In the first part of A One Year Experiment in Blogging, I shared lessons I learned about producing content. In the second part, I shared lessons in making blogs readable and marketable. In the third part, I shared lessons in bringing in visitors from search engines. Today, I’ll tell you about social media. While bringing in visitors via search engines is important, an equally important task in building your reader base is attracting visitors via other people. Being social is the name of the game and the traffic you’ll be bringing in from social networking sites is more valuable than that from search engines.

Share if You Care

Purchase my dickery, won't you?

Although most of my traffic  comes from search engines, I find that readers coming in from Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+ and other social sites are much more compelling. The reason for this is communication and engagement are strong with this kind of traffic. When people like your shared posts, you know that they’re interested in what you’re selling. In terms of my personal blog, I’m selling my thoughts and the silly things I have to say about comics and all forms of dickery. They are interested in similar shenanigans that I offer, hence the possibility that they will come back for more.

If people share your content with their own networks, you’re practically getting free advertisement. It also means that your content is compelling enough that other people want to share it with their friends, relatives and random Internet stalkers. This is why posting your blog updates to social networking sites is pretty much a must especially if you’re still building a following. Don’t overdo it, though, because  sharing everything — even your less than stellar content — can be quite annoying. I know this because I get easily annoyed with people who overshare too.

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So far in A One Year Experiment in Blogging, I shared the lessons I learned about content and presentation. Today, it’s time to talk about SEO. In my first few years of blogging, I monitored my traffic — as one should — and determined that most of my visitors come from search engines. I never really seriously considered optimizing my content for search engines until last year when I started to write keyword-optimized articles for a client. KA-CHING.

SEwhatnow?

What is this SEO you speak of?

Whenever friends and relatives ask me what I’m doing in my home based job, I simply tell them I do SEO. And then they give me a blank WTF look. There are possibly hundreds of blogs and websites out there that can explain the concept better so I’ll just tell you in simple terms what it’s about: SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it is the process of making your blog’s content more visible via search engines. Making your blog rank high on Google, Bing and other search engines guarantees more traffic. Bringing in readers from search engines does not always translate to a large and loyal reader base, though. Your content is in charge of that part.

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In the first part of A One Year Experiment in Blogging, I told you about the cliche “Content is King” and how I came to realize that it does indeed have merit. But no matter how awesome your content is, if you don’t make it readable and marketable, it might as well be worthless. For the second part of this series, let’s talk about the lessons I learned about blog presentation.

Conan approves.

Make It Look Good

I used to think that if people can read the text on a blog, that’s it. Readability achieved! It turns out readability is more than just making text easy to view. It involves color and formatting and images and the overall design, layout, look and feel of your blog. Using the default theme on Tumblr or Blogger or picking the WordPress theme with your favorite color is not good enough. It has to stand out, show your personality and reflect the attitude and theme of your content. Using a minimalist theme on a blog about explosions or zombie movies may not be the best way to go about it.

You may need to do some coding if you want existing themes to work with your content and your blog to stand out from the rest of the blogs using the same theme. You may even find it necessary to create your own unique theme or ask/pay someone to do it for you.

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I'm coming, Internet! Weeee!

I’ve been blogging since 2005. In the first 4 or so years, I’ve just been writing stuff to amuse myself and to document my life for some reason. I never really considered putting a lot of effort in it. I didn’t even consider making serious money out of it. Blogging was simply something I love doing and nothing more — until last year when I triumphantly quit my job and looked towards an awesome career in dicking around the Internet for the rest of my life.

The Plan

My plan was simple: experiment on available online options for generating income (blogging, freelance writing/designing, domaining, SEO) so I won’t have to go back to the corporate jungle. Of course I had to get a homebased job first to keep a steady flow of income as I dived into the black waters of the Internet. There were times when I felt I was going nowhere but I managed to keep myself patiently waiting for results.

Now, one year later, I have my results and I thought I should share some lessons I learned in my one year experiment in blogging and other online shenanigans. Keep in mind that I didn’t magically become rich and I’m not suddenly an expert in blogging, but if you spend an entire year tinkering with the wonders of the web, you’re bound to learn a thing or two. If you just started a blog or are considering entering the blogging fold, these morsels of information are for you. I’m going to dispense these lessons in 4 parts spanning 4 days. Today, let’s focus on content.

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