I noticed yesterday that Google, that had been sending me 200+ visitors daily, started pretending as though I didn’t even exist. I can’t figure out why it happened. Maybe it’s just some algorithmic change and I’m just making a mountain out of a molehill, but it’s equally possible that Google thinks I’m selling text link ads.

I’ve been creating web sites for four years, and I know if a site all of a sudden drops from all its rankings, there’s definitely something wrong.

So maybe Google thinks I’m selling links below the deceptively titled heading “Top Commenters”?

It’s not very unlikely as recently some folks have been trying to misuse my Top Commenters list by putting keywords where they should be writing their bloody names.

Right! That’s what you give a good guy in return for him giving his precious readers some link love. I’ve now decided to remove the Top Commenters list so all you spammers can go find yourself.. err.. another good guy?

But losing Google rankings is not the only reason I’ve removed Top Commenters widget.

One quality comment > a lot of useless spammy comments

I’m beyond that phase now when I wanted anyone to comment even if they mildly spammed. It happens. When you start a new blog, you desperately want people to drop by your blog, and want even more desperately to have someone leave you a comment.

However, as a blog evolves, the blogger gains more experience, and realizes the value of having a quality readership, he/she stops caring about numbers alone. Increasing subscriber count and comment count by any means possible aren’t important to them anymore.

Well, I think I no longer welcome useless junk in comments anymore, left only to get some link juice from my blog. I still welcome each and every comment, but if you want to advertise your keywords, please.. here’s the door.

Ah… I feel much better now!

For now, I’m showing my Twitter updates in place of top commenters list. Be sure to follow me on Twitter so we can chat in the best open messenger in the world!

I still feel I should reward all of you who take the time to write comments on Blogging Bits. So if you have a suggestion as to how should I do that, please chime in.

Link Code: d1928 - © Blogging Bits | Blog writing, marketing, and design

Due to the fact that you are only a few clicks away from publishing your thoughts, opinions, knowledge, and rants, you are in a very saturated market as a web publisher.

Every person who has a computer with internet access is potentially your competitor. With the advent of blogs, twitter, and tumblelogs, suddenly everyone is out there to get their share of audience.

So it has become increasingly difficult to find people who are willing to listen to you instead of that other guy. However, if you do something that other guy is not doing, you’ll have a definite edge over him.

And that is: you personally find and approach your audience.

While the other guy waits for his audience to come to him, you go to your audience and introduce yourself, increasing your chance of being noticed.

Here’s step-by-step how you can find, approach, and impress your audience.

Step 1: Finding your audience

Where’s your audience?

In the comments of other blogs in your niche – People who read your fellow blogger will read you too.

In the blogrolls of other blogs in your niche – Many blogs link to their favorite blogs in their blogrolls. I’ve always found interesting blogs and great bloggers through blogrolls.

On StumbleUpon – Most bloggers and other people who want to discover and read new content hang out on StumbleUpon.

On niche social media sites – Members of niche social media sites are particularly interested in keeping abreast of trends and updates in a particular niche.

On niche forums – People who hang out on forums are always looking for interaction, so they make a great communicative audience.

Step 2: Approaching your audience

How do you approach your audience?

Send them an email and introduce yourself – Sending someone a personalized email shows them that you have noticed them and you care about them enough to personally contact them.

Visit their blog and leave interesting comments – You become their reader and they’ll become yours.

On StumbleUpon – Open up the reviews page of a blog post and visit the profiles of all stumblers who has voted for and reviewed the post. Befriend them, leave them a review, and introduce yourself by sending them a PM.

On forums – Respond to their posts, answer their questions, and solve their troubles. Make them notice your presence.

Step 3: Impressing your audience

How to make them your fan?

Link to their blog – Linking to a blogger always makes him feel warm and grateful towards you.

Stumble their content often, or submit it to related social media sites – Do them favors that bring them real benefits.

Share interesting content with them through StumbleUpon ‘Send to’ feature – Share with them something they’ll be interested in. Remember not to send your own content because this way you’ll only put them off. No one likes to be directly marketed to.

In short, find your audience, introduce yourself to them, and don’t let them forget you. Keep doing them favors, and keep reminding them of your blog.

See, there is no dearth of eyes and ears. And most importantly people are willing to listen to you if you give them enough importance. Treat them like human beings, like your friends, and you’ll see how positively they respond.

Your thoughts?

Do you proactively seek your audience or merely sit around waiting for people to drop by your blog?

Link Code: d1928 - © Blogging Bits | Blog writing, marketing, and design

Here are some of the results at a glance:

• 20k+ new visitors
• 100 new subscribers
• And 23 new links so far (and counting)

But this is not what I didn’t expect. What I didn’t expect is something else. Soemthing that has a more long term benefit.

Yes I am talking about search engine traffic. Only 16 or so hours after this post got on to del.icio.us front page, I started getting search engine traffic for the keywords in the post title.

The post was titled: “20+ free web design ebooks and guides“, and I did title it with the intention to maximize the SEO benefit. What I didn’t expect was that search engines will pick the post so quickly and put it high up the ranking page for its keywords.

If I had made the title cute, funny, provocative, or interesting but keyword-less, it wouldn’t have received more than the temporary direct traffic from the links. But since I kept the proper keyword in the title, people who linked to the post used the title as anchor text, and the post got more and more credibility in the eyes of search engines with every new link.

Now, as a result, even though the social media traffic is slowing down, a new and constant trickle of search engine traffic has opened up which will continue for a long time.

Moral of story?

Resource lists and linkbaits are created for the sole purpose of getting links. Links clearly outweigh other short term benefits such as a temporary spike in traffic.

Always keep the keywords that describe your post in the title of your resource lists and linkbaits. Don’t give it a meaningless title such as “x resources for these people or this task’. Nobody is searching for ‘resources’. People search for specific things with specific keywords, so be as helpful as possible. Think of your post’s title as a summary of the contents to follow, and describe what exactly it contains.

I’ve made this mistake myself. My first post that reached del.icio.us front page was titled “54 typography resources every designer should bookmark“. Even though I cleverly left a hint in the title suggesting that it was a bookmarkable list, I could have used a better, more search engine friendly title for the long term benefit.

Your thoughts?

What about you? How do you title your linkbait posts?

Link Code: d1928 - © Blogging Bits | Blog writing, marketing, and design

Blogging isn’t as scary as some of the lengthy blogging guides make it appear to be. If you are new to blogging but can’t decide what to do, go through this teensy weensy blogging guide and take the plunge!

For now, this is all you need to know. If you are still around after a few months, come back and subscribe to Blogging Bits RSS feed for more tips.

Setup

• Get yourself a domain name
• Buy a decent web hosting package
• Setup WordPress on your new domain
• Install essential WordPress Plugins
• Optimize your WordPress blog for search engines
• Write at least 5 flagship articles before you start promotion

Promotion

• Subscribe to popular blogs in your niche
• Actively comment on other blogs
• Make guest posts on established blogs in your niche
• Join forums to drive traffic to your blog
• Submit your posts to blog carnivals for links and traffic
• Join popular social media sites

Monetization

• Use any of these 101 ways to monetize your blog

Misc good practices

• Link to other blogs from your posts
• Keep track of your subscribers with Feedburner
• Post on your blog daily for at least two months

Please add your tips for new bloggers below. If there are any particularly useful, I’ll add them to the list.

Link Code: d1928 - © Blogging Bits | Blog writing, marketing, and design

That’s probably not very interesting. What’s interesting is that I haven’t posted anything in the past two weeks! (because of illness)

I bet now I’ve got your attention, eh?

What’s even more exciting is that my traffic has mostly come from social media sites. Considering the bad reputation of social media traffic in the blogosphere, this indeed is some milestone.

Social media traffic is not entirely useless. In fact, without social media sites, many blogs wouldn’t have reached the level of authority and credibility they now enjoy. And many new bloggers wouldn’t have the motivation to continue blogging.

To make use of social media traffic, you have to understand your social media visitors. You have to go beyond what you know about attention grabbing content in the off-line and even the rest of the online world.

Know your social media visitors

Although web usability researchers have told us that web surfers read content entirely differently from how we are used to in the real world, many of the web content creators don’t seem to pay any heed. Or, it seems, they can’t help but get influenced by the ways content is created and read in the print world.

Web surfers, we are told (and we know that from experience) don’t read. They scan. They don’t read even if the content to be read is a few links, buttons, and small images on the entire page. They hurriedly scan everything and make a quick decision regarding their next action.

Since blogs are about text, content, and reading, and reading requires your visitors to make a commitment, this puts you in an even worse situation; you have to get people not only to stop by your page long enough to scan it, but also read what you have written, and subscribe to your feed in order to come back and read more of it in future.

As if this weren’t hard enough, as a blogger you have to rely mostly on social media traffic that is ruthless enough to skip your blog if it takes only slightly longer to load.

Ah, now you know the hopelessness of the situation you are in!

But worry not! See the positive side of things. Regardless of how difficult to please your potential readers are, they are at your blog because they are interested in your content.

They may not know if your content solves their problem, entertains them, or informs them, the topics you cover are the reason why they have arrived at your blog. Now it’s up to you if you can convince them to stick around or not.

If you ask me how to retain your social media visitors at your blog long enough to read your content, my answer is, keep it clean and simple, your content will do the rest.

However, since this is such a vague answer, below are some steps you can take to maximize the conversion rate of your social media traffic (or all traffic for that matter).

1. Host your blog on a fast server – If your blog doesn’t load in a fraction of a second, there is no chance you’ll even get to say hi to many of your social media visitors.

2. Keep graphics to minimum – Even if your host is fast, heavy graphics may still drown you. Keeping graphics to the bare minimum will ensure that your blog loads fast. Also, make sure the graphics you use are optimized for use on web.

3. Have plenty of white space – White space is the empty space in between different sections of your blog’s layout. If there isn’t enough white space to keep things apart, it may look too crowded and congested, resulting in confusing and putting off your visitors.

4. Keep the header small – A big header will push the content down the page where it is not instantly noticeable to your new visitors. So keep the header size small so as to bring your main content to front.

5. Have as few links in the navigation bar as possible – If you have a vertical navigation bar, don’t overcrowd it. Don’t list every non-post page in the navigation. For example, if you have a privacy policy page, its link can go in the footer. And if your logo or blog name is linked to the main blog page, there is no need to put an extra ‘home’ link in the navigation.

6. Keep your home page clean – Your social media buttons, related posts links, and all other bits and pieces are better off on the single post page. Since there is already too much stuff going on at the home page – lots of post title, excerpts, and images – this extra clutter will make matters worse for the readability of your posts.

7. Make sure your post headings stand out – Not only the headings should be attention grabbing, but they should also stand out from the rest of the content for them to be noticeable. Keeping the headings fairly large and colored differently from the normal text would help in this regard.

8. Strip your sidebar to bare essentials – Unless you want your visitors to notice and explore your sidebar first, you should remove every button and link from the sidebar that doesn’t serve any purpose. Keep only what’s most important.

9. Start your posts with one sentence paragraphs – that are also attention-grabbing, surprising, or strange. This helps in building your newly arrived visitors’ interest.

10. Keep your paragraphs as short as possible – Whether you write long posts or not, keep the paragraphs very very short. If a paragraph exceeds three lines, break it down to two or more separate paragraphs. In short, the smaller the better.

And I’ll say it again. Keep it simple.

Your thoughts?

Any tips you want to share with us to retain a visitor’s (and especially a social media visitor’s) interest for longer?

Link Code: d1928 - © Blogging Bits | Blog writing, marketing, and design

Your most popular posts are your blog’s most valuable asset. These posts are what attract majority of your visitors to your blog. They are the widest, most welcoming doors of your online home.

If you build upon the popularity and success of such posts to write your new posts, your traffic, subscribers, and every other counter related to your logging success will sky rocket, and your blog will become a must-subscribe for the visitors in your niche.

How to make your every post a success

Let’s consider this scenario:

• You write yet another post for your blog, publish it, yawn, and go off to the bed.
• You get up next morning, check your blog’s stats, and notice something different. There are a lot of new visitors coming in from various sources, and there are a lot of new comments.
• You are pleasantly surprised. You realize that you have written your most popular post. So you proudly pat yourself.

Everything is right so far, except you jot down another post, yawn, go the bed, wake up next morning preparing yourself for more pleasant surprises, but alas – this one turned out to be an average post.

So what went wrong?

Well, you didn’t learn anything from your previous success. You took it for granted. You thought success comes from a lucky stroke of fate.

Not true. There are always certain kinds of posts that suit your style, your niche, and your audience. When you write such a post, it becomes an immediate success. But you won’t be going far on the success route if you get complacent, or simply don’t realize what makes things tick.

OK, I get it – what now?

If you have been blogging longer than two months, there must be already a bunch of popular posts on your blog. Look for following traits in every post to recognize your most popular posts.

• It got plenty of comments.
• Many other blogs linked to it.
• It was received well by the social media crowd.
• It still brings you traffic from the search engines.

And here are the next steps:

• Write more posts to follow up the most popular posts.
• Write similar posts.
• Improve upon previous ideas.
• Write more in-depth, lengthier posts.
• Explore related topics.

If you keep on building upon, improving, and exploring the topics of your most popular posts, not only your blog will be more focussed to your niche audience, but it will also soar higher up with every new addition.

By writing posts without giving thought to how they will be received, or if they will help your blog make inroads into the territory of success, you are simply denying yourself the recognition you can easily achieve.

So here’s the deal: When you write your next post, you must write it with an aim to make it your most popular post to date. And go back to your archive of most popular posts for inspiration.

Deal?

Link Code: d1928 - © Blogging Bits | Blog writing, marketing, and design

There is often so much activity on certain forums that a normal forum-less website can only dream of.

While you can help other members and ask for help on the discussion forums, you can also tap into the abundant traffic of forums and drive it back to your blog.

Following are a few ways to get other forum members to notice you and visit your site at least once.

Start an argument with another member

And by this, I don’t mean you start a nasty kind of argument. Just a normal debate between you and another member where you quote each other and try to disprove your opponents’ claim or point of view.

When a debate starts in a particular thread between two members, other members usually don’t interfere. But this doesn’t mean they are not reading. They silently read the debate and derive their own conclusions.

If you wisely pick a weaker opponent to debate with, or you simply have more knowledge than your opponent to easily win the argument, you’ll get a lot of people clicking on your signature link, eager to read more of your thoughts on the subject.

Become an active member in a sub-forum

Pick a certain sub-forum (a forum category) that relates to your blog, and actively participate in all its discussions. Be the first one to solve a problem in a new thread. Always be eager to offer help and advice to fellow members. And Be welcoming to the new members.

This will definitely get other members to appreciate your help and altruism and have them wanting to know more about you on your blog.

Become a moderator

All right, you can’t really become a moderator at will, but if you try hard enough, why not?

Although becoming a moderator requires a lot more commitment and active participation in all the forums on your part, if you manage to pull it off on a fairly busy forum, the effort is worth it.

When you become a moderator, you are instantly promoted from being just another member with worthless opinion to a position of authority, where you are seen to have an authentic and well-researched opinion on all matters.

So, when a forum member clicks on your blog link, he already sees you as authority on a particular subject, which is the hardest part of converting a casual visitor to your site into a regular reader.

Therefore, by becoming a moderator, you not only draw more attention to yourself (and your signature) but you also get visitors who are already inclined to become your readers.

Optimize your signature

Do you have a signature link that says “My blog”? Os is it simply “yourblog.com” or some such anchor text?

Having a well-written link anchor text in your signature is essential if you want others to notice the link. If you did everything else right but have a poorly described link anchor text, you simply wasted your time.

The best way to describe a link is to put it in the form of title and a sub-title.

Example: Life with Church: Do you know you can drastically improve your life with the help of church?

Above is much better and appealing than a simple “Life with church” or “lifewithchurch.com” (only for example. I don’t know if such a site exists).

Drop your links in the posts

Not in a spammy way. Because if you drop links without establishing yourself as an active and helpful member first, you’ll be ignored, suspended, or banned. So don’t even think about spamming.

But if you want to help a member out and have already a post on your blog related to the member’s query, feel free to refer him to your blog.

If you are already seen as an authority member on the forum, no one would object to your occasional link dropping.

I have been a member of numerous forums for many years and have found the above methods to be quite useful. I have even gotten hundreds of visitors to my web sites through a single post on big forums such as Neowin and Sitepoint.

Your thoughts?

Do you use forums? And have you had any success with driving forum traffic to your site/blog?

Link Code: d1928 - © Blogging Bits | Blog writing, marketing, and design

Previously, I have written about what on a blog puts me off as a visitor and keeps me from subscribing to it. Today, I am going to disclose what makes me subscribe to a blog and how you can learn from my perspective as a reader to improve your own blog.

The quality shows. Whenever I see quality, I am inclined to make the most of it, whether it means buying a product, enrolling in a course, or subscribing to a blog. The problem is, for most, it is hard to describe what makes a blog so full of value that it becomes impossible to ignore it. So, here are five things that some of the excellent blogs do right and are the reason why I am subscribed to them.

Value on every page

Any blog I subscribe to is chock-full of value. It does away with redundancies and retains the valuable elements. Every such blog has no mediocre quality posts, no extra widgets and buttons, no unintended sentences, and no fluff. It only keeps what is important to me.

No element and not even a single dot on a blog should be there without a reason. Most readers have very short attention spans and they’ll likely be itching to go to the next web page if you don’t grab their attention the moment they arrive at your page. If you eliminate the redundancies and make the quality factor your first priority, there is no reason why you won’t see an exponential reader growth.

Distinct style

Distinct style of the blog author is what I notice first sub-consciously. I immediately notice that this is not just another of thousands of similar voices. It presents the common observations in a new way, and it carries with it the personality of its author.

Your style is how you say things, how you spell them out, and how you present them thorough your unique perspective. Your words, your grasp of the language, and your know-how of your subject matter define your style. The more eloquently you say it, the more uniquely you convey it, and the more information you put into your content, the more your refine your style and increase your chances of holding your readers’ attention.

Calls to action

I am pushed to perform a certain action, given reasons to undertake a certain task, and urged to do it NOW. There are no weak trailing dots, requests to “please” do it, and vague pointers that lead me nowhere. I am clearly told that if I do it, here’s how I’ll benefit from it.

It is vital to get rid of the elements that create uncertainty and doubt in your readers mind. Presenting information in a matter-of-factly and uninspiring way is not a good idea either. Instead, be clear about what you want your reader to do after reading a certain sentence or clicking on a particular link. Lay out information in a way that it makes your readers think and evaluate their opinions, and do something to change some aspect of their life.

Elegant design

I am impressed with beautiful colors, neatly aligned columns, and a balance between all the elements present on a page. Everything seems to be just in the right place, and I find it where I expect it. Navigating through such design is a breeze, and going to the desired locations is a matter of intuition.

Content is king, but design is the robes of king. How much would you respect a rag-clad beggar claiming to be king? Or how much would you like a king that goes around naked?

Similarly, no matter great your content is, people will ignore it if you dress it up in a raggedy design. Give your design top consideration, and make sure it’s pleasant to look at.

Subscribe link in the right places

While I am enjoying my browsing experience on such blog, I am reminded to subscribe to it at different points, and all these points happen to be at critical places. For example, at the end of a great article, on the navigation bar with other “What’s more” links, and in the sidebar while I look for more browsing options, I am told to subscribe. Of course, I accept the offer and become a subscriber.

Just putting a big and shiny RSS button somewhere prominent is not a good enough reason for your visitors to subscribe. You should remind them and tell them to subscribe, and place your subscription link where you think it’ll convince your visitors of the value of your blog.

Remind them often. One of those links is sure to grab their attention.

Boy! Looks like I am not easy to impress unless you do everything right. But then again, this is how most of your visitors are. By subscribing, a visitor creates a bond with you. He makes a decision to read you for as along as you write. You need to give him a reason for making that decision, and if you tale care of the above points, I, as a reader, a visitor, a subscriber, and a traffic statistic, assure you that you’ll convert every right person to your reader!

Your thoughts?

What makes you subscribe to a blog?

Link Code: d1928 - © Blogging Bits | Blog writing, marketing, and design

Are you a successful blogger? Success, it seems, has different meaning for every person. For some, managing a low traffic blog is a success in itself. For others, it means a lot of traffic, subscribers, and comments. The majority, however, does not know how to determine whether they are successful or not, and what exactly it feels like to be a successful blogger.

Every blogger is full of inspiration and motivation when starting a blog, but this elated condition seems to wane as time passes. The interest simply peters out and the once fun task of blogging seems more like a chore. This all happens because the bored blogger is not familiar with the sense of success.

Usually, since blogging is supposed to be a lifelong adventure, the formidable challenge of blogging overshadows the initial enthusiasm. To get a sense of definite direction and ultimately a sense of success, you need to set down several goals to help you stay motivated along the way.

Determine what success means to you

First, let’s get the meaning of success sorted out.

Answer yourself the following questions:

• Why did you start your blog?
• What do you plan to do with your blog?
• Has the initial purpose of your blog changed?
• Have you made significant progress in blogging?
• Do you think you have improved a lot?
• Do you think you are a successful blogger?

If your answers to all of these questions are not clear to you in the first 5 seconds, you probably haven’t determined why you blog, and you don’t know how it feels to be successful.

Blog with a goal-oriented approach

When you ask most bloggers what they want to do with their blog, they say they’ll write some articles, build some readership, create some buzz, and eventually make some money. When asked how, they usually stare at you as though you were stupid. Well, no comments.

Note the word ‘some‘. Some is the confusing part. Some can be as low as 2 and as much as a 100K and more. You need to involve numbers to see your course of action clearly.

This is where you’ll set down smaller and achievable goals to give yourself a sense of success and achievement, as opposed to being intimidated by the formidable ‘Some’.

If you have managed to answered the above questions by now, you probably already have quite a few ideas broiling in your head. So, to stir things up a little more, let me ask you a few more questions, this time a bit more focused on the nitty-gritty.

• How many subscribers do you want to have?
• How many comments do you want to get for each post on average?
• How much buzz do you want to create? Do you want to appear on Digg front page as often as Smashing Magazine and Tech Crunch?
• How much money do you want to make with blogging?

Already excited to get a clear sense of purpose? Great!

I know different people answer differently to this batch of question. To some, $10K a year would be a huge achievement, and others will be dying to earn this much money every month, or even everyday! But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There is no way you can make so much money only by knowing that you want to make it.

Confused? Of course I didn’t promise that a sense of purpose will make you filthy rich.

Tackle the ‘how’ questions

The real trick lies in determining how you will achieve it, and create as many little ‘how to’s’ as necessary. The giant task of earning $10K per day can only be achieved if you get closer to it one step at a time. And these smaller steps not only involve not only determining why you would take them, but also how you would take them.

Suppose you want to get one thousand subscribers by the end of the year, and to get to this impressive milestone, you need to know how many you would be able get every month. Say, getting 100 new subscribers every month is well within your reach. But, the real task of getting so many subscribers in such a short period looks intimidating.

Here’s how you’ll go about outlining your goal and all the steps involved:

Goal: Get 1200 subscribers by the end of this year.
Smaller goal: Get one hundred subscribers every month.

But how do I do that?

Steps:

• Write guest posts on 5 main blogs in your niche (or at least five smaller ones)
• Create 5 well researched pieces of linkbait, target Digg and StumbleUpon traffic
• Start a competition, give away something for free, go viral!
• Start a project that makes others subscribe to your feed for updates
• Send out emails to your social media friends to help you spread the word about your top posts this month
• Be the odd man out in your opinion about a currently talked about news

And so on.. sky is the limit when it comes to finding new ways to create buzz.

Now, of course, you may surprise yourself and achieve your goal in half the intended time, or you might just stop short of your goal when the year ends (which is very unlikely, if you do all the steps properly), one thing is for sure: you’ll get many moments of rejoice coming from the sense of success. This is the precious feeling you want to keep with you when you are going through physical and psychological bad times that threaten to dampen your confidence.

With clearer and smaller goals to keep you motivated, and the knowledge of exact steps you know you would take, the fun side of blogging comes back with all the pre-launch determination.

Your thoughts?

What are your blogging goals? Do you consider yourself a successful blogger?

Link Code: d1928 - © Blogging Bits | Blog writing, marketing, and design

You know why blogging became popular? Because it let the geniuses like you and I publish their rants thoughts about random stuff online. Blogs were supposed to be personal diaries.

Then, the cult of business-minded came along and turned blogs into online profit-turning machines, and set down a completely different definition of blogging. Of course, money feels and smells good, so everyone liked the renewed definition of blogging, leaving personal blogs behind.

The state of personal blogging is very bad nowadays. Personal bloggers have very few readers who hardly participate in discussions. Unless you have been blogging for five or so years, chances are you find blogging a very discouraging experience.

The fault, probably, lies within you. It’s time to reconsider your agendas and re-examine the way you blog.

Find a topic or two and stick to it

One problem with personal blogs is that they don’t follow anything resembling a topic. If today, you – the publisher of personal blog – are talking about politics, the very next day you’ll be found reviewing the iPhone. Not very consistent, are you?

Choose a few topics you are passionate about from the broader array of your interests, and post consistently about those topics. It doesn’t rob your blog of that personal touch. It helps you find your audience, the group of like-minded people that is interested in your opinions.

Don’t blog in spurts, find your rhythm

This is the area where most of the personal blogs struggle. It’s understandable that you, being a casual blogger, don’t have enough time to dedicate to blogging, or else how would you be any different from the probloggers? But posting daily or even every other day is not a prerequisite. Every blogger should find his own tempo and then stick to it.

You may want to publish something everyday, but it’s not possible because of the studies or your job and family responsibilities. So you post in spurts. Sometimes you publish 5 posts every single day for weeks, and sometimes you stay quiet for a whole month. What you got to do is, utilize the times when you are full of ideas and have nothing else to get in your way, and write as many posts as you can. Later on, when you get bogged down in the work and find it hard to spend time on blogging, publish the posts you wrote earlier. Publishing something even once a week is not bad if you are consistent with this routine.

Tell your friends to bog off! Welcome other bloggers

Your friends are not your only audience. Get out in the blogosphere and make new contacts with fellow bloggers. One problem with having only your friends and relatives as your readers is that they don’t come online as often as other internet addicts such as bloggers. And even if they come online daily, they can talk to you on the IMs. They won’t take the trouble to go to your blog, read your posts, find the comment form, and say something.

On the other hand, bloggers are generous in commenting. They trawl the blogosphere to find new bloggers and make comments wherever they can. It’s also the blogger that become your loyal readers most of the time.

Networking with the bloggers, whom you previously didn’t know, will increase your readership immensely. So make it a habit to discover new blogs and participate in their discussions (that take place in comments section of posts) and see how they come back to your blog, link back to you, and talk about you in return. There is nothing more rewarding than having complete strangers talk about you and your blog.

Make use of social media

Likewise, social media is another place to promote yourself and your blog. Social media sites like StumbleUpon and Digg can send you whole rafts of new visitors. There is no specific topic you have to cover to attract the attention of social media users, nor you have to be an authority in any particular subject to be featured on social media sites. It just takes one well thought out post to get noticed, and then domino effect of social media traffic starts.

Unlike what you may be thinking, it doesn’t take a lot of time to build social media influence. It’s just a part of discovering new bloggers and making new contacts in the blogosphere. If you have joined a few social media sites, make sure you promote those bloggers wherever you can to build feelings of mutual goodwill. Rest assured that the bloggers you favored will give you the same treatment.

I highly recommend joining StumbleUpon to generate quick traffic to any of your posts, and Digging once in a while to keep updated with what’s hot in the social sphere. Don’t ever join social networks like Twitter and Facebook. They do more harm than they do good. Absolute waste of time.

Get your own damn domain

I usually don’t take the bogs hosted on blog hosting services seriously. And I am afraid nobody else does. It just shows you are not serious enough about your blog, and, of course, I am not going to spend time exploring and commenting on such a blog.

Domains are easy to get and hosting is cheap. If you are looking to build an audience and make some money along the way, paying 5 or 6 bucks per month is not a waste of money at all, now is it?

Did you start off as a casual blogger and evolve into a problogger, or do you still own a personal blog and find it hard to increase your readership?

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