Ever feel that your blogging efforts are going nowhere? Does it feel like you’re trying so hard yet no results are coming from your blogging attempts? Like most of us in the early stages of our blogs things are tough to get going. However this is the time we need to pay the most attention to our blogs and sure that every attention to detail is taking care of.

Everything from design to content should be taken into consideration on a blog in its first six to 12 months of going live. The seeds you plant today are the harvest you will grow tomorrow. If you plant deception seeds your blog will never make it im afraid. But if you try hard to plant the good seed of honesty with your readers you will go far. Even if you don’t know everything on a subject your audience will still read if you say I am no expert on this area, but here is what I think…

In today’s blogosphere people get caught up into thinking they have to be this BIG time name to ever make it big. When in fact that is not true at all, all anyone needs is a good idea, great content and traffic. Before you know it a blog will be sailing across the seas of the blogosphere with ease!

So what are some great ways to start out blogging roots? Firstly we need to plant some seeds of interest around the net. Here are a few ideas / things we can do to plant said seeds with a decent turnaround time. Bare with us as this is going to be a REALLY long post, keep your eyes and mind wide open so you don’t miss a beat!

SEO: Alright, when we talk about founding some good blogging roots it all starts with our blog and how we have it setup for the Search Engines. This is also known as SEO, at least the steps we are about to take are.

When it comes to SEO for a blog particularly its not as important to have everything perfect as other website types such as forums and html sites. But it’s still important, I hope your using word press as your blogging system of choice, if your not stop reading my blog as WP is the ONLY way to go. Below is a small list of things you should check in your word press to ensure you have it setup properly.

Site Title: The first thing any website should think about is the Title Tag; it’s the most important tag to the search engines and your #1 ranking factors. If you do not list your keywords in the Title effectively you might as well forget the tag. Because the title tag is so important, I have written past articles on it in depth that you can check out here and here. Be sure to read them carefully and don’t rush things!

Description: The next step to our SEO success plan for a blog is simple, the description tag of our site is not only important for search engines, but your visitors as well. Since nearly every one’s traffic comes from the search engines this tag should never be overlooked. While it may not help with your rankings like the title tag does it can and does leave a lasting impression on your readers.

The description tag should be used as a form of advertising your latest products or sale ads. If your selling shoes and you have a special going two pairs for 19.95 list your description like this.

SuperShoeMart.com Sells Shoes At Rock Bottom Prices! As if that was not enough this week only you can get two pairs for $19.95 or less! Check it out today for a great deal on all the top brands!

With a description like that your visitor’s eye will be caught and should convert in at least a click to your site if not an easy sell. As stated, the description tag should be used to list your latest sale and it’s a place to convince your visitors that you offer something they need.

Perm links: If you are unsure what perm links are, basically they are the URLs of your blog posts. The perm link decides whether your link is SEO friendly or not. Personally I don’t know why WP offers both as and option, but you can use any type you like. Be sure to research the perm link more in-depth at the word press site.

Images: For some reason bloggers fail to realize how important images are to a blogs success, people search for images and photos daily. By including pictures on your blog you can increase your traffic to great levels if you do it right. The images alone can provide some traffic, but it gets maximized when you add an ALT TXT to the images. The alt txt is basically a description for the image. If the alt txt says hummer SUV, when someone type hummer SUV into google image search you have a good chance of coming up. I have seen traffic increases upwards of 250% just by including images to my posts with correct ALT TXT. Not to bad considering it takes maybe 3 minutes to find an image and put it in the post I am writing.

Categories: Another important factor for the search engines is how easy it can find your content. It’s best to have your content 1-2 links away from the homepage. This way the engines can find it easily. By creating good categories for your blog you are helping the engines find your content much easier. Do yourself a favor and sit down, think about the categories you currently have and add more or delete ones that are unnecessary to your blog.

The engines will thank you for it later on, and remember you can always add those categories back at a later time if you see the need.

Pages: Although we are talking about blogging, nearly every blog has a couple pages of static content. Whether its advertise page or a page that lists the favorite posts you have written yourself. Take advantage of these pages and apply the basic seo steps we discussed above. The search engines love new content, but they also love old aged content. By using your pages as an aged page you can work in keywords to key spots for top rankings. Try it out and be sure to let us know the results you produce from these simple changes!

Content: We can’t stress enough how important content is to a blogs success. As discussed in early posts and video casts content is not going to help your search engine rankings. But it does help your visitors get informed about the topic your writing. Content is the venue where you say what is on your heart, each post you create should be made with purpose. Just remember a few things that we have listed below when writing and producing content.

Purpose: If your content lacks purpose when it is published for your visitors they will not feel the devotion to your blog like we want. Each post you create should have purpose and passion put into it. Ask yourself, why am I creating this post? Will this post help others? Will it destroy some ones reputation? Why am I writing this, what brought on the thought to write it?

If you cant answer these questions then the post is not ready to be posted, sure every now and then you can think wholeheartedly that you know a post has purpose, but when you come back and read it 1 week later it simply doesn’t and it lacks that catch factor your posts need.

This is a large reason to why I pre-write nearly all the posts on my blog. I have stacks of them written for days and weeks ahead, that way I can read them as I need them and add ideas to them before they are ever put up publicly. Remember, what you say now in the root stage of your blog is what you will reap later on. It’s most important to find your voice and purpose before your blog becomes popular or unpopular in your visitors eyes!

Format: Learning to format your posts in an eye catching and intriguing way takes time, and there is simply no remedy or easy way to do it. You just need to experiment until you find a format that looks good and acts great for your readers. I have found that starting a post with an image a little text then the meat of the post is best. I also bold specific section keywords and link out to other posts when I can. This helps your inter linking but It also keeps your visitors on your blog more.

Series: Like formatting posts it will take time, but if you can create a series of posts every now and then 2-3 post series you can generate much better interest in your blog. Let’s just say your blog is about gardening. Instead of writing one 2,000 word post about gardening basics make 3 posts splitting the 2,000 words up. This creates a sense of interest for them to come back for the next post. People will also subscribe to your blog over this, take advantage of that and in the footer of your series posts tell them what is coming and that they should sign up to your email updates so they don’t miss it!

Link Building: To continue on with our blogging roots, it is important to build links to our blog slow and steadily. Don’t go out and buy 10,000 links to point to your site. Just make yourself a goal to get 5-10 per day and leave it at that. Here are some basic link types I suggest you get your hands out. Do each in moderation to keep your link profile natural. You don’t need tons of links if your link profile is top notch!

  • Directory Links
  • Personal Page Links
  • Site Reviews (Link Juice & Traffic)
  • Social Bookmarks

If you can get a few of each of those each day in 1 years time you could have your site a nice website with tens of thousands of back links. Do the math and you will see that is enough to out rank your competition with ease!

Traffic Marketing: Lets face it, without traffic to our blogs we are sunk. Traffic marketing is how we go about sending great traffic to our blogs. When we learn how to do it correctly traffic marketing can make us lots of money. Let’s first see how it’s possible by seeing some great way to generate legit relative traffic.

Site Reviews: Website or blog reviews as I prefer to call them are often overlooked for many reasons. They point traffic and valuable relative link juice to your blog or site. Through purchasing these from high class blogs in your niche you will find that you can get great traffic from them. Although a tad expensive at times, the traffic and branding ability it gives your site or blog is worth the price and a lot more. Take some time out and research these top class blogs and certainly give some smaller to mid size blogs a try as well. You can’t help but have a positive result from the small price you’re going to pay for a review.

Advertisements: Another often overlooked venue to generate traffic to a website is by purchasing advertisements from your competition. Because they are already established they don’t care if you advertise with them and they will put your add up. I have seen traffic in the hundreds to thousands of visitors from using direct advertisement purchases.

Socials: We have discussed social bookmarks before in great depth, but I will continue to remind you that they are an excellent source for relative traffic. I am always on the lookout for more ways to improve social bookmarking, if you know of any tools or sites to help with this I am all ears and would love to hear from you!

Craig list, Squidoo, Myspace: Although using sites like these is an aggressive technique of the past, you can still use them today for excellent strong relative traffic to your site. You could even start a face book account or twitter for the same type of results. Web 2.0 is here and you should create profiles on all the major sites to ensure you keep them!

Personal Pages: I bet you don’t know what Personal Pages are? Don’t worry; I didn’t worry about them for the first couple of years of marketing online. But the fact is that they are very valuable to us for traffic and link juice for the search engines. Personal pages allow you to buy a full page on a blog or website relative to yours. Basically on this page it should talk about your site and link to your homepage and between 3-7 pages of your site. Be sure to link to your feed for subscriptions to, these personal pages get a lot of traffic on the owner’s site, but it can convert into subscribers if you do it correctly.

Video Marketing: Well let’s face it, the internet is moving to a new digital age and that is video. Nearly everyone has created an online video about themselves or their businesses. Video is the best way to market as people are visual. If they see it in action they are more willing to buy, take advantage of that and create a custom video to display a product or service. If you don’t have the talent or time to create the video there are lots of people and companies to hire for doing that work for you.

Well that’s it, if you think you have what it takes to get back to the basics of a blog and restore your blog back to the roots of what your original intentions were then you will be a great blogger soon.

I am here to help you, be sure to subscribe to my feed and send me questions to answer!

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