Making a Living Online

There are critical questions that you must have an answer to when asked about your blog. What it is about? Who will read it? Why will they read it? If you haven’t answered these questions then your setting yourself up for failure, at least the first time around. Check out a recent blog post if you’d like to find out how to make your blog more interesting.

Now that we have that out of the way, lets get on to the subject at hand. Your next blog post. Who will read it? To answer this question you’ll first need to know where your audience will be coming from. Below are the most common forms of traffic and it’s vital to research a subject before you start writing away only to find that just a few visitors ever trickled in to read your post.

• Search engines(Google, Bing, Yahoo)
• Social Networking(Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr)
• Bookmarking Sites(Reddit, DIgg, Stumbleupon)
• Direct(Most likely, returning visitors)
• Referring sites or blogs(Sites that have linked to your post)

Social networks are great to boost an initial viewership of a fresh blog post and if your content is top-notch you might even get it “viral”. It takes some work though, build up a strong following by following new people and regularly interacting with them. It’s best to post new entries at about noon. Upon going through all my various sites’ statistics, I’ve found that the average visitation is at the 12:00 hour.

The real key is to make your next blog post be about something people are actively searching for on Bing, Yahoo and most importantly, Google. Choosing a title and mixing in keywords that people search for will help you rank in a search result for those terms. If those keyword terms get searched frequently and you’ve managed to get your blog post onto the first search result page then there is a good chance of getting lasting traffic to that particular blog post. This is commonly referred to as SEO(Search engine Optimization). Google themselves have put out a neat SEO beginners guide that should help you gain perspective. I should also mention that Google has a keyword tool to aid you in finding search phrases that get traffic.

Before you run off to start brainstorming, you’ll need a way of knowing who came and went when all is said and done, that’s where Google analytics comes in. Analytics is a free yet incredibly powerful tool that allows you insight into your site’s traffic. If you already have an account with gmail or any other google service, login with that and add your site. It will ask that you paste a snippet of code into your blog’s html. Once that’s done you’ll be able to see anything from how long a visitor stayed on your blog to what keywords people are searching for to find your content. Have fun.