What makes up good blogging?
That is the question I am asking today. Who decides what a good blog post is and what a bad blog post is? There was a time when people just blogged for the love of blogging sharing their point of view with the world.
Over time it seems blogging guru’s started dictating what it takes to write a good blog post. I learned a great deal in the Internet Network Marketing industry. The biggest lesson I learned is that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.
That applies here in the blogosphere as well. Connect with the right person and your blog will instantly enjoy lots of traffic and comments out of the gate. On the flip side piss off the wrong person and you will spend the remainder of your cyber career in virtual Siberia.
I know some of you might be thinking is that true?
Well I can put it to you this way. There are some bloggers out there that have lots and lots to say about blogging and online marketing. The only problem is they themselves don’t have to much to show for it other than some colorful fancy words.
I’ve been blogging here at Profit On Knowledge since 2006 some years I’ve made a killing online and others I’ve made hardly anything at all. Around 2008 I was a page rank 4 and today I only have a pagerank of 2.
Why?
Because I had links coming from friends who had comments coming from people who had crappy sites. Sure their comments where good, but what they were linking to was crappy. That never stopped me from visiting my online friends blogs.
So as a result I also had my pagerank drop. That didn’t stop from making lot’s of money online though. It just made me have to think more outside of the box, always remembering not to rely on the big search engines for traffic.
Even though I don’t post here all that much right now I still enjoy a decent level of monthly traffic to this site which is why I feel compelled to keep writing here. I figure if folks are going to keep coming I may as well keep writing.
Tips To Writing A Good Blog Post
The biggest tip I can give you is, don’t pretend to be someone your not. If you already decided that you want to blog make sure you have a clear idea in your head what you want to blog about.
Contrary to what you may hear, don’t just blog about anything. Blog about something you know about already. It will make for a much more interesting blog. Eventually after you build up your community and blog followers you can think about how you want to monetize your blog.
Do build a email list. Offer something of value in exchange for the persons email. Even if your only going to keep them updated when you put out a new blog post. One of my good blogging friends does just that and she is a bad ass when it comes to getting her followers to engage her and her blog.
Some people will have you believe that there is some secret out there that once unlocked will flood your blog with thousands of people and untold riches. The fact is if nobody is interested in what you are writing about, nobody is interested… Move on!
Don’t be one dimensional – If you keep blogging about subject that isn’t gaining traction, move on to a different subject. Keep an eye on your analytics, BTW make sure you hook up google analytics to your blog so you can see if your actually getting traffic and what that traffic is doing.
Above all else just keep writing. It might take you 100 – 500 articles to start finding your own unique voice. To be perfectly honest it’s easy to start getting traffic in a smaller niche than it is to get traffic say in the make money online niche.
Internet network marketing is even a bit hard to get traffic for. Especially if your a newbie starting out.
If there was one thing I could do over if I had the chance it would be NOT focus any effort, time or money in the home business niche. Simply put there are easier ways to make money than to compete against internet marketers who dominate that niche.
The same internet marketer more than likely don’t have the same skill sets or knowledge you do. So that is your advantage use it!
It took me many years to figure out how to make money online. I should have spent that time following my passions rather than trying to follow the money. I certainly made a ton of money online, but the time cost and money cost was crazy insane………………
Do yourself a favor take a deep breath and really think about what it is you are interested in and just know whatever it is you can apply internet marketing skills to and dominate it online.
Thats all for now…
Talk to you soon,
Larry
clearly diffrentiated differences between good blogging vs bad blogging really nice one
Thanks I am glad you enjoyed the article
In the first note, I quite agree that blogging where one passion is is a great way to succeed in blogosphere. Blogging isn’t as easy as most people think and one can easily get stuck along the way due to stress especially when the expected monetary return looks almost unrealistic. The passion and knowledge of the niche keep one going.
There is a need to understand ourselves as bloggers. Knowing our weak and strong points is essential in coming up with a profitable niche ideas. I’ve read some tips from influencers online saying “forget about make money online” when choosing your niche. I think they’re right. The niche don’t have to be before generating cool cash from internet.
Hi Aceclue, anyone can make money blogging. It depends heavily on what you are focused on. Thanks for stopping by and commenting.
Nice post..
Quality is king, biggest point while writing a good blog post. Intially one may stumble but with span of time one can master on writing good quality blogs.
Once again thanks for such an informative post.
Hi Rishabh,
Where there is a will there is a way. Most people end up giving up before actually getting to the top of the mountain to see all the heavenly beauty.
Nice post, Guys. Not everyone can be a writer, and it is a fact that you have to keep at it on a regular basis. i applaud all of the points you make, here. They could take a long time to find on your own.
Hey Oliver,
I would say there are three types of people who end up on my blog.
1. The person who is just doing random searches or see’s my comment somewhere and is curious what I write about.
2. The person who is just seeing who I am because of my various different online projects
3. The most common person that visit’s this blog is in some kind of home business like a network marketing business.
To this person, my advice is write as often as you can because it’s a major skill to learn to be successful in online marketing.
Your perspective on blogging success is very interesting. I have a passion for writing, and it’s the driving force for why I blog. I hope you’re right about it paying off monetarily at some point. After almost 2 years and 150 articles, it has happened yet.
Hi Joe I visited your blog. For starters it needs a face lift. I recommend spending $300 to $400 and get a blog make over.
Appearance says a lot about how much you care about what you are doing.
I easily have written 1500 blog articles in less than a year. Another bit of advice I can give you is that if one idea isn’t panning out after 3 months. Drop it like a bad habit and move on.
Profitable niches won’t be hard to make money in because there are already buyers there.
I will use my martial art niche as an example of what I am talking about. Before I created a product for this niche, I just made a youtube channel and it took off with a life all its own.
https://www.youtube.com/user/entertaichi/videos
Thank you, you inspired me to write a blog post today 🙂
Nicely done !!i liked the differentiation between blogging ..the main focus on blog should be the quality content ..its the king of web marketing (SEO,SEM etc)
Thanks for stopping by and commenting Richard
writing is a good skill but writing a blog is different thing.really nice tips for writing a blog and giving clear difference between good blog and bad blog.thanks for sharing this post.
I am glad you enjoyed the article satpreet
I’m truly enjoying the design and layout of your blog.
It’s a very easy on the eyes which makes it much
more enjoyable for me to come here and visit more often. Did you hire out a developer
to create your theme? Superb work!
I have an in house designer who works on my sites. Jamie is really good at web design stuff…
Nice and very informative post
Blogging is truly a creative work. Writing is an art , it is not possible by everybody. Blogging is done by many people for many reasons. Most bloggers do blogging because of money, some for their passion, some for expressing their views , their experiences and some purely for sharing information.
I never thought of good blogging and bad blogging. I mostly concentrated on writing good and informative posts rather than duplicate and useless posts. The above post clearly explains us the difference between good and bad blogging. Bad blogging would not live longer , its causes will surely be seen in no time. The one advice I would like to give bloggers is that blogging if done by thinking of readers then it would be better.
Great post and i hope this post would help many bloggers especially beginners.
Thank you for sharing.
Hey Sagar, thanks for stopping by and commenting. Your right, a blog post is good if the blogger is writing with the reader in mind.
Hi Larry, about the first note, i kept browsing your blog searching for paid ads and i couldn’t find any, no banners!
then how are you monetizing your blog ? selling blog-posts ? maybe that’s what lowered your page rank in the first place!
Comment links are of nofollow nature, and they have no affect at all to pagerank, so you just can’t blame your followers and audience for lowering your page rank because they were engaged and commented on your blog! that’s just wrong.
Search engine algorithms are constantly changing, there are more than 120 factors that affect pagerank and “dofollow” links are just 1 factor.
Also pagerank do not dictate the results in the search engine, and it’s no way to measure the success of a blog, i’m sorry i had to point that out because i read it in many blog posts so far and it’s wrong.
Many thanks,
Best.
Hey Mitch thanks for commenting.
I have several blogs. Some of my blogs do run ads, others just have opt in boxes and a couple of blogs I have I don’t even try and earn money from. I guess you can say I just love to blog.
Your wrong, there was a time when using services like comment luv give do follow links. Idiots who pay other people to go comment would visit blogs like mine, (and still do btw) to try and get link juice.
At the time I didn’t realize that google’s algorithm didn’t like that. In fact to this day I have web companies emailing asking me to go back and delete comments from my site because it’s lowering their rank.
Pagerank doesn’t lower your seo, however page rank can and does raise it up. I certainly can blame some of my commentors. Especially when I use to average 9 to 10 thousand visits a month and hundreds of comments coming in from people just trying to get link juice because I have a do follow blog.
If you actually knew how many request I have gotten because of bad back linking strategies you would understand better.
“then how are you monetizing your blog ?” I sell stuff 🙂
Thanks for this informative post. Your tips about Good blogging vs Bad blogging is really nice. I’m a good blogger. I am so glad I found your advice blogs–this one I can’t wait to start putting your recommendations to work.
Thanks for your tips! I really appreciate your efforts.
Great job!!!!!
Your Welcome !!!!
I have come to know writing is not just a writing. You need to do it with a lot of passion knowing that you are writing to help someone out there. And so it requires time and commitment. Otherwise it will never be effective. Nice post.
Hey Fredy, you absolute need to have a passion for blogging for it to be effective for you. Some folks think that they can start a blog and just start talking about making money and poof their gonna get rich.
…OR
Just put up some adsense code and POOF your gonna get rich..
The truth is your readers will like you more if you start blogging just because you love doing it. Eventually the money will come….
On some blogs about marketing is too little information, and here I agree with you. Well it appears more and more new parties on good marketing blog
Good post and useful information on blogging…..Thanks…tips …Blog about something you know about already. It will make for a much more interesting blog.
I made the HUGE mistake of having a blog about finances just because it was more profitable but I had zero experience in the field and writing the articles was a colossal effort for me. Now I have a personal development blog and I can’t wait to wake up to write and schedule a few posts. My advice is to stick to what you know and try to be as relevant as possible.
I couldn’t of said it better myself
Awesome post I think blogging is a journey of patience. In this field you’ll face many up and downs. But If you are committed to your work and learn some think from your past weakness and learn new thinks in blogging. Then no body stops you for being a successful blogger.
Thanks for sharing nice post
I’m very much interested in writing, and this is the reason for starting blog writing but only interest is not enough to write a good blog. Who cares more about title, but choosing a title which is more attractive for readers is very difficult. Thanks for the post
I completely agree with you when you say that the so called blogging gurus are dictating on how to write, what to write and when to write. I just blog for the love of blogging and am happy to do that. It is rare to see such a honest review as this. Thanks for this. I have just started blogging and hope my love for writing will keep me engaged than worrying about SERP.
Hi Ganeshkumar, what you just said is awesome. I am sure you will be very successful in your blogging journey.
🙂
very good (and honest) points, here, Larry. You can never tell what online friends, your own good friends have, and that can hurt you. I think that’s a negative about online publishing that we have to live with. What you do have to have is post good, interesting stuff, from an expert’s point of view. Do some research first, write what you know, and be interesting! Thanks for the post.
HI Ken, It’s very true unfortunately. It is hard to know who is reputable and who isn’t. Combine that with people not really understanding how SEO works or backlinking and you have a recipe for disaster.
Thanks for commenting
I think the best tip anyone has given me is write what you know and write naturally. If you don’t write what you’re familiar with, you’ll hit a dead end quick. And, if you don’t write naturally, people won’t stay interested.
Hey Michael, I started blogging in 2006 back than there really wasn’t that much information about blogging for free.
It wasn’t till around 2008 that people really started opening up and talking about blogging. I think I did what a bunch of other people did. I wanted to make money online but i really didn’t know where to start.
That is really good advice. If you have a passion for something talk about that. Don’t talk about stuff you don’t know much about. Don’t quote people or other bloggers, because you never really know for sure if what they are saying is true.
I like this post. I am really impressed with your writing work. And really the ideas are awesome. It will be very helpful for me.You shared good points about Self-Perceptions and Reality. In my point of view, this is just amazing 🙂
Thanks again for sharing this valuable and easy way to develop our financial site.
Hi Nayem, it soundls like you are just looking for link juice.
However if you are being sincere thank you!!!!
Hi,
Nice post. I think the main thing that differentiate a blog is good or bad is content and usability. Writing is an art which everyone shouldn;t have talent and the who can, write a genuine content . First choose a topic which is usable for readers then write down the points that you know about the topic, don’t copy paste.
Hi Anu, it takes you writing hundreds of blog post before you find your true voice online. I never considered myself a writer ever. If you would have told me in school that I would spend my time writing I would have probably started laughing and dismissed the idea.
Kind of ironic how life works sometimes.
It was great when all blogger build their blog with good content and good passion of blogging.
Even maybe not perfect, but it will make blogging world much comfortable to explore, especially for newbie who really like blogwalking.
Blogging has changed a lot over the years. That’s because with wordpress you can do so much more than just blog.
To a newbie they see a blog and don’t realize just how powerful these CMS platforms can really be. As a business person myself, I can understand why some bloggers have chosen to focus on selling stuff rather than just telling stories…
Heck I am guilty of it myself. Though here on profit on knowledge I am staying with my original theme and that is to share my experiences and knowledge I have gained over the years of marketing on the internet.
Hi
I strongly believe that if one shouldn’t have writing skills can’t make a good post ,No matter a person spend his time in writing or not but one who have writing skills only can make a good, interesting and genuine post.
Thanks for the great post Larry! I like what you said about finding something you are passionate about. . Also, provide value to your audience, always. It’s not all about promotion. It’s about helping others in some way too.
I’ve been a blog content marketer for a long time and find it to be very lucrative and lots of fun!
Thanks again
Have a nice day.
Lisa
I agree that blogging where one passion is is a great way to succeed in blogosphere. Thanks for sharing this great info. Really, these are the top points you have mentioned to make a simple blog as a Good blog. I will must be use these tips on my website for making it viral.
Blogging can be quite difficult at the start but after time it becomes worth it. As you write more blog posts, you become a better writer and eventually people will notice your content and slowly you’ll gain more traffic which is great !