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5 Tips to kickstart your new blog's success

Posted By Scott Klarr on Dec 21, 2007 at 8:56 pm

Its all about the Benjamins

Its no secret that blogs can be a goldmine with well-written content along and good ad-placement. However many bloggers that are new to it all may find it hard to get the profit ball rolling. Here are a few tips that will help your blog generate paper!

The whole basis of making profit from blogging is that you can place contextual ads such as google adsense on your website and whenever they are clicked by visitors, you get paid! Contextual means that the ads will be related to the content on that page, making it more likely to spark the interest of the viewer. While this concept is very simple, there are a lot of more in-depth issues that come into play when it comes to maximizing your click thrus.

1. Content Is King!

There is absolutely no replacement for well written content that the reader will find useful, interesting or enjoyable to read. Find a subject that you like writing about and that you feel you can continually write about, and start writing! Make your first priority writing good content.

2. Scratch That Niche.

A niche is a relatively specific topic that you write consistently about. When starting a blog, you need to decide what the blog's purpose is. Will it be just a general personal expression diary/journal, or do you want to write about music? or maybe computer hardware reviews? Typically, the more specific your blog's theme is, the better.

It is much better to have 10 different blogs that are updated frequently with very tightly grouped subjects rather than 1 huge blog where one post might be about the latest rapper's beef and the next NASA's newest space discovery. The main reason for this is that you can more easily gain subscribers to your blog if they know all your posts will be something that they are genuinely interested in. Keeping a niche also can help with your search engine rankings.

If you want to open many blogs for different niches, there are hosting companies that have plans where you can host unlimited domains on your account. This is great for making niche sites with little cost overhead. If your very tight on budget, you can get one domain, and then use subdomains for the different niches. For example: technology.domain.com and music.domain.com

This particular blog, scottklarr.com, might not seem to target a specific niche as it ranges from programming to hardware, however the topics on this blog are fairly related in the sense that it all has to do with technology and computers; both of which usually share a good portion of their interested audiences.

3. Don't Overload Ads

Whatever you do, do not overload your page with too many ads or use shady methods to get click-thrus (such as a click on the background = popup ad). People will tolerate ads to a certain point, but when there are more ads than there is content, most viewers wont even bother thinking of sticking around.

Remember, your first priority is to provide a service to your readers, that service being provide information that is easy, free, and "no strings attached." Many new bloggers that have money sign in their eyes will make their first priority trying to force people to click ads which just doesn't work in the long run, and will leave them wondering why they aren't making any money. If you can build a loyal audience, your ads will get clicked. Another thing i should mention, never, and I mean NEVER ask, hint, or otherwise persuade people to click your ads. This is considered click fraud and can get you banned from ad services such as adsense.

4. Adsense Channels

Adsense channels allow you to track which ads are being clicked on and which ones are not. Use them to your advantage by running some tests. Play with the placement, size, and color of ads each week using different channel ID's and track which ones produce the highest click thru ratios.

5. Don't Scrape

Many money-hungry newcomers will follow some cheap get-rich-quick scheme that tells them to scrape other websites' content, inject keywords, overload with ads, and publish as their own. This is not the way to go. Write as much of your own content as you can. It is usually ok to quote a section of another blog or news source and then give a link to the original site, and then to add some of your own thoughts or ideas on the topic, but do not base your whole blog off copying and pasting other articles or blogs.

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