Blogging Tips That Work

Almost six months have past since I published the first post on Blogsessive and during these six months this blog has passed through a series of events and changes that made me rethink my strategies.

As you’ve probably seen by now, whenever I’m sharing blogging tips with you, I always try to explain how they work through my own perspective. There are two reasons behind this approach:

• First of all, it stands as proof that those blogging tips work;
• Second, it provides information on how the tips where applied and also effect of their usage.

So, after six months of “competing” in a pretty crowded niche I’ve come to realize that Blogsessive has grown in a natural way, with about 160 subscribers, loyal readers and commentators, friends, social media profiles, on the point of entering Alexa’s top 100.000 and many more encouraging statistics.

Blogging tips that worked for me

What have I learned from these six months of Blogsessive experience? Read on as I’m going to share it with you.
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Should I Start Guest Blogging?

Since Alex has been kind enough to allow me to contribute a guest post on his blog, I thought it would be appropriate to write about, well, guest blogging. I believe guest blogging should be a top priority for anyone who is serious about building their online presence. After all, what better opportunity is there to expose your name to a new audience that to post on someone else’s blog?

Finding the Right Blog

I know people like to say that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but you want to make sure your guest blog contributes to your overall goal of brand building. For this reason, you should conduct careful research to find a blog suited for your needs. If you’re an offshore welder, you probably wouldn’t get much benefit from posting on a blog about flowers. But that’s common sense, right? So, the first step is to find a blog you can contribute your expertise to.

After discovering a few blogs in your niche, you want to find one that has a following. If you’re going to take the time to create a well crafted guest post, you want to make sure at least a few people are reading it. And with so many fly by night blogs out there, it’s hard to find one with a loyal audience. The best way to determine if a blog has a good following is by checking out the comments. If all of the posts consistently generate a few comments, you’ve probably found a good blog to post on.
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What’s up with Blogsessive?

This is a question that probably some of you want to know the answer of. Lately, the posting activity on Blogsessive has fallen to a slower pace. Fear not, Blogsessive is not “shutting down”! I’m around and have been all this time, communicating with those that asked me different questions or simply wrote me emails.

Before saying anything else, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Hendry Lee of Blogbuildingu.com for his wonderful guest post published last week: Research and Dominate – How to Strategically Plan Your Blog for Success and to Eric Brantner, who’s guest post you’ll be reading a few hours later. I’m not going to spoil the surprise of his post so make sure to check back later and read it.

Back to the publishing flow on Blogsessive, the last two or so weeks have been a total madness. After 9 years of working as a full time employee in the web industry, I’ve finally decided that it’s time to set my own terms of business and to make sure that if I’m going to win, it’s because I did what I did and also, if I fail, it should be based on my OWN decisions. So, from August I’ll have time to dedicate to my projects, including and focusing on Blogsessive. Also, even if it’s a bit early to say more about it, I’m in the middle of setting up a blogs network with a couple of Romanian friends that write for the international audience. I’ll let you know more about this when the time is right.

Other smaller things have come in the way of my regular activities, such as being invited and getting ready for one of my dearest couple of friends’ wedding and also taking time to look for a new motorcycle, which apparently it’s quite time consuming.

All has been put behind and activity should be back to the regular flow. Thanks to each and every one of you who came here and left comments and emails during this period, to all those who have subscribed to the feed or that did what they do daily, being loyal Blogsessive readers! Thank you!

Research and Dominate – How to Strategically Plan Your Blog for Success

I am always astounded at the speed I can do research nowadays. What could have taken weeks or a few months suddenly can be accomplished in 30 minutes or less. When it comes to blogging, you can now gather a lot of data for free.

This can help you even before you start a blog around that topic, so you are aware of the amount of work you need to do to be one of the best in the market.

A simple competitive analysis, for instance, can help you determine what you should do next and create a strategy to better penetrate the market. (Like it or not, when you blog, you are communicating with the market.)

What’s astounded me most is the fact that more bloggers don’t take advantage of the Internet from this standpoint.

For example, if you are looking forward to start a blog about gardening, it is impossible to dominate that niche alone unless you have a team working full time for years to build massive content for for the blog. Gardening is a huge industry. You are more likely to get into the top 10 if you target a sub niche. Rose gardening comes to my mind — not that I know anything about growing roses.

By the way, why getting into the top 10?
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Writing Reader Engaging Posts

From where I stand, the greatest advantage of blog writing is, without doubt, the instant feedback. Unlike classic media, like newspapers or magazines, our blogs give us the possibility of getting valuable opinions on every post that we publish. Of course, not all feedback should be considered valid, but this is a matter of personal choice and analytic skills.

Writing reader engaging posts is definitely one of the biggest challenges of every blogger, since these posts are usually excellent ways to create and grow a community around your blog. At a short glance, among the advantages of writing reader engaging posts we find:

• Community growth – Obviously, writing quality posts has the power to turn casual visitors into loyal readers, as long as you maintain a good flow;
• Social media exposure – The more interesting and better written the post, the more people will want to share and recommend it across services like Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, Mixx and so on;
• Conversations – A good post is more likely to entice readers to engage in commenting. This is a great way to further develop the topic or even generate new content ideas;
• Networking - Engaging posts are great ways to network with other bloggers in your niche. Write something appealing and you’ll surely make their link-round-ups;
• Quality traffic – Of course, all of the above are great ways to generate either a great deal of traffic or quality traffic.

Click here to read the full blog post!