Blogging Tip of the Century

I throw out my blogging tips as often as I can, and for the most part I try to keep them quick and easy, and something that the average blogging know it all doesn’t really share, or doesn’t think is all that important. Today I am going to get into the boring, but very important things that the blogging know it all should be saying, but don’t really because, they don’t actually blog. They simply sell you tricks on search engine gimmicks, that don’t translate into blogging gold. Now of course some of this is search engine tricks but a very small percentage, and a LOT of this is tricks of a different measure. A purist will read a lot of what I am going to lay out today and be offended (and then continue to fail as a blogger because purist and realist are on two different continents) and a realist will benefit from this exponentially. Follow these steps in order, or just go back to the SEO people and stop bothering us bloggers.

1. Build your content before you do anything. I still don’t do a single bit of search engine optimization because I am all about the content. People show up because what I do is interesting, fresh, and relevant. If you do not do this first and foremost then everything else is just a roadmap to trailer park. Then it because a roadmap to a place everyone will avoid.

2. Build your popularity. Here’s where some people will balk, but if you do not build the perception of popularity, then you will probably never actually gain any popularity. I happen to be lucky where as I built my blogs on the Blogger platform. Blogger being a part of the Google family, I am able to use G+ build a large following and get a certain amount of people that will never read a single thing I do or pay attention to anything more than the picture that is attached to my blogs, but they will +1 it. All of those +1s give the appearance of popularity.

3. Through analytics I can track actual stats that mean something AFTER I have done the two things above. The most important analytics are the “unique” page views each day and the “actual” page views each day. From there you can then look at where users are referred from and who are repeat visitors, but make sure you have a reasonable amount of the first few analytics first. I didn’t start micro managing the other things until I had about 100 unique views. Until then you haven’t worked the first two enough.

Now of course there are a few people who have read this who are saying “I don’t care about …” and whatever came after that doesn’t matter. I am not speaking to you and I am sorry you wasted your time reading this far. Now let’s build on what I just listed out. You have your content, you have your perceived popularity, or at least you are working on it. What is the system for making these things work so that you can make the whopping $40 a month that I do.

If you follow any of my other blogs you know that content comes from everything. I write, take pictures, make videos, create tutorials, share recipes, and just about anything that makes Jeremy, Jeremy. This is basically what you are going to do of course in your own way. As far as part two goes, you need to learn how to manage your posts in a way that you will get whatever amount of +1s, Likes or whatever you are using to gauge your popularity in the eyes of others to a level you find works for you. I work for about 150 +1s for every post. Some get past 200 most hover between 100 and 150. Accomplishing this is merely set up by how many times you share something, but at the same time don’t share it so many times that people tune you out. As I said you will need to work on that yourself.

Now with the analytics, I like at least 1000 unique visits and then I don’t worry too much about the total visits. I have gotten over 10,000 on a few but rarely do I get that. Not exactly superstar numbers but I am pretty sure everyone reading this would like to get there, and it is a good start. As you can see this simple science (and it is very very simple, for those who think it isn’t) will start building you and audience. What you do with that audience is your business, but I would personally suggest that you work on keeping it.