What makes a successful blog? Obviously, success is determined over time, so technically you don’t start a successful blog: You start a blog, and make it successful. But starting it with the right mindset for success can make a huge difference from right out of the gates.
The first thing is to pick a winning niche. It’s hard to start from scratch when there are already established blogs pulling in thousands or even millions of visitors per month, but part of the key is to pick a niche that will enable you to make your blog unique. For instance, instead of writing a general travel blog — which there are tons of already narrow the playing field a little by styling yourself as a budget travel blogger .
Another important factor is getting the feel for how to write a successful blog post. Blog readers tend to be scared away by long, dense blocks of text, so keep it short and snappy: short paragraphs, short sentences, and create bulleted lists whenever you can. Even if all your blog posts are timely — about what you are doing, for instance, or about current events — try to work some “evergreen” posts in there, which will continue pulling readers in from the search engines long after the post date has passed.
Don’t forget to utilize keywords in writing those blog posts. You can do a quick search using either Google’s or Yahoo’s keyword selector tool (for their advertising customers, but anyone can use it) and find out everything you need to know to create a list of keywords to hit on your blog: what keywords people use while searching for information, how frequently each term is searched for, and so on.
Once you have a good list of keywords, be sure you know how to use them! Keywords are best used in the title (preferably in the first 5 words), once or twice in the first paragraph, and occasionally throughout the rest of the text. If your blogging platform allows you to put them in the meta tags as well, do so! Don’t try to use the keyword too frequently in the body, though — doing so can actually hurt your blog, because it will look like you are keyword stuffing (a big no-no if you want to get picked up by the search engines).
Finally, when you are just starting out is a good time to establish things like your frequency of posts, how often you use pictures and video, linking to other sites and blogs, and immersing yourself in the blog community for your niche. For instance, posting three times a week is generally a good practice if you want to stay high up in the search engines, but you really need to do this from the very beginning. Pictures, video , and a strong presence in the blog community are also really beneficial to your blog, but again, the earlier you start with these things the stronger your blog will be, increasing its chances for success.
