Blog maintenance

The blog has again been rather quiet for the past week and  I don't like to see it lose its momentum and my daily readership stats  drop. However, especially as one develops as a writer/blogger, you start to learn that there is more to running a blog than just writing and posting articles, as important as that is.

My stats have certainly risen but although that is great, with an increase in readership comes , just as in any other job I suppose, more responsibilities and work.

Of course stats will not increase if nobody see the blog and its blog posts, You can write fantastic engaging articles but won't make any money from monetizing the blog or get writing engagements  if you are unread and unknown. There is no point in a blog full of even the greatest content if few people read it.

The blogs with the greatest readership are the ones that then make money. As you learn more about how to  promote your blog , in my experience I found that I have been almost without realizing it , growing and improving my networking skills. With this of course comes one of the characteristics of blogging and the blogging community and that is networking and communicating with other bloggers. You read other blogs and articles , especially those in your niche and comment on them, and of course people answer and maybe also comment on  characteristics of your blog, bloggers are a real community where unlike many fields of business there is a lot of mutual support and encouragement..

One of the most important means to being noticed in the blogging field and getting your blog posts seen is unfortunately for those who dread learning how to use it ..SEO . This is ( as I understand it so far ) a sort of web language that the search engines trawl which then indexes your site and good SEO is the difference between being at or near the top of search engines, especially Google, or not being seen .

What makes for  a start in good SEO is ....language and learning the terms to use that the search engines pick up . I am a witty writer who tends to write in the style in which I might well chat to my friends and as much as it is a friendly, popular , easy to read style, especially if readers know you personally, it is not necessarily the best style at all for search engine ranking.

A good start is with your blog post title and then inserting the best relevant  keyword terms into the text when you can. A useful took to help you do this, especially when you are a beginner is to use a keyword research tool

I think many of my readers may gather that this part of blogging...the blogging maintenance and ;housekeeping; is still new to me, indeed as is developing the most profitable writing style, so if I suggest  a site, I am not an expert but am sharing resources that I discover and find helpful.  The keyword research tool which I  recently discovered and am currently using which will keep me going with suggestions for a long time is the very good http://ubersuggest.org/.

An example of its resources is entering the term blog maintenance for this blog post and receiving these suggestions :

blog maintenance
blog maintenance checklist
blog maintenance services
blog maintenance packages
blog maintenance provider
blog maintenance tips
blog creation and maintenance

 Nobody wants to read a blog which eg is full of broken links and references to sites which no longer exist or things which are no longer for sale and just like a normal conversation it is very rude to not answer a comment to your blog , to reply to comments you receive is a vital part of growing your blog, and certainly as important as writing.

Valerie