Bloggers R Us

Jeremy Long Chia Teik asked:


Blogging is the word on the internet. The blog has created phenomenal impact on how online communication is being changed for the better. What is in your blog for you? How can you succeed at blogging? What can you do to enable your blog to grow into a successful marketing tool for your online business?

Tools and resources for blogging are plenty and at our disposal on the web. Still it is vital to maximize the effectiveness of your blog. Listed below are various strategies to succeed in blogging. The list is by no means exhaustive.

(1) Keep on posting regularly

In blogging, the most important requirement is to blog frequently, and over a long continued period of time. This is the only way for you to build and increase the quantity of your loyal readers. As long as readership increases, the possibility of bringing in traffic and money is high. It even works better when targeted traffic relating to your niche flows into your blog. Regular posting on your blog pays well eventually.

(2) Provide relevant content in your blog

You will be doing fine as long as content in your blog is relevant to what readers are searching for. Valuable information and links to other websites will help readers to return to your blog for more. Give your readers the best of content – informative, appealing, thought-provoking. They will love what they read and more importantly they will love your blog as the source of great content. Providing good relevant content is one of the many good strategies to succeed in blogging.

(3) Recommend interaction in your blog

The blog opens the door to interactive conversations. Bloggers share their opinions during their blogging sessions. As for a business blog, it is good to be prudent during blog conversations with other bloggers. If there is an interesting post in your blog, others upon coming to know about it will participate in a discussion or even in a debate. The blog allows readers to leave their comments, returns to your blog to read the replies, and may even offer another comment. Effective management of the comment box will certainly contribute to drawing in more traffic to your blog.

(4) Continual promotion of your blog

If you have so much good content posted on your blog but there are not much visitors reading them, it would all be sadly wasted. Promoting your blog continually using every available tool will pay handsome dividends eventually. It is vital that you use as much traffic generating tools that you can find on the web to promote your blog. Promotion must be done aggressively, because there are millions of blogs out there on the internet. More promotions will lead to increase in blog visibility.

(5) Build friendships and connections

The blog provides the best opportunity to build good friendships and strong connections that are so important for your online business. The concepts of community, linking, and even dialogue are an integral part of blogging. With the formation of friendships and strong connections, it will benefit your blog tremendously if you can get other blogs to link to you. This is one of the more important strategies to succeed in blogging because it will pave the way for more traffic to your blog.

(6) Make yourselves known

Blogging is fun; it brings out the lively side of you. This is because the blog provides you with the best opportunity to start networks with others, whom you can convert into buyers for your products. Social networking opens the door to marketing opportunities. You can make yourselves known by being active , participating in forums, blogs , and message boards. Your visibility in the blogging world will also increase tremendously.

(7) Provide great experience to visitors

When readers come to your blog, they will expect to see relevant content, easy navigation, and to experience warmth and friendliness while they are in your blog. It is so important to ensure that your blog provides the visitors with an experience that is really fulfilling and worthy. An intrinsic characteristic of the blog is being friendly and personal. Your blog must be able to allow visitors to read, chat and even socialize. Only then will they treat your blog as their favorite.

In conclusion, the search for information on the internet never stops. Blogging offers online marketers the best of opportunities to help feed information to those who need it. The blog is the best solution. You will definitely be required to understand and apply proven effective strategies to succeed in blogging.

Robin Dale asked:


The major issue bloggers face is that over time their blog archives gets fill up with thousands of posts and by default a blog normally only shows the most recent posts that you have posted on the front page while the majority of your previously written posts can’t get noticed once they drop off the front page.

The new technique is called Sneeze Page. The idea behind it is simple – to create a page that forces the people in different directions deep inside your blog by highlighting a variety of previously written posts.

In simple words – A sneeze page is all about exposing those archives.

There are many types of Sneeze Pages that you can create on your blog. Few types are explained below.

Themed Sneeze Pages – these are posts or pages on your blog or site that revolve around a single theme. The sneeze pages (and others) are linked to prominently around the blog – including the ‘best of blogs’ section of the front page, if you have. These pages generate a lot of page views both themselves and the pages that they link to.

Time Related Sneeze Pages – these pages are based around a defined period of time. They are usually a ‘best of’ post that highlight your key posts from that period to either remind readers of previous posts that they might want to revisit or to highlight posts that they might have missed.

The period of time that you choose can really be anything from a year through to a month, week or even a weekend (ie a post that summarizes the posts from a weekend that those readers who don’t read your blog on a weekend might have missed).

Retro Sneeze Pages – Another variation of this ‘time related’ sneeze page is to do one that unashamedly shows off a number of posts from your blog from a particular point in its history. The most common way to do this is to do a post highlighting posts from the blog from a year ago.

Series Sneeze Pages – many bloggers use the technique of writing a series of blog posts that allow them to explore a topic over a period of time with lots of interlinked posts.

One key with writing a series of posts is to make sure that readers have a trail of links between posts so that they’ll not only read one but the full series.

A great way to help readers discover a full series is to develop a sneeze page. All of the posts in the series should link back to it and it links to them. Series Sneeze pages can become key pages on your blog.

Advantages of Sneeze Pages

Exposure to your archives – I don’t know about you but when I spend hours (if not days) crafting a blog post, I want people to read it! Sneeze pages lengthen the time that people interact with your older posts.

Benefits to SEO - search engines not only look at the links that other people make to your posts in order to give them ranking but the internal links on your blog. Linking to old posts can help them grow their search engine ranking.

Help’s create a Sticky Blog – I’ve not seen stats on this but it is my suspicion that a person arriving on your blog for the first time increases the chances of coming back to it the more great posts that they view on it. Get someone to read 10 great posts that you’ve written previously instead of 1 and you’ll exponentially increase the likelihood that they’ll subscribe and become a regular reader.

Sneeze pages can be an effective way of driving people deep within your blog – but they’ll only do that for as long as you’re able to drive people to the sneeze page itself. As a result – a sneeze page is something that you’ll want to promote and position prominently on your blog in a place that people will continue to see it.

Link your sneeze page from the navigation menu, sidebar or other hot spots on your blog. It works beautifully for both SEO and user experience purpose.