There was a time when I would advocate forced popularity of your blog. I believed you couldn't achieve a popular blog by natural means. I was impatient. It is my nature to want immediate satisfaction. Your not generally going to get that when it comes to grass roots style blogging. In fact, many people will lose interest in their blog long before they find the popularity that they are looking for. It keeps the folks who spend money for success, at the top of the food chain. It makes others say it is impossible to rank well in search engines. It is what most people attribute to failures. And this is correct. This is why my point of view changed. I realized that if I insist on continuing in the fashion that I do, that I need to make sure what I say and how I say it are unique, well thought out and of my own doing. And also, I must practice what I preach.
I still believe that some assistance is needed in order to generate popularity in your blog. It is the nature of the beast. The internet is a large place, and without some announcement of some sort, all your work will go unnoticed. No matter how big, post wise, your blog becomes, it is just a drop in the bucket when compared to the internet as a whole. So with this knowledge, i will always do a few little things that will help your progress.
I believe that it is important to ping any new post you publish on your blog. There are a lot of different ping services. Pingoat is one of those sites. It is free to use. Please, do abuse it because it will be noticed. But a single ping to a specific post is perfectly acceptable. And will help surely. The point of this service is to help you be noticed by the search engines, pinging your link will make the crawlers aware of it. It does not mean you will immediately be listed in the search engine for the keywords you chose, but it will speed up the process.
Another thing I like to do is to make a companion article to the blog post with sites like Hubpages. There are other, very respectable article posting websites that will do the trick as well. I have been a hub member for a long time and find it to be the best one for my purposes. And use it regularly. A Hubpage or article that complements your blog post will offer another means to your blog. If you include a link. Of course a Follow link will be better for SERP purposes, but is not necessary in all cases. In fact, too many Follow links from the same location will look bad. And this should be used sparingly. Some people choose to use multiple article based websites to control this, but generally speaking, I prefer the approach of sparing usage. I am not going to write a complement article to every single blog post. Its often redundant and I would much rather use my material on my blog. Knowledge is not endless and at some point, you will run dry.
But the bottom line to your blogs' popularity, is going to be your writing on the blog, and your interactions on that blog. Writing posts that are unique and can grab a reader is going to be your bread and butter. And interacting to the comments you receive to that post is almost as important. It shows the readers that you don't just write it and forget it. This is YOUR information and your knowledge and you should own it afterwards, even if your opinions change. That is ok, because it is in our nature, to evolve our thinking, the more time we put towards it.
The point I am trying to make here is this. You cannot force something that just isn't there. You cant expect a blog, with 10, or 20 or 50 posts to support a huge upsurge in popularity. It is not part of the natural progression. It's like any other progression, you have to learn to make sounds before you can speak, you have to understand words before you can speak well. It is the same with your blog. And generating false popularity with other means, like link swapping and comment spamming is going to get you nowhere. It may, and this is a big may, generate you high levels of immediate traffic, but it will not be able to support that long term, and at some point you will be called out as a fraud, by your readers or by the search engines themselves and when this happens, its very difficult to recover from.
Real strength and a real following will be created if you do some of the minor things I have mentioned here. Pinging, and companion articles, maybe feed burning, and sometimes tweeting. The point is, don't be viewed as annoying. It is counter productive and it is hard not to do it. You do not want to be spam. Labels will stick long after you learn your lesson. The whole point to these things it to say, hey, I have something new! And nothing more. If you can pull this off, and if you can have true patience you will begin to build popularity.
In the grand scheme of things, this truly is the small fish approach. But this blog is about just what I call it, BLOGGING FOR BEGINNERS. I am not here writing to the individual that has hundreds of dollars to throw as specialist and writers to get their blog up to a level that can support a large following. I am writing to the individual that is trying to see if they can make a blog, make it successful and make a couple dollars off that success. This if for the people who have a certain knowledge set, and wants to share that with the world. And in a way, stroke their ego when their site becomes something that people look for and find. This is why I write here, and this is how I intend to make this blog popular in its own time. With no real investment but my time. And I believe this to be an important factor for anyone who wants to start a blog, but does not have the desire or ability to fund the project. Nothing is for certain, and time and patience is not the only thing that will guarantee a popular blog. But it is a good place to start. And it keeps your cost to a minimum if it still does not achieve the level of success you are searching for. I have never spent a cent on this blog, and I have no intentions to. I hope that you too will see that this is a viable method at achieving real and long lasting popularity.
Thank you for reading blogging for beginners. And come back soon!!
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