Now you own a blog. It is certainly not an easy task to keep maintaining a blog, and after you have gain some traffic, challenges will be following on the way, especially if you have no technical background. WordPress has already made blogging easy so bloggers do not have to worry about the html, php or design stuff, so you can focus on the key — building up content, which also happens to be one of the major factors affecting the fate of your blog.
Most bloggers are very delightful to see their blogs are established once it comes out running on their domains, but some will crash down after a while when they notice the lack of traffic despite of all their efforts they had made to build up their blogs, while some will get lost on what they should write about in their next post, or they just do not have the consistency to blog.
But if you pick up the following 10 habits, you will get your blog to the next level continuously, and help your blog to grow.
Adapt 7 Habits to Help Your Blog Grow
Blog . Every . Day
A blog is like your baby, a new born baby which you have to teach it so that it could grow. If you stop teaching, or if you teach less, it will be less competitive than others. It is just as simple as that. It is best to blog everyday. If blogging each day is too much for you, at least set up a blogging schedule. Force yourself to do it. Stick to the schedule and do not procrastinate. If you are blogging less frequently, you have to be stricter to yourself that you have to write a post with better quality than those who blog 7 times a week.
Also, the baby will need time to absorb the information and grow. If you are targeting for search engines, it may take as long as 3 months, 6 months, or even a year for your topic to be included in the index, provided you did nothing to promote your blog. Publishing everyday will help search engines in indexing your blog, as you have new feeds to tell the world everyday.
Blogging habit is the most important one out of the 7 habits in this list.
Always Put Your Blog on Your Mind
Keep it a habit of thinking about your blog by including it in your mind. When your mind is free, for example when you are waiting, or travelling, prepare what is the next movement of your blog. What will I talk about on my next post? What features I have to include in my blog? Any extra plugins do I have to install? What is the best way to cash out from my traffic?
If you want your blog to be big, nobody can help without your call.
Evaluate Your Blog
Evaluate your blog every month or every week. Examine the ways to improve. Are the links easy to navigate? Are my titles eye catchy enough? Are there any new updates on the contents of my previous posts? If so, update them, frequent updates on your posts will make good impressions on search engines.
Comment on Other Blogs
Whenever you read a blog post, make it a habit of commenting on it. In the past I would never make any comments after acquiring the information I learned from a blog post. But everybody who has a blog should do so. Commenting on others blogs not only could build up your link profile, it can also get your site noticed so they could help to direct some traffic to your blog. Even though most of the comment links are nofollow, spending 1-2 minutes commenting on blogs would not hurt.
Now I also make a habit of clicking blogs from search results. It may not come first from the search result. But if all the search results could solve my problem, I would like to select the pages which I could be able to comment on.
Build Forums Profiles
Sometimes when you run out of topics to blog on, join forums of your field to be inspired! I have also been lurkers on forums for quite a while. But if you are spending time on the forum, go and register to create an account. Fill in the profile, add your blog on your siggy and go ahead to post. The more you post, the more links you can build to your blog, and juice content will be able to redirect from popular threads to your blog.
So, join and keep an eye on forums frequently!
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is found to be very helpful when you are trying to find long term readers for your blog. If the readers are interested in your guest post, they will follow you to your new blog. Other than posting for your blog, guest blogging for others blogs from time to time.
Take Quality Photos
No matter your blog is about photography or not, whenever you saw something beautiful, catchy, or special, snap it with your phone or digital camera. Bloggers have to use photos from time to time, in order to make their blogs look lively. As we all know, you can buy images online. But if you have some related photos, you can save it up. Using free stock images often come with terms and you will have to label it or link to them; but using our own images you will be 100% free of legal actions.
Photographing with cellphones will not give you the best images, but sometimes it can surprise you. You just have to find special angles around your living environment. There must be 1 accepted photo out of 100 taken pictures.
It is not an easy task to pick up all of these habits for blog starters, and it will be quite time consuming to work on all stuff at a time. Try to do it slowly and add the load when time goes on. Once you are on the right path, you will be doing even more than the aforementioned!
If you know any other habits blog owners should adapt, please share in the comment session!
