Deciding to start up a blog while still in college is an excellent choice—not only can it help improve your writing and communication skills as well as improve your computer skills, but a blog can also help you find a job after graduation, especially if you create a blog that’s in your “niche” or ” industry.” For example, if you want to become a music journalist, then creating a blog where you review bands and albums can help you get your foot in the door. But in order to show that your blog is influencing other people, you have to have an audience—i.e. continuous traffic visiting your blog. But word-of-mouth isn’t enough. That said, below are few ways that can earn you some loyal readers.
SEO
First and foremost you need to understand the importance of search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines such as Google and Bing use a set of algorithms to “rank” pages. Thus, when a consumer types a set of keywords or a phrase in the search box, the search engine will pull up a listing of the top matches. Since statistics show that consumers typically don’t go past the first page of results, you want to make sure that your blog is highly ranked. There are a lot of different factors that are considered when search engines decide order of rankings, including key words in your article, domain name, and original content. The whole ordeal can be quite confusing. Spice Up Your Blog has an entire category dedicated to SEO techniques to increase traffic to your blog. But if you need further assistance, there is also a number of free web extensions for Wordprss such as SEO Content Control and All-in-One SEO Pack to help with your efforts.
Catchy Headlines
In order to attract and keep readers, you really need to learn how to write engaging headlines, otherwise readers won’t read your content or come back to your blog. Using superlative adjectives, such as “easiest,” “best” and “worst” and lists are popular headline choices. For example: 5 Best Ways to Design a Blog or 25 Greatest Summer Vacation Spots. Proposing a stimulating question or analysis that tells the reader what the story will be about without giving it all away is also a great headline. For example: Will Google+ Take Over Facebook? Is Facebook’s Timeline too Complicated?
Post Photos
To make everything visually appealing you should also aim to have accompanying photos to your posts. Of course you need to abide by copyright laws and find photos that you can use legally. Your best sources for royalty-free stock or real photos are those found on Wikipedia Commons, Flickr and FreeDigitalPhotos.net just to name a few.
Use Social Media Marketing
Last but not least, you need to let readers know that your blog exists by continuously marketing your blog on a variety of social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Add professional people in your industry so that every time you Tweet a blog post article for example you possibly might get a re-tweet and gain an influx of more readers. Finding ways to promote your blog is crucial to gaining and keeping traffic.
By Guest Author –This guest contribution was submitted by Samantha Gray, who specializes in writing about online bachelor degree. Questions and comments can be sent to: samanthagray024@gmail.com.
