AdityaSpeaks

On Today’s internet, we could find hundreds of thousands of people having their own blog. Though we cannot deny that 80% of the blogs are dead. Most of them are spam and others made for selling pay per post or may be autoblogs for adsense. Very less percentage of blogs are real blogs and another small percentage of it is where the owners, i.e. the bloggers write interesting content regularly on a selected niche. (Also according to me, 75% of the Internet is spam and garbage). Among the thousands of bloggers, there are only a few who have actually made a good reputation on the internet. The question which is important to ask is “Why do people actually blog ?” and the second question is “Why should people actually blog ?”. And the answer to this question is what separates the popular bloggers from the non-popular ones.

Should you blog for money ? Yes you should. Why on earth should you do something which doesn’t benefit you one way or the other. BUT the fact it, those who blog money never actually make it. Keep money making as a secondary goal and getting readers, building popularity as the primary one. A good blogger’s primary goal must be all of the following -

1. Getting Excellent Traffic :- Just build it and they won’t come. You need to know better marketing, market your blog and generate traffic. Leverage the power of social networks like MyBlogLog, Digg(Hard to use for beginners), StumbleUpon (Extremely Easy Traffic), Del.Icio.Us (Full of spam these days), Propeller/ Netscape etc. Social Networks can prove to be extremely powerful if you work on it patiently.

2. Converting the Traffic :- It might look strange to you when i use the word conversion since you are not selling anything on your blog and moreover most of the time the word conversion rate means how much percentage of the visitors buy a product or a service which you are selling. But in this case, conversion will mean how much percentage of the visitors you get convert into loyal readers of your blog, read your content, explore other pages or say bookmark it in their browsers or say subscribe to the RSS feed or just remember the name and come back to it themselves by typing in the URL into the browser or recommend them to their friends, link to it or in simple language, “What percentage of your blog visitors add to its popularity ?”. All these things matter a LOT in the world of blogging. Now the question arises how to measure conversion rates in case of blogs or how will we know whether the people coming to our blog do get involved or interested in it or not ? There are many ways of doing this. First indicator is how much does your RSS subscriber number increase by an increase in traffic ? Out of every 100 unique visitors if one of them subscribe to your feeds, then it is a good conversion rate. Another way of measuring is the comments to post ratio. If you have 100 posts with 10 comments total in all posts, you can conclude that the visitors are not getting involved in the content. If at all they read your content, they would have something to say and they would have commented. The revenue from your blog depends mostly on the conversion ratio rather than PR or traffic. How many loyal readers do you have on your blog. When you make a post, how many people do flock in to read and comment on it themselves ?

3. Decrease your bounce rate :- For those who don’t know, Bounce rate is the percentage of people who close the window immediately after opening your site. I.e. Percentage of people who don’t read your blog’s internal pages or posts or don’t comment or get involved, but simply close the window on first site. This needs a bit of experimenting. Layout and design is the most important factor which effects conversion rates. Stuff a page with adsense and see how your bounce rates flock upto 90%.

3. Making Money :- The third most important point offcourse is monetizing. If your blog doesn’t make you money, you yourself will loose interest in it. Why in the world will you blog when it doesn’t make you money right? Exactly right. But the thing to think is the way you monetize your blog. You have to monetize your blog in a way that you don’t loose your readers. Stuffing the main places with adsense will kill your readership and increase bounce rate and decrease the conversion rate. But you still need to make money. You can try out other methods like selling paid links through TLA, selling banner or Ad spots, RSS Advertisement links, Selling paid reviews, using Kontera, Promoting Affiliate products. When it comes to adsense, a small banner of 468×60 is the best size which gives goot CTR and doesn’t spoil the looks too.

4. Increasing Income-per-pageview :- Divide the number of page views by the income per month. It will tell you how much is your income on every page view. Its the most important factor.

So from the above points it becomes absolutely clear that the first factor is traffic and the second is converting the traffic on your blog to loyal readers.