again!

Another way of connecting with your blog’s audience, is to harness the power of social media. Twitter and Facebook alone have accelerated beyond all belief to reach unprecedented membership. If you can offer your visitors a means of connecting your blog to their social media, with a simple click, they will do it at the drop of a hat – no hesitation! So jump on the social media bandwagon if you still haven’t and make sure you have like buttons and all those cool social icons posted with every blog post. WordPress has several cool plugins for it such as Digg Digg which is my favourite.

I also suggest that you Install the facebook comment platform on your blog because over 800 million people are on facebook and most are always logged into it. When they land on your blog post, they might simply post a comment because there is no hassle of logging since they are already logged in. On top of that, their comment gets posted on their profile which means more exposure and more connection.

Make your blog appealing to the eye. This does not mean you have to employ a graphics artist, but making “reading your blog” an easy process for the eye. This is an important step that many bloggers either forget or are blissfully unaware of. Make your blog easy to use and easy to read. In practice this means following these vital guidelines; Focus on a simple design and easy navigation. Do you like the design of this green blog ? What about the simplicity?

Try to keep your blog posts below 600 words like Seth Godin if you can’t write long interesting articles like viperchill; both kick-ass in their posting styles.

Make use of paragraphs, bold, italics whenever necessary.

Paragraphs make it easier to read and focus on sentences.

Make proper use of bullet points to list out points and important stuff.

Remember, don’t make its difficult for readers to be able to read stuff on your blog.

Having a strong Black Background with a weird light font will be a pain in the eyes. Try to keep it simple stupid. If you don’t like how it looks or if something sucks in your eyes then you know that you have to work on it.

Step 3 – Retain your Readership!

If your blog is leaking readers, or if your subscription stats are on a downward trend, it’s time to reassess and figure out why you are losing subscribers. I have experienced this before; Wise are those who make mistakes and take steps to fix it. So if you start losing subscribers all of a sudden, don’t panic. There can be many reasons for this, for example, perhaps your blog is based on a seasonal niche and will naturally have peaks and troughs of interest. However, here are the top three reasons why your blog is losing subscribers.

• Too many updates! Yes it is true; you can update your blog too often. There is a misconception that Google expects to see updates every day to be of value – don’t fall into this trap. Maybe 1 post a day can get indexed and bring you more search traffic, but your subscribers will hate you for it. Let me explain why. First of all, if you really don’t have anything awesome to post then its better to sit down, think about it, come out with something awesome and then post it. Secondly, you might be able to commit to your blog and make a post everyday. But, in reality, we all know that most of us are busy in our trade and it’s hard to keep up with several blogs on a daily basis. You don’t want to annoy your readers by sending them daily updates through aweber, feedburner, or twitter feed EVERYDAY. Make your readership wait, then hit them with the three “i”s couple of times a week. They’ll love you for it.
• Don’t be negative. There is always a way to put a positive spin on almost everything, and your readers will appreciate positivity more than negativity – every time. Some bloggers even agree that it is better to say nothing than to be negative, while other bloggers make a habit out of being negative and it becomes their Unique Selling Point. For the most part though, as a blogger looking for both new and returning visitors, keep it positive! If you are addressing something negative then try to find a positive outcome
• Over Promoting sucks. Are you writing promotional blog posts more than quality and informational ones? If this is the case, then your blog sucks and I wouldn’t doubt if you are losing subscribers. As a blogger, you should try to post useful and informational articles that will help others or make a difference in the community. There is nothing wrong with promoting stuffs and I love doing it myself but there is always a right time for everything. A lot of my readers emailed me asking why don’t I have that many promotional posts on this blog and how am I still able to make money from it ; well the secret is : the ultimate guide to blog monetization . Promote stuff that is worth it; a product that you will personally use and can vouch for. When is the best time to make a promotional blog post ? Let’s say, you are a regular blogger making 3-4 posts a week. In this case, you can make 2-3 promotional blog posts per month. I would try not to go above that.

Always remember, the more you share free ideas and help others, the more money you will make in the long run. Its a crazy psychology , I know, and maybe i’ll write a blog post on it someday soon.

Bottom Line

Successful blogs were not created over night and the fact is that you need to work hard on your first blog if you really want blogging success. Be truthful to yourself and take the shot. If you think your blog sucks and is not doing well then stop procrastinating and implement the three important tips mentioned on this blog post for your blogging success.

How To Make Money And Get Backlinks From Squidoo

I have been using squidoo for a while for various purposes. It has been almost 2 years and I have created more than 1000 lenses so far. Now I am sure you will ask me to show you the 1000 lenses and before you do that let me clarify it. I discovered squidoo in mid 2008 through a Google search and was hooked since then. It took me a while to understand the way it worked but I am adventurous; I dug deep into the squidoo world and learned a lot from designing to layout and coding. Couple of months later, I started creating some decent lenses, wala! Usually it doesn’t take that long to learn squidooing but once you master that, you can create an awesome lens in less than an hour. I created tons of lenses for me and also started helping others create a custom one for a small fee. This is how i reached the 1000 lens milestone

Today, I decided to enlighten everyone about the power ofSquidoo which is one of the largest social media network.

A Little About Squidoo

Squidoo was founded by the elite marketing guru Seth Godin who has also authored several fascinating books. Squidoo gets more than 12 million page views every month. Squidoo has changed the way people donate to charity online. Squidoo gives everyone a voice, and the opportunity to make (free) donations big and small, month in and month out, to organizations that matter.  You can read more about this at How Squidoo works with charity

What is a Lens and Who is a Lensmaster?

Squidoo allows you to create pages on almost any topic except adult and gambling niches. The pages are called lenses and the creator is known as the lensmaster.

So Whats The Deal?

Ok, so why create a lens? Squidoo has a Google Page Rank-7 and is very popular with the search engines. A lens is loaded almost every 1/4 of a second. Technorati says that Squidoo gets blogged about 2000+ times a day.

A lens do not only give you backlinks to your own website but with several money making modules, you can make money from squidoo.

There are various attractive money making modules on squidoo such as amazon, ebay, adsense, chitika, clickbank, zazzle, Netflix and more…

Now you don’t have a reason for not becoming a Squidoo addict just like me

Register at Squidoo and Become a Lensmaster Today

You may still have a lot of questions for me about squidoo but before you ask, I recommend you to check out the following related lenses that may answer your question:

• I have become a Lensmaster, Now What?
• Squidoo’s and Squidont’s: Surviving the Lens Page Jungle
• What Are Squidoo Modules
• Basic HTML for Squidoo
• Advanced HTML for Squidoo

If you follow all these tips, I am sure you will make money while creating valuable backlinks to your site. If you are serious about making 2-3 figures from squidoo lenses then you may also want to subscribe to one of my new blogs WhySquidoo which is provides squidoo tips and tricks.

If you want a custom squidoo lens but do not have time to create one yourself, then you may want to check out Squidoo Lens Builder. It is the best provider for squidoo lenses and other web services.

I hope you have learned something valuable from this post. If you have any questions, then please ask them through comments.

To your squidooing Success…

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Being a professional blogger is not easy if you are not passionate about it. You can’t simply write for money. You make money from blogs when you are dedicated and completely passionate about it. I still don’t consider myself a professional blogger because I am involved with so many things right now that it is sometimes difficult to keep up with my blogs. I own several forums and blogs but, MasterMind Blogger is one of my favorite ones and I do my best to provide the ultimate tips to my readers.

Professional Blogging involves a lot more commitment and planning. I love blogging and helping out people to get success online. I have learnt a lot from my past experiences and mistakes and I will try to bring out all the information to the table so you all can benefit.

So What is this Professional Blogging?

Professional blogging requires complete passion and dedication. You must be committed to it all the time. Your blog should have a dedicated niche and also a targeted audience. Let’s make this easier by giving examples: John Chow talks about how to make money online and that is his niche. He makes money by telling people how to make money online and people who want to make money online are his audience. Same goes for Darren Rowse from Problogger; he writes about how to make a better blog and succeed online which is his niche. In this blog, I write about how to build a successful blog, make money online and making the best use of social media tools and network. Every blog must have a niche and a targeted group.

1. Choose the Best Brand Name for Your Blog

Brand names are very important because it tells a lot about your blog. They give the first impression to a visitor. Problogger clearly tells you that it is related to blogging and definitely professional blogging. Entrepreneurs-Journey would attract any entrepreneurs or people who are interested to set up their own businesses.

There are tons of blogs that have taken all the names you can possibly think of. You can’t get learnblogging dot com or professionalblogger dot com but you can definitely find one similar to these and make use of it. Take this blog as an example. Why did I choose MasterMind Blogger? It sounds cool and it is dedicated in helping you create your first profitable blog.

You can Google several popular blogs and try to find similar names but go your way; get a unique one that stands out; the one that reflects your brand.

Also, secure the names on popular social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Find out if your brand name is available with them. This is very important because these social media tools will greatly help your blog grow.

2. Choose the Best Host

Hosting is very important because this is where you will save all your blogging details and data. There are some hosts that shut you down for getting massive traffic to your blog and this can be a big loss and annoying. If you are serious about blogging and making money online then you must be prepared to invest some money on the best web hosting. Believe me, its dirt cheap these days. I would recommend WpWebHost or JustHost because I am with them for a while and had no such big issues.

3. Choose the Best Blogging Platform

WordPress is by far the best blogging platform I have ever seen. All the top and popular bloggers use WordPress without doubt. Although, I won’t say that other platforms such as typepad and bloggers are bad because famous author and founder of Squidoo, Seth Godin uses typepad for his personal blogging; I just prefer WordPress because it is user friendly and simply awesome. Whatever you choose (I know it will be WordPress), choose it wisely.

4. Get the Best Design and Appearance for your Blog

Design and appearance will give your visitors the first impression. If they don’t like it, they will simply leave, PERIOD! All the good blogs have the best designs because they are serious about blogging. If you think you want to be a pro blogger and have the ability to take your blog to the next level then try to work with a good designer. There are tons of freelance designers out there for hire who can provide very decent designs for a good price.

I haven’t worked much with designs because at the moment, my blog is neat; I hope you agree with me. I know some coding plus Photoshop so I try to take care of my blogs. But, there are hundreds of reasons why you should get a pro designer to design your blog.

Most of my blogs run on Thesis which is one of the best themes so far. It is built in such a way that the author/blogger can easily navigate, design, post, change colors with a simple click. If you are a newbie, get Thesis and get started with your blogging right away.

5. Learn the Basic SEO and How to Implement It

SEO which is the short form of Search Engine Optimization plays a vital role for taking your blog to the next level. You might have no knowledge about it but if you Google; you will find a lot to learn about it. If your blog doesn’t get listed on the search engines then you won’t get enough traffic and will lack in revenues. To get noticed and well ranked in the popular search engines such as Google, yahoo, you must know the basic of SEO and implement in on your blog. I would recommend you take some time and check out Matt Cutts blog; you can learn a lot from it.

6. Say NO to Advertising Banners and Affiliate Marketing

If you have noticed, a lot of blogs can’t resist the temptation of putting up banners and filling the pages with affiliate links instead of valuable content. You MUST not do that. If you want to be a professional blogger, you need to build up your reputation first. You must provide value to your blog and show that your content is worth reading. Once you reach a certain level, you can consider putting up some banners and links to attract advertisers. But the main purpose of blogging is to provide valuable information to the public.

7. Write At least 1 Pillar Article a Week

I have mentioned this before in my previous posts that pillar articles are really important especially for the new bloggers. Articles such as How-To and tutorials bring in great traffic and remain popular all the time.  Try to write at least one pillar content a week.

8. Keep Up With Your Blog, Write Frequently and Write Quality Content

So now you have setup everything for your blog, all you need to do is keep up with you blog and engage in conversations. To be a professional blogger, you need to post at least five times a week. Always remember, quality and unique content is the main key to blogging success. Never copy and paste articles on your blog, this can piss off the original authors. Stick to your niche and be passionate about what you are writing on. Once you reach the level when you can consider yourself a ProBlogger, you can take it easy and come back to this blog and tell me that you finally did it.
I hope you had fun reading this and hope you found this useful. Please feel free to spread the word!

To your Blogging Success…

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