What does it cost?

Blogging can cost nothing if you use free platforms like Blogger.com or WordPress.com. However, it is highly recommended you go for your own domain and hosting which costs money but you could do so with a figure as low as a under five hundred rupees a month. It makes your blog sound more professional and gives you total control over it.

If you would rather not tinker with the technology and setting up of the blog, you can always hire a programmer for a few thousand rupees to get you going.

Which platform should you use?

By far the best choice is WordPress.org. You will need to have your own domain and hosting for it, but services like GoDaddy.com (http://godaddy.com) make it a very simple process for you. You can also go for WordPress.com but you are not allowed to carry ads on these.

When do you blog?

There are no fixed schedules for these. If you are working elsewhere, evenings and weekends might be your best bet. If you have gone into blogging full time, you can be the master of your own time.

More..!

If you have any question, you can post it on the comments and I would try my best to answer it. Would like to hear from you.Similar Posts:

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Blogging skills/basics:

Blogging requires good writing skills and passion to write, it requires that one should be able to spend some of his time on every few days for blogging if everyday is not possible. As I try to spare some of my time on weekends to have some new posts on my blog, as I can't spend anytime on my working days. It requires one to write with consistency as you must serve something new to your visitors to make them visit again and again. You must write something new which is uncommon or if you are a technologist or programmer you can post problems you might have faced and solutions you have come up with. Something you might have done which you were not able to find solution with googling skills.

3Cs of Blogging - Competencies, Capacity and Comfort

Alternate Stages of Blogging

If you are able to spend sometime on periodic basis and able to achieve the consistency and focus on your blog then you can achieve many of your desired benefits like:

Learning: You can learn, you can post your opinions and you will get some positives and some negative responses if you are lucky. Critic to your ideas will make you realize your possible mistakes and you can learn from them. If you have faced some problem you can post on your blog and I am sure if you post it on some link sharing website you will surely get some positive response within small period of time. PHP Text encoding challenge is one of my such post. Basically we are students for life.

Web Presence: In the effort to make your blog famous you will link it to some of the websites, try to do some SEO and that will increase your marketing skills for sure. You can proud that you online presence is more than just your online resume`.

Make some money: You can make bit extra money by just sharing your expertise on the subject or application. Having little extra cash never hurts. I have been blogging since while now but truly speaking it has never been a economic aid for me as of yet but I just love to blog.

After all, it's Fun: I like to share my experience, I love people getting help from my work and appreciating it. Hacking jQuery thickbox has been my most commented post on the blog among rest of others and I like people helping each other in the comments and sharing knowledge. You will feel proud that your small idea is helping out quite a few people and their are loving it.

I don't mind asking a question if I get confused and I do get the answers on quite close time limit. People/readers will comment on your blog either by realizing that you are either right or wrong in your assumptions or thoughts.

Why Blogging ? - What is the single greatest point of value you receive from blogging?

Ask this question to yourself and probably your answer would fall into one of you can see in the above picture.

I have a copy of digit magazine (June'09) and there were some good article which we have posted here on my blog and hope that would help you to continue blogging in the right direction.

• Define your Product/Content
• Choosing a blog type
• How to market your blog?
• Content sources
• Want to see some money?

I hope my blog readers are getting some benefits by being on this blog..! Your thoughts and ideas on the topic are more than welcome; I am looking forward to them..Similar Posts:

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Advertising

This is what we have all grown up believing since the dotcom got associated with stories of riches. Get the eyeballs, advertising will follow and you can live it up. This is how all media survives. If you have the audience, advertisers cannot ignore you.

The simplest way to start is to sign for a service like Google’s Adsense. Acting as a middleman, Google approaches advertisers all over the world and automatically places ads on blogs and sites that sign up with them. The advertisement that gets displayed is contextual to the content on the site, and it is all done automatically.

All you need to do is create a free account and get a code from them that you place in your site program. And the ads will start coming up. The more the number of people who view or click on the ad, the more revenue you generate.

It sounds great in theory but you have to have a lot of traffic to earn enough to feel good about. Few people know how Google decides the percentage to share with you, but it is a very small one for sure. The few cents you get per click will add up to something chunky only if you have people queuing up to read your blog. Not the smartest way to monetise your blog.

Blogging for money pyramid

How about pitching for ads directly from potential advertisers instead of making someone else rich? This way all the revenue you generate is yours to keep. In some cases you may have to shell out 15 percent agency commission but that is a standard practice. And Google does not even pay you 15 percent of all revenues it generates through your traffic. To get direct ads, keep the following in mind:

Get ads at any price: Someone paying ten dollars for an ad for a month may still be more than what Adsense pays. Not saying you make this your benchmark, but start. Get anyone at any price. No one wants to be the first advertiser, but are willing to follow. How do you suppose new magazines are always full of ads from the first issue onwards? They give out free ad spots, others believe the publication must be doing well to attract advertisers and decide to do so themselves too.

Tease your target advertisers: If Ford is not willing to commit to ads, place one of GM even if free – call it ‘hitting at the competitor.’ Then go back to Ford and tell them GM is with you. The folks at Ford are sure to ask ‘Hey, how much is GM paying?’ Play with words carefully and you could have Ford as a paying advertiser.

Forget providing detailed analytics: No need to get bogged down by your traffic figures. In many cases, you may decline to share these with advertisers. Instead, focus on your rank on Technorati (a search and ranking engine for blogs) and the number of loyal readers. Companies could be invited to advertise for the brand exposure to these audiences.

Be confident – offer a money back guarantee: Make this offer to all advertisers. Offer to return their money if they are not happy with the results. If your claims about your blog are true, less than one in a hundred may apply for a refund.

Join forces: Get together as a group of bloggers to jointly offer your inventory to advertisers. The value proposition may suddenly be more attractive.

Cut out the middleman: Going direct has its benefits as all the money is only yours to keep. But can you always spot a willing advertiser? Track which ads appear with higher frequency on your blog through programs like Adsense - there is often a pattern. Call these guys up directly after this – they may bite if there is relevancy and the cost to them is lower than what they would have paid Adsense.

E-Commerce

Do you have a product or service to sell? If your blog has the audience, why not make a sales pitch while you have their attention? Make it attractive for them to buy from your blog than other outlets by throwing in discounts and freebies.

What if you don’t have something of your own to sell? No problem. Sell stuff on others’ behalf. If you have a blog on mobile phones, contact Nokia or their distributor to offer a special deal on your blog for a given product. Once you receive an order and have processed the payment, you can pick the stock from the distributor and dispatch to the customer. You do not even have to bear the risk or investment required in carrying inventory.

Likewise, what you can sell is limited by your imagination. If you have a travel blog, sell packages at prices better than all others. An auto blogger can sell accessories for cars. A books site can offer books on discount.

You can choose to offer only a limited selection of popular products, or even set up a full fledged online store. All depends on what you can gear yourself to manage. At the same time, you need not always offer stuff to match your content. An auto enthusiast is a very likely buyer of laptops. Why not offer these to customers on an auto blog?

Affiliate Marketing

You want to dabble with e-commerce but are not inclined to tie up with vendors, process payments, fulfill orders and manage complex books of account? Go for affiliate marketing.

This is how it works: You tie up with an online merchant like a computer store and carry ads of the latter on your blog. When any of your visitors clicks on these ads and makes a purchase with the merchant, you get a commission. It is all easily automated with a simple code you embed in your site.

Consulting

Once you have established yourself as a subject matter expert on a given topic, why not get paid to help individuals and organizations further with your knowledge and experience? A lot of professionals have seen their consulting incomes rise substantially after prospective clients read their blogs. If the subject of your blog lends itself to having such commercial potential, make sure you tap into it.

Speaking Opportunities

That’s another thing your blog does for you. It becomes a way to get invited to speak at conferences and other events. In India, the concept of paying you to speak is still to catch on in a big way but it is important to be on the speaking circuit if you can. When the market trends change, you may be one of those who may start getting paid to speak. And don’t forget the networking potential when you speak at events: you get to meet the right people who may just lead you on to better things in your career.

Freelance Writing

Newspapers, magazines and online media are increasingly relying on bloggers who know their subject to write columns. This can be a handy source of income. Typically one can expect to be paid between Rs. 2,000-5,000 for a piece. Yes, the per piece rates may sound low but aggregate them into, say, ten pieces a month and you could have something decent for yourself. At the effort of usually doing no more than repackaging content from your blog. There is also a non-monetary advantage: writing for leading publications boosts your personal brand and can serve as a testimony to your worth – and thus opening doors to newer opportunities.

Pay Per Post

For years now a debate has been raging over the ethics of bloggers being paid to write. Services like PayPerPost offer to pay all those who write about their clients. The fee is usually quite low, under ten dollars for a post. An unwritten code demands full disclosure when you write something in exchange for material gain on a public forum like a blog just as would be the case with a newspaper or magazine. But if your idea is not establish any journalistic credentials but carry content for the sake of attracting traffic and generating advertising revenue, what you do is your call.

Books from Blogs

It may be early days yet, but there is already some interest in this area. You may just land yourself a book deal based on the content of your blog. And you will not be the first to do so. Even if it is not a book all by you, your posts could form a part of anthologies published by the companies like Sulekha.com (http://sulekha.com). Even if you do land a book deal, chances are it would take a while for royalty cheques to start coming in. But that should not be reason to walk away from such an opportunity. Once you have one book out, chances are you could start expecting advances on subsequent ones. Or even get alternate means of earning money like consulting, freelance writing etc. A long shot, but don’t give it a miss.

And if you are really having a lucky day, an overseas publisher might take note of what you do.

Syndicating your content

In theory you can start syndicating or selling your content to other media to republish and pay you for it. Some publishers do buy such content, but very sporadically and pay only a pittance. But do keep your eyes and ears open for the time when the market opens up. It will over time as publishers realize the economic and other value in outsourcing. You could do well to explore western markets if you have content that may interest them. Services like Mochila.com allow you to post your content for other bloggers to see and publish. If they do, you can be entitled to a share of the advertising revenue accruing from such postings. Likewise there are many sites and blogs out there who allow you to post your content and they share advertising revenue with you. In both such cases the amount you earn depends on the traffic these sites attract and how much of this reads your specific post. And don’t expect any transparency and detailed break-down of revenues earned and split. If you are not too protective about your content, go for these options too.

Feedburner for your blog

• Making money online: Define your Product
• Making money online: Content Sources
• Making money online: Choosing a blog type
• Making money online: How to Market your Blog?
• Why blogging?

There are ways to overcome this challenge by generating content from alternate sources. Not only to take care of the issues mentioned here, but also to add more variety and depth to the content. This is where you can get content from when you are not able to provide yourself adequately:

Guest Writers: It is not uncommon to invite others to contribute to your blog if they have something relevant to add. The guest could write a one-off post, or even agree to post something at a regular frequency. Their motivation to do so may be an opportunity to be featured in what they consider a quality media outlet, to do you a favour or even to earn some money. The last mentioned can be an option if you have a budget to pay writers.
Make it a collaborative blog: While blogs are usually perceived as one-person efforts, it need not be the rule. Nor is it always the case especially when operations cross a certain level. You could partner with one or more persons on the blog giving you more contributors. Even if everyone cannot write, division of labour can ensure all necessary functions like content, marketing and technology are given their due attention by the various partners.

Pull in content from other blogs: You have to be careful here in not infringing any copyrights. It is common practice to create posts on your blog where you carry a synopsis or a few lines about a post on another blog and link to the latter for those wishing to reading more. It not only adds content to your blog, but you provide value to your readers by directing them to other relevant and quality content in the blogosphere. This can actually send increased traffic to your blog if you are perceived as someone who does a good job in directing people to the desired content saving them a lot of time and effort Googling for it. However, if you were to copy full posts from other blogs and sites and carry them on yours, you could get into serious trouble if you had not taken explicit written permission from the original authors. It is not enough to attribute and provide links to the original content. If you are bothered about the issue of time spent in visiting blogs, making synopsis and posting them on to your site, there are automatic solutions to these too. If you are working on WordPress for example, plugins like Autoblogged and WP-o-matic allow you to subscribe to any RSS feeds and the content on these automatically become posts on your blog. Since RSS feeds are usually truncated versions of full posts, you should be safe legally. However it is always a good idea to check with the original authors if they have objection to your using their content in any way.

Mochila Syndication: There is a way to get free legal content from publications like Businessweek, CNet, Cosmopolitan and many others and even get paid for it. Services like Mochila.com have agreements with leading publishers to syndicate their content to any other blog and website, place ads in this content and share the revenues with copyright holders and the blogger. There are at least a few bloggers who have set up blogs with content only from Mochila, attracting traffic because of the popularity of the topics covered and enjoying the advertising revenues accruing from it. They have to do little except select the content they want on their site. Do no-brainers get better than this? Try this for yourself too.

Mochila - License Architecture

• Making money online: Define your Product
• Making money online: How to Market your Blog?
• Making money online: Want to see the money?
• Why blogging?
• Making money online: Choosing a blog type

Here is what you can do to get the eyeballs to look your way:

Promotion

If every good product sold on its own, advertising would not have been a career option. Even when you have hit the sweet spot with your product, you need to promote it. Try these ideas—based on a mix of conventional thought and the science of how bits and bytes behave in cyberspace:

Get other sites to link to you: In an ideal world, everyone you want will link from their site to yours. Poof, and you could be in business overnight. The more blogs and sites that link to you, the better you fare in search engine rankings. If wishes were horses! Keep trying, and you will have sites linking to you over a period of time. It may take a year or longer of blogging for things to start happening for you. Remember, other sites will link to you only if your content is good. Period.

Get yourself some links: Till WSJ.com does not link to you, visit the site and other blogs and leave comments on topics of shared interest—with your link. This is one way to generate some traffic faster - find blogs in your niche area and leave meaningful comments on posts with your blog’s address.

Link to others, selflessly: Provide links to blogs you like without expecting anything in return. These respective blog owners might come visiting to know about yours and someday do something for you too.
Grab all the free ad spots to publicize your blog: These include your visiting cards, email signatures, letterheads, mobile messages, bumper stickers and other such communication. Let your emails end with a prompt to a recent post of yours relevant to the recipient.

Be proactive: Respond to all those who leave comments on your blog or seek further information - make their effort seem valuable. Let them feel a part of your blog community and they will tell other people about you.

Send out mails: Mine every email address you have in your desktop and workplace, and send a message. Pitch specific posts, not necessarily your blog, to entice greater interest.

Make friends in the Blogosphere: And write guest posts and comments on each other’s blogs. Exchange links, too. There is no such thing as being competitors here. You have to realize you cannot be selfish—it is all about give and take to get ahead.

The title of your post matters: A simple yet overlooked factor that makes a big difference. Most people read blogs on RSS (really simple syndication) feeds. The title helps them decide whether they want to click on it or move to the next entry on the feed. Also include keywords in your title that people are expected to be searching for.
A social media strategy: Sites like Facebook, MySpace, Orkut and LinkedIn may have become a rage for their socializing and networking potential, but they are also highly effective to promote your blog. There are many ways to do so, as also elaborated in a later section, but here are some pointers to set you thinking:
Create a Fan Page on Facebook
Create groups on Facebook and LinkedIn and invite your contacts to be members
Take feeds from your blogs on to your profiles for your contacts to read even if they don’t visit your blog
Advertise if you have the budget
In your status updates mention the latest you have done on your blog for others to get alerted to and possibly visit
Twitter: A Microblogging platform, Twitter allows you to post messages not longer than 140 characters. Whoever is following your ‘tweets’ can get alerted to the latest on your blog and visit it if interested.
YouTube: If you have any video content on your blog, it is always a good idea to post on YouTube too. With its own captive audience, you can get viewers to your videos and they may want to explore your blog further for relevant content.
Flickr: Likewise posting any photos on your blog on to a Flickr account can get you eyeballs redirected from Flickr.

Marketing Platforms

“You just cannot get results fast enough. It was only after a year of blogging that things started happening for me. Other sites will link to you only if your content is good. Leaving comments with your blog URL is one way to generate some traffic faster—find blogs in your niche area and leave meaningful comments on posts with your blog’s address. If it adds value to the conversation, other readers will click on your link to know more about what you are doing. Someone else may already have the audience, and you are doing nothing unethical or illegal in trying to attract them too.”

- Amit Agarwal, Professional Blogger at Digital Inspiration, a Technorati’s Top 100 blog

Easy Distribution

Will you travel 10 miles just to pick up a KitKat or settle for a Dairy Milk an arm’s length away? Ditto for blogs. If you don’t make it easy for your readers to access your content, they will just move to a competing blog. Here is what you can do to get them to stay with you:

One click sign-up: People read your posts mostly through emails and RSS. Make it easy for them to do so—sign up with free services such as FeedBlitz and FeedBurner to manage all your sign-ups and mailings automatically. And place the forms, chiclets, links and icons they provide on all your pages and even emails you send for your readers to subscribe with one click.
Maximize your storefronts: Nike and Starbucks generate volumes by ensuring a presence in all marketplaces to make for easy access; links to your blog are your storefronts. Make these present on as many websites, blogs, comments you leave and emails you send - never be too far from your customer, who is the reader in this case.

Some more marketing tips:

Positioning: Why should someone want to visit your blog? The answer has to come in a single word or short phrase. This will be its unique positioning. A picture of what your blog is all about should form in the reader’s mind as soon as he or she thinks of your blog. If this does not happen, you know you are doing something wrong.

Presentation: Keep your layouts neat and easily readable. Let not the untidy, garish blogs be your inspiration. Try to write good copy, with catchy headlines and minimum language errors.

Passion: Be passionate about what you write - it is like a book writer who has to feel for the subject, to be with it for years while writing it.
Patience and Persistence: If you are on the quality path, it will be a long and lonely marathon. Do you have it in you to undertake it?

“I did not do any promotions though—over time, people just found me because of the work I was doing.
Why does someone visit a blog? Because they want to learn something. My audience is the thinking Indian. Quality causes stickiness. If I only wanted traffic, I would be doing very different things. If you are on the quality path, it will be a long and lonely marathon. Do you have it in you to undertake it?”

- Kamla Bhatt, blogger for four years now and publisher of the highly popular KamlaBhattShow.com connecting Indian diaspora around the world

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• Why blogging?
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1. Identify a gap in the market, and go for it

If you think everything there is to write on every possible subject is already being written, think again. Despite India not lagging behind in the blog roll calls, there is still a dearth of quality blogs with content being written consistently on them. A majority of blogs still focus on personal musings or public interest issues. Both these categories make for lesser subjects when it comes to making money. Just look around and you will be amazed at the number of topics you could cover: technology, automobiles, health, fitness, business, consumer goods, books, sports, marketing, travel, investing and fashion to name just a few. Even these can be further broken down to give you a niche. In technology, you could have separate blogs for mobiles, computers, social media, gadgets, software, programming etc.

Blogging makes you a better marketer

1. Decide on Type of blog and focus:
   • Is it a hobby blog?
   • Is it a business blog?
   • Do you want to monetize?
   • Will you do Pay per Post etc?
   • Who is your target audience?
   • What is the purpose of your blog?
2. What can you blog?
   • Blog your passion.
   • Blog your interests.
   • Blog what you want to know.
   • Blog to enhance business or profile.
3. Finding possible popular topics:
   • Social media. e.g.: Technorati, StumbleUpon etc.
   • Search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Bing etc)
   • Lycos Top 50
   • Magazine, newspaper, television & other media
   • Amazon, bookstore
   • Technology (Gadgets, Mobiles, new and notable hardware/software reviews etc)
4. Explore the Niche:
   • Is it saturated niche?
   • Is it too narrow a niche?
   • Can you blog on it without burning out?
   • How about even if there is no traffic for a while? (Check keyword tools for phrases)
5. Practicalities:
   • Can you make justice with more than one blog?
   • Can you make justice with more than one topic?
   • Are there opportunities to link to your "old" blog?
   • What will you benefit from more than one blog?

Ideally, if you have some level of expertise or familiarity with the subject of your choice, its great. But don’t pursue a subject you know about just because that is the case. Assess its financial potential first. Yes, there are some topics you cannot write about till you have an inherent knowledge of the same. But expertise can often be acquired. How do you suppose journalists manage to cover so many different beats, including the ones they would not have known how to spell at one stage? Research, reading up and talking to people can make up for a lot of deficiencies. You can also make up for it by sourcing content from alternate sources as covered later.

You can be assured of attracting traffic at a rate faster than usual if you write about what is either not being covered or is being done so in a limited way. When someone searches for what you have written, chances of your blog coming high up in the results are pretty good. Remember, when we Google for something, all of us tend to click on what appears on the first few pages only. If you make it to these, you are in business. Of course, you have to be writing about something you know lots of people will be searching for.

Once you have traffic coming your way, you can tap into one of the many ways of generating income from your blog including advertising and affiliate sales as covered under a separate head later. Eyeballs matter.

2. A blog to enhance your professional income

Are you a programmer and extremely good at what you do? How does one know that if they have not worked with you? A CV can never say much, and it is easy to mislead in one. Let a blog be the proof of your pudding.

Whatever your domain expertise, start a blog about it. Share your knowledge, experiences and tips through a series of posts. Create an online portfolio of sorts where you talk about your achievements, awards, projects undertaken, assignments completed, testimonials and more. In a manner that your true worth comes across to your target audience.

How will it all help? Here are just some ways it can:

Clients will flock to you: Whether you are an independent professional or working for someone, clients may identify you as the key person they would rather trust their portfolio or assignment with. If someone wants an e-commerce portal developed, reading your blog may convince them on you being the right project leader to handle the work. Remember, it is people who finally do the work no matter how large or successful an organization is.

You charge higher rates: Once you know you are the preferred choice for a client, you may just get away by charging a slight premium on regular rates. If it is your own work, it all comes to your pocket. If you work for someone else, you can be sure of a fatter bonus or raise if you have a fair employer.

An employee in demand: As word gets out about quality clients being happier working with you than others, it will certainly enhance your reputation in the job market. And have companies reaching out to you to work with them. This could be the time to choose to go to not just the company you always desired working for but also at a remuneration package higher and more satisfying than what you would currently be drawing.

Time to strike out on your own: If you are in a sector where your skills matter to the output more than office infrastructure, plant and machinery then it may be time to strike out on your own. Many a professional, especially in fields like programming and consulting, has been able to do so knowing clients they were handling would send business their way from the day they set up shop. Likewise, if you have a million dollar idea of starting your own venture in, say, the dotcom space, VCs are more likely to back you up with money by understanding your capabilities and track record through your blog. For investors, it is the team behind a venture that matters more than the idea itself. Implementation is key to the success of even the best laid out plans, and this can easily go wrong if the people behind it are not suited for it.

3. Businesses need to blog – whether they are your own or you work for one

Do you run your own business? Especially a small or medium sized one? Then blogging about it makes very good sense for many reasons including:

Talk about your product or service: It is amazing how few businesses talk about what they have to offer to customers. Beyond the user manuals and sales promotion material, the only other source of information are salespersons – and we all know how inadequate they usually are. A blog can not only tell you the basic information of the product or service, but can cover its many aspects in more detail and highlights its benefits. This can help the customer make more informed decisions.

Beat the competition: The legendary adman David Ogilvy once advised an airline client to advertise their first class features. When the client said that these are similar to what their competitors offer, Ogilvy replied, “Yes, but who is talking about it?” The client took his advice and went to have one of the more successful campaigns in advertising history. Your blog gives you a similar advantage. In a market where competitive differences can often be miniscule, your talking about what you offer may just send more customers your way. Away from the competition.

Putting customers at ease by conversing: Your willingness to engage with your customers on a blog puts them at ease and positions yours as a business to trust. No one is perfect, and customers would rather be with someone who is willing to have honest and transparent conversations than with someone who would rather not.

Makes your business discoverable: A regularly updated blog means it features higher on search engine rankings than one that is not or just a company website. Translated it means attracting customers you never knew existed till they discovered you on their own.

Improve the search engine rankings of your site: Your website may be a static one with few updates, and not lend itself to going high up on the search engine rankings. But a blog on the subfolder of the main domain, something like www.mycompany.com/blog, is more dynamic with regular updates. This helps the cause of the main site when it comes to search engine rankings.

But you don’t have a business? So how does this benefit you? You can volunteer to blog about the company you work for. If you are in sales, the results will add a glow to your team’s performance directly. Even otherwise, once the company starts to enjoy the benefits of the blog, guess who will be the apple of the management’s eyes? You, who else. Thus ensuring you move up the corporate ladder faster than usual. Even carving out some special strategic position for yourself in the company.Similar Posts:

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Yes, there is chaos out there. And a big clutter. How can you make money from a blog when most people don’t? There are ways for your blog to go beyond being a mere statistic and making a healthy contribution to your personal balance sheet. The following could help you get started:

Define your Product

Every suggestion in the book on monetizing your blog will come to nought if your product is not strong. For a blog, the product is mainly content. What is more important in a newspaper: the quality of production or what it offers to read? Same holds true for a blog.

Start by asking why you are writing a blog. This will bring clarity on who you are writing for, and this in turn will help you determine what you are writing. Readers will come to you only if you carry something impactful, informative or even humorous for them. Just because so many blogs have little more than incoherent ramblings of the publisher does not mean you have to subscribe to such low denominators.

Blogging Dimensions - To be taken care of

And here’s more to make your product buyer friendly:

Quantity does not beat quality: While frequent postings may help you go up the search rankings, don’t do it for the sake of doing so. Ask yourself if anyone would care to read what you are writing. Post once or twice a week if need be but ensure it is quality writing. You don’t want to turn away readers or bury your good pieces under the debris of poorly written ones.

Is it unique? Unless the first blog Rip Van Winkle goes to after waking up is yours, your content is valuable only if it is unique. Search engines such as Google can now catch those who copy content from other sources. Spooky, but true. A combination of originality and quality works beautifully—it takes you higher up on the search engines.

Is your content ‘buzzworthy’? It can be if you offer scoops or write controversial stuff—but be careful and don’t go over the top. A positive buzz will get people talking about you and send links and traffic your way.

One Blog, One Subject: A blog is usually a success if it covers only one subject area, exceptions always being there. This gives the blog its own unique positioning proposition. Your audience knows what to expect. If you want to cover multiple subjects, have multiple blogs. A technology follower may have little interest in personal finance matters.

“Start by asking why you are writing a blog. This will bring clarity on who you are writing for, and this in turn will help you determine what you are writing. A combination of originality and quality works beautifully—it takes you higher up on the search engines.”

- Rajesh Lalwani, Founder and CEO, Blogworks, India

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