Life Chronicles Part 3

A Blogger's Mind

A BLOGGER

So I started blogging for the past two weeks now and my experience has been worthwhile. Though it has not been a smooth journey, I came to realize that it’s easier said than done. Apart from the regular writers block there’s a whole lot to blogging. After i decided to use blogger offered by Google, I am still learning new things every day.  I thought it was going to be easy dishing out a 400 character post but that’s not the case. To rank in Google search engines it’s required for your articles to be at least 2000 characters. The more characters the better. Not to forget that you need quality content. I thought I had lost my muse after I felt totally blank without an idea of what to write.

My greatest question in blogging is, how do I know what niche to specialize on? I am still writing on a variety of things till I get to know what I am good at.  I love to help and advice people so I am sticking mostly to motivational and inspirational messages for now.  I have read about the saturated nature of some niches and also how some niches get more readership and monetary advantages over others.  I am sticking to what I know and can use to impact on my readers.  I am still figuring this aspect out too.  I don’t have a strong social media followership but I tend to share my articles with facebook and also ask some of my friends to share too. I have concluded that the hardest thing to do is convincing people to read your content.  If you have the trust then you have the followers, if you have followers you have traffic, if you have traffic then you have the opportunity to earn a living from blogging.

Two weeks back, I was feeling I had completed the developments for a blog.  Yeah, I had a good blog design with a nice template; I had added gadgets to my side bar. I carried out different changes and tweaks on my side bars to ensure it was presentable, I tested gadgets and widgets on my site removed the ones that didn’t work. I even started experimenting with CSS and HTML codes. I came up with a fairly site which I built on my own with no prior knowledge of website design before now. Fast forward today, the main question is how to increase traffic to my young site. After checking countless blogs on how to go about this ordeal I came across tips from famous bloggers like Harsh Agrawal. I applied these tips but only went as far as nipping the bud.

As if it wasn’t enough, I now learnt that to get traffic you must know at least the basics of SEO (search engine optimization). This is the most baffling of them all. From creating a great website to optimizing the key words, steps you cannot avoid if someone needs traffic in his site. This would improve my sites rank in Google all things being equal. I can imagine that everyone wants traffic, imagine spending hours and days researching for that killer article and after you publish it, no one comments.  It feels like heartbreak. I just feel the content was not good enough to appeal to my readers or even wasn’t ranking high in search engines for people to see it. However I continue my quest in getting a killer content. It was around this period I applied for the Google adsense program. I wasn’t surprised it was disapproved for insufficient content.  I now made it my mission to publish more articles and get approval when next I applied for adsense, I had also read about banner adverts and affiliate opportunities for monetization. 

BLOGGING

What about Meta tags and Meta descriptions, a short phrase or sentence that depicts what an article is about they usually appear under a topic in search engines.  It was made up of at most 150 characters, which may include few key words. Then I heard of Google webmaster tools, I am still fascinated by it because it is so complex for a rookie like me to understand. I was required to verify the ownership of my blog; I chose the second option which required me to place a code in my site for Google to verify. After that, I learnt how to submit my sitemap. Funny enough, I had this notion that blogging was all about writing something up and pressing enter just like updating a Facebook status little did I know I just started my journey more was to come. It wasn’t over as I needed to add my site to two other big search engines, Bing and Yahoo.  I was like, oh! So I need to go through this daunting task again.  I registered successfully with Bing and added my site map. I heard that Bing and yahoo are linked so I was glad I didn’t have to add my site to yahoo anymore since I was registered with Bing already.

A META TAG

A whole new experience to me, but I am enjoying the journey I have loved to write right from time, what better time to start using my talent. I have joined other blog groups on facebook to learn more from the experience bloggers.  I guess I have a lot to learn from them.  I follow other blogs that have high followership and have a high ranking for both Alexa and Google etc.  I learn from those sites and see what they are doing, then use the knowledge to be more creative in my own blog. I also learnt about writing articles on other blogs as guest authors which will help improve the traffic of my own blog through back links etc.

In conclusion, it’s not easy being a blogger, most will quit after the first two weeks especially when their post are ignored without comments, shares or feedbacks. As we know feedbacks can either be positive or negative.  But a true blogger will strive until he gets to the top. I strive to improve my blog experience to my mobile users, Android, Windows and Blackberry.  This is for the sole reason that a lot of people use their phones to do most things online. I may not have covered up a lot of ground concerning blogging but am writing my major experiences as a professional blogger. Expert Advises and inputs are encouraged from my esteemed readers. My source is my mind; I know its good enough to impact on my readers.