Blogging can be very exciting and lucrative once you know how to do it properly. For those who need a little help I’ve written a blogging guide to help anybody that has been thinking about blogging get started. I will inform you about how to choose a topic, how to choose keywords to improve your search engine traffic, how to bring traffic to your blog, and how to make money with your blog if that is one of your goals.

Choosing a topic

First with this blogging guide lets choose a topic. The topic you pick is important because if you want to blog you should be able to write about something that either you have knowledge about or really passionate about. Blogging gives your readers an opportunity not only to read and connect with you, but a chance to comment and discuss with you the information that you’re sharing. Its important that you establish your expertise and its easier to do if its a topic that you already know or have an interest in.

In your chosen topic you will want to give your readers what they want so they keep coming back for more. Find out the questions people are asking on related forums and group discussions.Also look at other established blogs in your chosen topic and see what they are blogging about and see what questions their readers are asking. Once you know what people want to know its easy to research and provide it for them.Providing valuable content helps establish your credibility and expertise.

For your own good you will also want to know how people are searching for answers in your chosen topic. These are the keywords that people use in the search engines to find their answers.

Keywords to improve your search engine traffic

For example in the blogging topic, keywords could be: “Blogging guide, make a blog, wordpress blog, etc.” Think of what kind of keywords people would use to find answers in your chosen topic. make a list of at least 10. You will want to try to target your traffic so try to come up with longtail keywords. These keywords are simply the extension or the longer version of the “root” keyword. For example, look at the root keyword “blogging”. Examples of long-tail keywords for this would be “make money blogging”, “how to start blogging today”, “how to blogging” and such. As a general rule of thumb, pick those keywords with searches above 1000 and number of results below 100000. This can be found out easily with keyword research software such as market samurai or ad word analyzer but you can also use free online tools such as wordtracker freekeywords and Google keyword suggestion tool.

Once you have chosen your keywords you should use them to optimize your blog such as in the blog title, blog posts, and blog tags. You can learn more about search engine optimization and improving your site rankings at my internet marketing blog.

How to bring traffic to your blog

Next in this Blogging guide lets talk about the ways to bring in visitors.There are many ways to generate traffic on the internet, I’m going to list a few here but more information can be found at my blog.

1. Good content – You should always provide good and relevant content. You can bring in traffic but if your content is lacking then you will have a hard time capturing readers. Concentrate on posting consistently and providing excellent content. Just write like how you talk and share your opinions and thoughts but also keep it informative providing insight to those seeking answers

2. Article Marketing – Writing articles and submitting to article sites is a good way to bring traffic to your blog. There are lots of possibilities – the reader of your articles finds your article interesting and visits your blog out of curiosity, or another blogger might find your article relevant and posts it on his blog, and so on and so forth. Try to submit one article every 2 or 3 days to achieve maximum results.

3. Blogroll, Blog commenting – A blogroll is a listing of other blogs that appear as links on blogs. This list of links is used to relate the site owner’s interest in or affiliation with other bloggers. Contact a blogger and ask for a link exchange, and if they accepts this is a win-win situation as each of you all will be getting traffic from your counterpart’s blog. Also if you’re looking for targeted traffic and some solid one way backlinks to boost your search engine listings, then try commenting on other people’s blogs leaving a link back to your blog. Remember to provide useful content rather than a simple “nice post!”.