Internet Babel

I think you need to experiment and continue to experiment regularly with your blog. Your ads, ad networks, placement, just try different things continuously.

Try and improve your blog everyday. Look at successful blogs and think ‘what do they have that I don’t’ emulate things to a degree but ultimately try and create your own unique brand.

Posts / Content

You can always improve your posts. I’m sure if you’ve owned a blog for a while and have over 100 posts on it – you have looked back on now and then and been surprised and how rubbish you think an old post looks!?

I have done this a few times. Make sure you always experiment with your posts to constantly provide fresh content, fresh views, advice and standpoints.

Use bigger images, smaller images, bigger headings, color texts. Be provocative, leave questions unanswered. Try what you can to increase reader interaction and constantly try to improve your grammar and most of all. Presentation. Make things easy on the eye.

Subscriptions

This is for me, the most fickle aspect of a blog. Changing one thing can increase subscriptions a lot. Always experiment with where you place your subscription options, how you present them, how visible they are etc.

Generally, the more visible they are the better. You want people to know

• Here is my RSS subscription
• Here is my Email subscription

Which brings me to my next point. Make sure you always offer an email subscription option! whilst most don’t like email updates, well most bloggers. Due to obvious reasons. It’s still another option for people who may like it and can do nothing but expand your subscriptions.

RSS makes it so easy to flick through blogs in seconds and it’s so convenient and neat. I love RSS and would never subscribe via email personally. Don’t see much point. But still, make sure it’s there and people can see it.

Advertising / Revenue

Very subjective topic. If you’re absolute only purpose of a blog is to make money. I don’t think you will get very far. You need an undertone, something which makes your blog great. Whether that be simply an amazing logo, so be it. Overall though, great content, obviously.

But if you are trying to grow a blog or even static website based purely on re-written or purely ripped content, surrounded by Adsense blocks… give up now!

What you should be doing is writing pure original content. That’s right – from scratch. It’s good to get inspiration but make sure you don’t copy people, develop your own train of thought on a subject instead of borrowing somebody else’s.

That being said, this will then provide you with a good surrounding for ads. People don’t mind ads nearly as much if the content is good. Just look at John Chow – he has said a lot of time his blog doesn’t look like it’s full of ads, well… John, hate to break it to you but it does. A lot but we don’t care because your content is great!

Make sure you follow in John’s footsteps if you need a stepping stone example. Great content surrounded by targeted advertising = revenue.

Traffic

Why put this one last? because it is the most important silly!

Traffic to your blog or any website is the foundation for EVERYTHING. No matter how crappy your content may be, how spammy your ads may look, everything escalates with traffic.

With crappy content surrounded by ads but A TON of traffic. The bad content ironically becomes a good thing. People will want to get out of there and if your traffic isn’t savvy to these things, they will click ads. All the time. Which equals? big revenue!

But. I wouldn’t want this. I’d much rather try and build a quality content source with highly relevant ads. Advertising then becomes less of a hindrance and more of an alternative source for the user. If they don’t like what you’re saying and are going to leave anyway… you may as well get payed for it.

Big Traffic Equals

1. A lot of people viewing what you say and do!
2. A lot of potential buzz!
3. A lot of potential revenue!

It’s just all about how you utilize these qualities that decides how much money you make and how successful your blog becomes.

Final Thoughts

There is obviously other criterea also important to your blog such as; Design, Backlinks, Impact etc.

But I have sort of covered all those a lot in previous posts and things like backlinks and impact can be easily related back to traffic so in some areas it’s not worth expanding. Because I’ll go on forever… maybe another time…

Remember above all though. Neve be satisfied *Never be satisfied