Your Blog What’s next?

Blogging for money sounds like an interesting thing for most people. It certainly is a concept that has enticed a lot of newbie marketers to try their hands on blogging because it sounds really easy. All you had to do is to write some post every day, and you shall earn the living of your dreams, or so they say.

This is far from the truth. That moment when harsh reality hits you is when you created your first blog or hired someone to do it for you but you didn’t know what to do next. You feel happy as if you’ve accomplished something and that you finally have a blog to begin with. However, getting a blog is the easy part of the game. The hard part hits right after and that is what should you do and what could you to get sufficient traffic and then you will also wonder what is going to be your monetization strategy.

So now that you have finally gotten yourself a blog, it’s time to go to work. Here are some of the things you can do to start your blog with a bang.

About Me Page.

The ‘about me’ page is very important because it is what connects you with your blog readers. When you have people reading you blog posts later on, if they like what they see, they might take the time to find out who is the writer and they might want to learn more about you. So take this chance to set up your ‘About me’ page early so that you will not have to go back to do this later on

Be sure to be clear about your details. Tell people in your own words who you are. Do not be afraid to express yourself and show the world who you really are instead of putting up a mask. People who will be able to connect with you through your post will be able to understand your character so you do not have to hide yourself.

With all the information that you will include in this page, you could leave out the information and details on where you live so that you will still retain some of your own privacy. Enjoy this bit of setting up the about me page and make sure it is not too short or too long.

Set up a contact us page.

The next thing you would want to have on your blog is to have a contact us page. People who read your blog might need to reach you for any kind of reason so are sure to give them a chance to approach you. Who knows with a contact us page you might even be offered with an opportunity to do a guest post, or you might even get lucky with some advertisers who wish to advertise on your blog?

The best way to let people contact you online is via email. With email communication, you do not have to sacrifice too much of your own privacy and at the same time you can choose to answer them in your own time and manner. If you get too much of the same question, you can even consider setting up a F.A.Q page so that you can reduce the number repeated questions.

Customize your blog with a nice theme.

There are countless blog themes out there and with blogs like WordPress, you should be able to find just about any kind of theme for your blog. You can choose the colors of your theme or you could choose how serious or professional your blog would look like. The themes available online are mostly free. However, there are premium themes out there that are being sold and they either look better or the theme has a certain type of function that you might need.

Most of the time, a free blog theme should be enough for a beginner.

Plugins

With blogs such as WordPress, you can further customize your blog using custom-made plugins, which can be downloaded free from plugin sites. Like the themes, there are premium plugins that can be bought to suit your need. Always make sure that there are no similar free plugins available for download before you pay for the ones you will need.

Some of the best plugins that you can get online include SEO plugins that can automatically optimize your wordpress blog. Be sure to look into this if you are planning to get traffic via the organic search traffic.

Setting up your ping list.

You can get a list of pings from the internet pretty easily by doing a search on Google. Here’s a quick list that you can include in your own ping list.
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://www.octora.com/add_rss.php
http://www.popdex.com
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.wasalive.com/ping/
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC
http://www.xianguo.com/xmlrpc/ping.php
http://www.zhuaxia.com/rpc/server.php
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping
http://zhuaxia.com/rpc/server.php
http://zing.zingfast.com
There are tons of other ping lists that you can find on the internet. Be sure to add as much as you can so that your blog will be pinged to the list each time you post a blog. This will ensure your site to get indexed fast by the search engines.
Post your blogs

When all those mentioned above properly set up, it is time to post your first blog post. Mind you that the first blog post is only the beginning. You will need to constantly post on your blogs preferably once a day so that your blog has sufficient activity, and that it will get noticed by the search engines. You should try your best to get traffic back to your blog posts as well by back linking or commenting on forums.

Of course, there are countless ways to get traffic to your site be it paid or free, but the important thing to note is that your post is worthless unless someone reads it and people will not land on your site by accident. You will have to actively point and direct traffic back to your site at first until your blog takes off.
Successful blogging takes time, and you should know by now that blogging in itself is like work. You have to constantly provide information that people want, and you have to present them in a way people will love it. Only then will you get a lot of site visits and blog subscribers which can lead you a good income online.