As 2008 comes to a close, I want to wrap up my first year of blogging with some things I’ve learned this year. Many of these are mistakes I’ve made, so hopefully you can learn from them.

Expectations and Prep-work

1. Write about what you know

2. Post as much as you can

3. Don’t get started unless you have the time to finish

4. Don’t do it for the money

5. Blogging should be a hobby, not a frantic attempt for cash

6. The bloggers who succeed are those who know what they’re doing

7. Don’t fall for the John Chow Effect

8. The only secrets to blogging are consistency, and originality

9. Sadly, more posts beats larger posts

10. Focus on content, and the rest will come

Setting Up your Blog

11. Read blogging tips blogs, pretty much anybody on this list is good.

12. Create the essential accounts, twitter, stumble, digg, feedburner, google…

13. A good design is important, but a bad one won’t destroy you.

14. Prepare yourself for a roller coaster of success and failure

15. Use wordpress, not blogger.

16. If you know how to get your own domain

17. Write as many posts while you’re in the mood, because there will be those days…

18. Start networking right away.

19. Read this article

20. Study a little, these topics in this order, CSS, HTML, SEO Traffic Generation, Social Networking, and Social Media.

Essential Plugins (for Wordpress)

21. Top Commentator List

22. SEO All in One

23. Not a plugin but use the latest version of Wordpress and keep updating.

24. Comment Luv

25. If you’re picky about comments, Keyword Luv

26. I love Social Book Marking

27. Large RSS and Email Subscribe Buttons

28. Akismet! It’s blocked 450,000+ spam comments on here

29. Full Text Feed

30. Google XML Sitemaps

Content

31. Make content your focus at the beginning, not marketing.

32. Set up a recommend/featured posts set up, so that you can advertise your top posts.

33. Write in lists and use pictures

34. Conduct lots of reviews, studies, and polls

35. Use lots of links, to yourself, and to other bloggers

36. If it’s under 500 words don’t post it

37. Humor is ok, as long as you’re still giving them good information

38. Read some stellar posts so that you get an idea on how to do it.

39. Bold and Italicize your keywords, this helps catching the readers eye, and the SE spiders like it.

40. Use spelling and grammar checks

Marketing

41. Comment like crazy

42. Look for free links like Q/A posts, or top commentator lists…

43. If you have good information to share, share is as good information, not as obvious spam, The Secret to Millions Online

44. The best way to get quick links, is through sponsoring a popular contest

45. Learn How to Comment successfully

46. Learn Popular Social Media Sites

47. Email people, and have a contact page.

48. Read and study. Learn from the experts, and other people’s failures.

49. A Failure is better then never even trying. Because then you’ll probably succeed next time.

50. Accept that some posts will do better then others, and market those ones.

SEO

51. Use the SEO All in One tool. I know I already said this, but use it from the beginning, that way you have meta tags, and descriptions on every post.

52. You don’t need to be an expert on SEO to be able to use it, learn the basics and you’ll be fine.

53. Use comments for SEO purposes

54. Use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to choose your keywords

55. If you’re in this for the long run, aim for popular keywords now. It’d be annoyed to have to re-optimize later, for a different keyword.

56. Make your title tag your top keyword, and put that keyword in your meta description and keywords for your homepage.

57. Use beginner and advanced squidoo tips, to bring traffic and Link juice to your site.

58. Google respects powerful sites. Just keep focusing on content , and dont‘ use too much flash, and you won’t be sandboxed.

59. Google isn’t the devil people make it out to be. They’re just scared of it, because they don’t understand it.

60. If you comment enough, then all your posts will be added to google anyway. You don’t need to worry about submitting your posts to it, and don’t’ waste your money on those people saying pay them to add your site to search engines.

Traffic Generation

61. Social Media is awesome, and highly successful. Learn Digg and stumble!

62. Comments bring traffic.

63. Guest posting brings traffic, links, and markets your site. This is one of the best ways to market your site.

64. The Viral Effect can happen to anyone, at any time. Be prepared with either a big enough server or run away from digg, cause it’ll blow.

65. Word of mouth/email is still the best way to get traffic. You need your readers to be telling other people about your site.

66. Use Press Releases, and take advantage of current events to be the first to be writing on your evolving niche.

67. Use forums on your niche to your advantage. And don’t be afraid to ask questions on this.

68. Use your connections to market your site/products.

69. Sell something that’s really good. Spend a while on an Ebook and give some free promotional to start the viral effect rolling, and get the traffic flooding in.

70. Try the new rage, Video Posting

Stat Trackers

71. Alexa and technorati are both awful and misleading, try not to use them when you’re analyzing sites.

72. Though still skewed, siteanalytics is a good way to compare site’s traffic.

73. Use websitegrader to give you useful information about your stats, and site SEO.

74. Get listed in lists like 45n5’s and Winning the Web’s.

75. Use every stat tracker you can find.

76. Every stat tracker will be different, but analytics is the most trusted.

77. Aweber isn’t legit, don’t use it, and people don’t trust it. People use it to try and say they get hundreds of visits a day, but it’s not true.

78. Feedburner is the best feed stats tracker.

79. Use these tools to get untrue and unrealistic monetary values of your site.

80. Understand that visitors are not what makes a blog, but it’s active readers that create a community.

Monetizing

81. Have a creative original 125×125 ad.

82. Have an original site slogan that people will remember.

83. Don’t do it too early.

84. You can always monetize later, but monetizing too early can greatly hurt your site.

85. Ebook sales are awesome, once you have a popular enough blog.

86. Don’t try and sell something you don’t know.

87. Monetizing=Marketing You’ll only sell as much as you can market it.

88. Private ads are the top money makers for most people.

89. Affiliate Marketing can be a huge money maker if you know how to do it.

90. Sponsored Reviews and PPP, programs like that destroy your Page Rank. Be careful what programs you start up.

Extras

91. An About page is not an essential, but you should make one if you can.

92. A Contact Me Page you Need!

93. Advertise pages are more then just for buying advertising. I read all advertise pages just to see what type of stats they have, and which ones they use to get an idea of the blog. If you see them relying too much on illegitimate sources you can realize how important money is to them.

94. Patience and Perseverance are critical to succeeding on the internet. You’ll probably need to wait a while awhile before you will see anytime of monetary success.

95. Use Google Reader to stay informed.

96. Learn twice as much as you write. This way you always stay a step ahead of your readers, and have an inexhaustible amount of posts to write.

97. Don’t let stat results get you depressed. Good content combined with time, will always succeed, eventually…

98. Getting the first 100 subscribers is the hardest. After that, it only gets easier.

99. Have a good archives system set up, so that people can find the posts they’re looking for.

100. People Love Freebies! Give as many freebies as you can.

101. I got this post idea from Thoushallblog’s 101 blogging tips list. Make sure you check out his as well, because he has some great stuff on there, that I didn’t cover.

102. Stay One Step ahead of the other bloggers in your niche.

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Will has been designing websites for over a decade, and has extensive experience with Joomla!, WordPress, and social media. He has consulted hundreds of businessmen and webmasters on the oftentimes mystifying aspects of Search Engine Optimization.

Will has blogged 54 posts here.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 at 2:38 pm and is filed under Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.