When people have asked me how I was able to increase my reader numbers from 100 to 500 in just a few months, my replies have ranged from heavy marketing to quality content. The truth is that any success in business stems from the ability to create demand for your product. In blogging terms, this means that you need to create a demand for content… you need people wanting to read your stuff!

This may seem a bit obvious at first, right?
Supply… demand…. okay, I get it!

No, what I am talking about today is a different kind of demand. Artificial demand. I call artificial demand the kind of traffic and readers that come to your website solely because you are offering them something or just urging them to visit. We see this everyday, and it will generate some of the best traffic to your blog. The flip side of artificial demand would be a more organic demand that is coming from daily viewers, traffic off of referred websites and hits coming from search engines. Clearly, artificial demand is something you do directly, making it a bit easier. So let’s discuss my top three methods in creating a more artificial demand for your blog.

1. Offer a Free eBook (or download) for RSS Subscriptions
One of the best ways to ensure that you will get RSS subscribers is to offer something free and display it prominently on your homepage. About 60% of the business/money blogs that I come across have a separate area on their homepage offering something free for a subscription. I feel like this is a brilliant strategy for getting readers to sign up right off the bat. Basically, what you need to do is designate an area on your blog where you have two things: a subscription form (e.g. “enter email here”), an eye-catching photo and description of your product to get some attention.

Take a look at some of the more popular blogs in your niche, a lot of these guys have to attribute some popularity to the fact that one of the first things a visitor sees on their blog is “get this free, just enter your email.” This kind of allure is oftentimes irresistible, and I myself typically sign up to random blogs just to take a look at their free eBook (or other download). The thing about these sign-ups is that they are entirely artificial. 90% of the time, people will be signing up just to grab a copy of your free bonus… they might not care less what your daily content looks like. It’s this type of artificial demand, where you can increase your readers and traffic without “actual” interest, that can really boost your figures.

2. Spread Unnecessary Links To Your Blog
Other than increasing demand in the form of readers, you can pull artificial demand in the form of website popularity and traffic by spreading links to your blog across the web. There are many different places you can do this, and I wanted to avoid the “s” word (spam), but this is essentially what you will be doing. Let’s hunt around for some popular forums and message boards where you can creatively slide your link into discussion so as to score artificial traffic from people looking for answers.

This isn’t spam, because we aren’t mercilessly posting our link wherever we please. Instead, we want to pinpoint discussions that are relevant to your niche, and simply refer people to articles that you happen to have written on the subject. As long as the subject fits the theme to some degree, you won’t be labeled a spammer and may actually be thanked… even though you just want their traffic.

Great Websites to Refer Visitors to Your Blog:

The websites that I have listed above are mostly forums or portal-based communities that work through discussion groups. Again, this list is just a general template, and you should be using the websites that are best suited for what you are offering on your blog. We don’t want to just spam our link in unrelated posts, we need a focus on tennis, or popsicles or muffins… whatever your niche happens to be.

People that are active on communities like Yahoo Answers and Digital Point will be more than willing to visit your website if you simply write something like “this blogger actually wrote about X awhile ago. Check out the article: LINK.” I suppose this would technically be spam, but it’s going to help your rankings and your popularity if you get a lot of interested traffic out of it. This becomes artificial demand because in reality, these people don’t know what they are signing up for when they click your link!

3. Run a Contest That Encourages Feed Subscription and Linking
You can really never have enough links or readers, so the number one way to ensure that you get the results you are aiming for is by running a contest on your blog. I’ve been running monthly contests at Jimvesting for quite some time, and promoting them as well. Don’t forget that if you are a new blogger, you need to get out and active (as prescribed in point #2) in order to let others know what you are offering.

I want to address one issue, and that is competitions that really have no base. If you are running a contest full of sponsors that provide individual prizes, don’t be surprised if people are turned off. The reason that a lot of people don’t respond well to these competitions is that sponsors often don’t provide the promised donations and the true worth of a contest’s offerings is a bit distorted as people typically list inflated “monetary value” numbers. I want you to ignore the naysayers! Contests that offer a lot of sponsors and ask that participants subscribe to your feed and post about the contest in their blog are great for your rankings. You’ll get a boost in numbers from those that register to your RSS feed, and you’ll get referred traffic and some excellent backlinks from those that decide to make posts.

Contests have probably been my biggest driver of success by a long shot. If sponsors don’t come to you, go to the sponsors! I had a tough time in my first few months of active blogging because I had to go around collecting emails and contacting/talking with everyone in my niche. You need to do this eventually, so why not now? There are plenty of “nice” ways to casually ask for a prize donation, but remember to NEVER send a message without the name of the person you are emailing and some small personal touches. You’ll get your sponsors, even if you have a big fat 0 on your RSS, because bloggers feed off exposure like sharks.

Bottom Line: There are plenty of ways to create a more artificial demand for your blog and your content if organic growth isn’t working out fast enough for you. I have personally done all of the above, and recommend that any aspiring niche authority do the same. Being casual and helpful with your “creative spamming” is a must… so be sure to spend a good amount of time gathering some research so that you know where posting links to your articles or promotions is going to hit pay dirt.

-Jimvesting

One question I have been asked time and time again is “how do you use images in your blog posts?” More specifically, readers are talking about the unique way that my articles look and feel with images inserted professionally in all the right places. It’s really little more than a clever web design trick, but having your images styled to fit with the rest of your articles can be a major catalyst for your blog’s popularity.

The video above outlines the entire method with a helpful screen display that walks you through the process I go through every time I slip images into my blog posts. I’ve discussed before a more general guide on how to effectively use images in your blog posts, but I feel like you guys are looking for something more specific to this blog. Therefore, the video above goes through step-by-step to show you exactly how I style images and add them to all my articles.

I like to back all my videos up with a post just as normal as any other, so let’s discuss right now Jimvesting’s Blog Post Image Method for getting all of your articles styled to perfection. Using images effectively will increase your traffic and popularity over time simply because people like to be entertained, and images are the number one way to add a unique touch to everything you do. Better yet, they make things easier to read… which encourages people to stick around!

Understanding What Images Work For You
One thing that many bloggers do incorrectly is use images that obviously clash with their overall designs. What do I mean by this? Well in my case, everything is drawn and animated. I’m not using any “real” photos of people or things anywhere on my blog, so I shouldn’t be using them in my blog posts. To fit with my theme, I am going to be using the type of “cartoony” or “hand-drawn” graphics to maximize my style. This could be the most important tip for many of you, as finding images that naturally match the overall feel of your blog should always be square one.

Grabbing Images That “Fit”
Once you have the general concept down on what kind of image you are looking for exactly, we need to actually go out and get a copy, right? My three favorite services for getting stock images are: iStockPhoto.com, Google Images and Stock.XChnge. Of course, iStockPhoto images do cost a few dollars a piece to purchase. However, I have found that these images are far superior to anything you’ll find for free, and you can use them over and over again (as I do) in order to make the purchase worth your while. If you are looking for a 100% free I would recommend simply messing around with images from Google Image Search.

Format the Images to Your Blog’s Content Style
Once you have the images you are going to use, the most important step is to get them cut down and optimized to flow with the rest of your article. Here are the general tips that I use in editing photos to get them looking their best!

1. Use a professional image editor like Photoshop!
It is really important to use a professional image editor so that everything can be edited to perfection and later optimized to cut down on your blog’s loading time. This is a prime reason why you should be using more than just MS Paint!

2. Make sure the image background matches your content area!
In other words, whatever background is under the normal text of any article you put out should match the image’s background. My background is white, so all of my images are going to have a white background (#FFFFFF, not something “close” to white). This ensures that the images don’t distract, but still offer some eye candy.

3. Resize Your Images to Fit Your Articles
Take note of how big the content area is that you will be posting in. For me, it’s somewhere around 500 pixels. Because of this, I never want to go more than 1/2 the size of the total text area for ANY image that I use. I typically choose to resize all my images to somewhere between 200 and 250 pixels. Unless you are planning on using a separate line for your images (if it’s just too big), things need to be no more than half your total content space.

4. Save as Optimized .jpg, .png or .gif
JPG, PNG and GIF are the three primary ways to save images simply because they look good and aren’t too big. I personally use JPG images because they are the smallest in size for what I use. What’s more, you can typically get away with just 60% quality since you aren’t going for high definition necessarily. Optimize images to cut down your blog’s loading time, and you’ll have satisfied readers!

Upload Your Image to the Internet
An obvious step, but I felt that I should address it nonetheless. A lot of bloggers just use images from Google or other websites and have links to the images on someone else’s server. I recommend just saving your own copy (if legal) on your web server so you can be sure that it won’t be down next week. A lot of these websites are offline within weeks of you seeing them, so you don’t want to run the risk that things will be offline. If you don’t want to use too much of your own bandwidth by hosting all of your images, you can simply use a service like ImageShack to host them for you for free.

Insert and Align Your Image with Spacing
The sad part about most blog articles is that people work hard to format their own images, and then just throw them in their posts without a care in the world. This strategy can completely dismantle the appearance of your posts, so you need to be formatting everything correctly to make most effective use of your images.

One thing I ALWAYS do is add a protective 10px horizontal spacing between my images and my text. You can accomplish this in the “appearance” tab of your WordPress WYSIWYG Image Editor. This makes sure that the text doesn’t bump against your image, which always looks sloppy.

Assuming that you have your image all formatted ready to go, one last step is to align either left or right to make sure that your text wraps around it properly. Of course, if you image is too big, I would center the whole thing and put it on its own individual line. Otherwise, things need to be to one side or the other if you want to rack up the most style points possible.

Bottom Line: Using Images In your posts is one of the most essential steps to ensure that you gain popularity as a blogger. Blogs that fail to put images in each article are going to find gaining subscribers so be a bit harder, as readers generally see blogging as an escape from reading through news. People want information that is fun to read, so using your images in a way that optimizes your content can really boost traffic and returning visitors.

-Jimvesting

If you are stuck in an endless cycle of tutorial posts, product reviews and website observations on your blog, perhaps it’s time to mix things up! One thing readers enjoy is a bit of controversy, and nothing promises more traffic and interactivity than a good old fashioned rant post. Let’s figure out how to make an effective link bait post!

Why It Works

Writing a “link bait” post, or what you should think of as anything published on your blog that will carry some shock-value for discussion, is one of the top ways to for you to get an insane amount of traffic delivered straight to your blog with little work. By targeting a website or blog that is an authority in your niche, a well thought out rant post can command powerful debates and advantageous “top-down” linking from the authority site. Put simply, writing something a bit “off the wall” or controversial will naturally spark some debate if written well. Having a debate running on your blog, even if you appear slightly insane, is always a positive move for your rankings.

What Do You Need To Write an Effective Link Bait Post?
In order to accomplish the effect we are going for, which is essentially a massive overreaction that fires up a heated debate, you need to have two things: a killer idea, and a blog that is popular enough to command some authority. The plan here is simple: publish a post on your blog or website that differs from common opinion in such a way that certain people will agree with you, and certain people will be offended.

We need to offend people. If you write a controversial article that everybody agrees with, you aren’t going to find any traffic bump or interesting links back to your website in the near future. What is important is that things are not taken too far over the edge, so always remember to keep discussion as polite as possible. An effective link bait post is not a personal attack on someone you don’t necessarily like, it needs to be backed by legitimate and verifiable information (trends, numbers, percentages, history, etc.).  If you have a blog that has enough exposure that people will start to notice your post, a simple rant can potentially double/triple/quadruple your daily traffic flow.

Coming Up With A Killer Idea
The driving factor for the success or failure of your link bait post is the topic you are covering. I would recommend using a current event, such as a contest or promotion, though you can find just as much success turning to a program, company, website or even person. In my case study, I decided to exploit a blogging competition happening at DailyBlogTips called “Blogging Idol” because it had over 100 blogs entered, a lot of buzz around my market niche, and absolutely zero criticism.

If you have a great topic but someone has already attempted to present a controversial spin on things, you are better off looking elsewhere. Even if the blog isn’t so established, nobody likes a copycat. You might get lucky and have nobody bring it up, but you will look foolish if someone posts a link to the same discussion that took place a week ago on another website.

In addition to being a current topic, it should also be a “hot topic.” In the ideal case, you would have an event that has already gotten a large amount of press around the blogosphere. The more times mentioned, the better, as someone that has already written on the subject is a lot more likely to visit in order to see your spin on things than someone who hasn’t been involved. Hitting that “hot” issue doesn’t necessarily mean celebrity gossip or anything like that, just something current that has people talking.

Coming Up with a Title That Rocks
Again, in our ideal case, we want an overreaction to what you have posted… yet not to the point that you are belittling anyone. We want people to read the post and immediately take a side. Setting up the dominoes for an all-out debate is the best method to carry your website into the spotlight in a short period of time. One of the first steps to take, and arguably the most important, is writing your title. Even if the title doesn’t exactly match up with the views expressed in the post, we need things to sound outrageous from the get-go.

Let’s take a quick example. When I wrote about the Blogging Idol competition in a rant post to get some traffic, I didn’t really consider the contest to be a total flop. In fact, I still maintain that the competition is a great way to get people blogging more effectively, and it has a solid foundation. True, my belief is slanted toward the a negative view of the end-result of the contest, but I decided to write the blog post as if the blogging competition was a virtual cesspool for cheaters around the world. My title of choice was “Blogging Idol is a Joke“… so that if you had known about the contest and heard nothing but praise, you need to be thinking “I’m reading this one” at this point. Make the desire to read, and discussion/traffic will follow course.

Lay Down Some Effective Content
So now that we have a title destined to reek havoc on the blogosphere, we need that all important content. By this point, you might be considering an all-out warfare… but I actually advise against this. I believe strongly that the content is where you turn things down a notch and discuss your views in a controlled way with lots of evidence and logical arguments for your side of things. Again, if your rant is targeting a website, company or person, you need to make sure that you make things clear that you aren’t trying to enter into a war. I recommend some kind of peace offering, and maybe even plug the blog/person/company in a positive light before you turn the page. Nobody likes a jerk, and you don’t want to risk anything with legal consequences.

Other than forming your opinions in a non-offensive manner, you need to write effectively by using plenty of research, evidence and experience to pull readers to your side of the coin. You want to be able to convince enough people that you are indeed correct to spark a debate. There will always be those opposed to your view if you are writing something controversial, so the most important element is going to be your ability to convince your audience.

There’s not a lot of actual guideline as to what to write; however, it’s really essential that things are structured and fully explained. Make sure to first discuss what you are talking about (for example, I explained what Blogging Idol was) before proceeding with any sort of argument. Even if you think that everyone reading knows the subject you are referring to, it is necessary to refresh people on the topic before beginning.

The Powerful Results of a Well-Run Rant Post
As you know by now, I have tested this method before making this post by arguing the case that the Blogging Idol competition was poorly run. In less than 24 hours, I have over 50 comments (my average is  around 8-15 per post) and tons of page views. In fact, I had more returning visitors than ever before with 94 people checking out my blog more than once. 874 page views trounced my average, and I saw 573 unique visitors on the date of publication along. What’s better is that it seems to have caused a big debate, where I may see several links back to the post in the near future. It’s a win-win situation by all means!

Now that you have the know-how to create an effective rant post of your own, why not set out on forming one of your own? What should be clear from my traffic results is that people crave discussion every once and awhile, and will give your blog the attention it deserves if you throw a bone their way. Be creative, be smart and you’ll have a jump in rankings in no time!

-Jimvesting

Is your blog or website a big clunky mess that always seems to load slowly? It’s not just you, the load time on your blog can absolutely destroy your “curb appeal” and bring down your blog’s value. After experiencing outages here at theNetFool.com, I’ve decided to switch web hosts. However, there are plenty of tricks you can apply to get some oil back in your site’s gears, and start seeing more traffic.

Suppose you have a brand new house in the hills worth $5k after appraisal. That’s a pretty nice chunk of change, but it just so happens that there is a lot wrong. Maybe you are lazy, maybe you just don’t care, but the outside paint is chipping away and the lawn is dry and full of weeds. It’s amazing how simple curb appeal can tarnish the value of an otherwise great asset. This same story holds true with a webmaster that is running a website covered in weeds. Being on a faulty server or free hosting account is going to bring down the value of your blog. People simply don’t want to wait more than 3 seconds for a website to load anymore, so having the large files, the cheap hosting and the repetitive coding is going to hurt.

Ditch Your Free Web Hosting!
There is a reason why I am switching web hosts. Currently, I’m on a server that has too many users, and goes out all the time (as you’ve probably experienced) as a result. This was okay for starting up, but I’ve put up with it for far too long. Hosting is all relatively cheap nowadays, so I am going to go for that nice 100mbps connection when I choose a web host. It’s a bit amazing how many people will choose based on price, not quality. Speed is important, as you don’t want a car just because it’s shiny… check out the engine first!

Free or cheap-to-a-fault web hosting will catch up with every blogger sooner or later. A few outages, and Google can totally miss indexing you, which is going to hurt your search engine rankings. Loss of visitors from outages or slow performance is probably the single biggest toll. Again, the majority of readers don’t like to stick around to see a massive blog load all the way through. Discounted hosts can be a death sentence for an aspiring webmaster, but there are many good deals out there. I recommend: Host Gator, 1and1.com, GoDaddy.com, BlueHost.com and DreamHost. With current deals out there, nobody pays sticker price. I could get a 2-year “Baby” plan at Host Gator down from $214.80 to $121.84 by applying a 20%-off coupon and buying a package through my own affiliate link.

Test Your Website’s Speed Now!
There’s a lot you can do outside of switching hosts to speed things up on your website. Simple optimization techniques can make an enormous impact to how fast your blog will appear. iWebTool’s Speed Test is my favorite, so go ahead and enter in your blog along with some professional website’s that you’d like to match. Chances are, you can see some big improvement just by taking some simple steps… so let’s work on getting you “up to speed” (oh man, please excuse my humor).

Optimize Your Images
The single most important step in tweaking your website’s speed is to optimize your images. With Adobe Photoshop, it’s pretty easy to get high-quality images that look identical to the big master files, though there are plenty of other programs that can do the same. Try the Online Image Optimizer or JPEG Wizard for free optimization on the internet!

There’s a big debate as to which image types are the best to use: GIF, JPG or PNG I’m a sucker for the ultra-low file size offered by JPG images, but it’s recommended to only use the extension for photos. GIF and PNG are great for web-images (like navigation bars and spacers), so what you choose is up to you. Never, and I mean never, put a BMP file up on your website.

Typically speaking, images are the bulk of the loading process. If you can cut the size of your images in half, you are going to see a dramatic boost in your page load time. All the images in my blog posts are set to 60%-70% JPG quality… so clearly you don’t need perfection to entertain your visitors.

Optimizing Your Coding/Content
There are thousands of tips and tricks that people swear by in juicing up the speed of a website with coding. I’m not going to waste your time on petty things that don’t show up in the end-result… so let’s hit the top five ways to speed up your website:

1. Use CSS (cascading style sheets) for your designs
   - Adding a CSS style is an effective way to load images and work to reduce repetitive code in your template. Having things set up in an external .css file can be the best way to jump-start your blog. Check out this free CSS cleaning tool.
2. Enter image size proportions (height & width) in your code
   - A lot of people simply forget to add the height and width tags to their images. By having “<img src=”x.jpg” />”, you are forcing your server to do extra work to figure out the size. Why not tell it from the get-go what you want? “<img height=”5″ width=”20″ src=”x.jpg” />” is a lot more efficient and will load your website much quicker.
3. Use external scripts, don’t try to pack it all in!
   - Never try to include all of your scripts in the coding on one file. It’s much better to save all of your scripts individual, and link them in later so that they can be cached in the browser for faster speeds. If you are using the same script over and over, why not load it from one spot?
4. Use a backslash in your links
   - List all of your links with a backslash “http://www.Jimvesting.com/”. Without the slash, you are making the server figure out whether this is a file name, a whosee or a whatsit… when all you want is the directory!
5. Avoid “tables” and repetitive html code
   - If your website is contained in one big “<table>” tag, be wary. Websites generally won’t load until the server processes the whole chunk of code inside. Instead, try cutting things up into smaller tables, or use “<div>” to clean it up.

With these tricks in hand, you can significantly improve the loading time of your website. You’d be surprised what some simple organization can do to your speeds… and your traffic will jump as a result!

Are Your “Caching” all this?
If you want to have your whole website run a lot more efficiently, why not experiment with a WordPress plugin like “WP Super Cache” or “WP Cache” to load all of your files quicker from the get-go? Cache services like these can help initial downloads load faster from your server. In addition, people viewing multiple pages are going to see much better performance if things on your website are being cached in their browser effectively.

The plugins mentioned above attempt to do many methods of caching all at once. If you’d like a more exact process, check out this great cache guide from arnebrachhold.de. Using a cache to have your files more easily manipulated is a popular movement, as is using .gzip compression to mash down the file sizes of your content. As far as compression goes, a lot of that is technical mumbo-jumbo that I don’t want to five into. If you are interested in .gzip, check out this reference guide!

Bottom Line: Why settle for a $5k house, when with a few updates (faster loading speeds) you can have a full $1 million? I’m a current offender of this rule, which is why I am electing to upgrade to a faster web host. Try experimenting with optimized images and optimized coding to get your blog running faster and more efficient than ever before, and keep your visitors happy!

-Jimvesting

Welcome to the conclusion of the “Creating A Blog” series brought to you by theNetFool.com. We’ve come a long way since week one, and now have everything fully functioning on our blogs. Heck, you should even have a few posts published… and by now, you should be starting to see some traffic flow into your website. Let’s work on organizing your content, your RSS feed and forming that all important blogging routine.

Being an efficient blogger is one of the most important moves that you will make in your blogging career. There are so many writers that have great blogs, but fail to do things regularly. Readers like some measure of consistency, so it is important to have all of your RSS feeds and post titles just as predictable as your blogging routine. By the end of this chapter, you’ll have the game-plan in hand to succeed.

Organizing Your RSS Feeds
Chances are, if you are new to blogging, you just don’t understand where to begin with Really Simple Syndication (RSS). By default, the WordPress system will set you up with an RSS feed that is sloppily organized from the get-go into a few pages of content. We need to have this a lot more organized so that people can sign up to our feeds with ease. Remember, not everyone will want to sign up to receive your RSS in their email inboxes every morning, and not everyone will want things directed to an RSS reader. The key to getting the maximum amount of RSS subscribers, is giving them the most options.

Luckily for us, Google recently took over FeedBurner… meaning you get all of the most professional options completely free. If you haven’t already, get on over to FeedBurner and create an account. With this, you can add your blog’s feed to your account and have everything streamlined for you within minutes. You’ll get an easy to use “http://feeds.feedburner.com/Jimvesting” access URL that opens up to a ton of unique subscriber options. Everything is tracked for you, and you can publicly show your readers how many subscribers you have at any given point in time with the “FeedCount” plugin among others available to you for free.

Go ahead activate whatever option you want through FeedBurner, as most of them are quite valuable. About 95% of successful bloggers are using FeedBurner to organize all of their subscribers. You can make a unique email feed subscriber option, add advertisements to your RSS feed for added revenue or even customize the format of the text that appears in each RSS feed item.

Organizing Your Post URLs and Titles
For the purposes of search engine optimization (SEO) and uniformity, it’s important to have your blog posts structured in the most effective way possible. Now that you have everything on your blog SEO’d with All-In-One SEO Pack, you may be looking for a way to simplify the URL of your individual postings. We don’t want to see any numbers or dates in the web address, so use “Permalinks” to get things set up correctly.

Lots of bloggers fail to address Permalinks as a useful tool to organizing your content. However, having your posts appear as “yourblog.com/post-title-here/” is very neat and easy for search engines to pick up. To do this, simply navigate to the “Settings” section of your administrator section and select the “Permalinks” tab. We want to use a custom structure of “/%postname%/” after our domain name. Alternatives are fine, but I feel that simply having the title there in the URL is the easiest method to use.

Once you have Permalinks configured, you can adjust the words that appear in the URL on each individual post. Right underneath the title of your posts in the editing screen, there will be a new “permalink” line where you can manually edit what appears. I recommend using five words or less, and adjusting it to include a simple term that would naturally be well-searched in Google. Use your own discretion, but having the Permalink appear as a common phrase is usually great for search engine rankings.

Other than Permalinks, the title of your post itself is essential. Beyond having a nice looking url on each post, your titles should be unique and packed with keywords. Over time, you will see exactly what I mean by this as your blog starts to appear in search engines more often. Make sure that each post title is something dynamic that draws attention, while at the same time describing what the post is about. This should appear clean inside of your blog’s layout, meaning that you don’t want a title that is going to run off the page… and you don’t want a title that is too short to describe a post.

Tracking Your Stats
Now that you have everything working correctly, you’ll want to install a traffic-tracking script that will show you how many unique visitors you are getting every day (among other things). This is very important for advertising purposes and organization. You will want to know how well your blog is doing outside of subscribers alone, so it is important to see how many people are seeing your website each day, week and month so that you will know what you are doing right and wrong. Without a statistics measure, bloggers often miss out on potential traffic coming in because they simply don’t know what works and what doesn’t. Plus, advertisers like to see what kind of traffic you are getting for ordering ads from your website.

The best traffic tracker in my opinion is the new Google Analytics system. This is more reliable and has the most options possible for analyzing your traffic. Plus, you get an unlimited log size so you can see how you are doing over a long period of time… which is always nice. If you are looking for something simpler, check out a service like StatCounter or WordPress’ own FireStats to track your progress. As much as I hate to over-rely on statistics to gauge my success as a blogger, it’s important to at least check how you are performing on a statistical basis now and then.

Forming a Blogging Routine
The biggest pitfall in blogging is the failure to create a blogging routine. When you own a publicly viewed blog, you need to be posting as often as possible and doing everything possible to expand your reach. I don’t know too many people that own blogs as personal journals that they really don’t want to pick up lots of readers, so I am going off the assumption that we want as much traffic as possible.

My recommendation is to make a new post every day. I have experimented heavily with posting at different intervals, but there really isn’t a better way in the world to increase your readership than by posting regularly every day. If you simply don’t have the time to fit this formula, try to pump out a minimum of 3 posts every week. Blogs that publish content less than 3 times a week are generally forgotten about. As much as people want to read your material, you will lose interest at an alarming rate if people assume that you simply don’t care enough about your own content to post regularly.

In addition to posting often, you should be doing all the right things after you make a new post. Your personal “bloggers routine” can include anything and everything from commenting on other blogs in your niche to publishing to social media networks. I find that my routine often consists of:

1. Commenting on related blogs to get clicks back to your post
2. Submitting each post to submission services like BlogEngage and BlogsVine
3. Re-Writing good articles and submitting to free article services like EZineArticles
4. Posting 5-10 useful thread responses in forums like DigitalPoint and Bloggeries

If you keep a steady routine of posting on regular intervals and following up each post with a slew of marketing techniques to gradually increase the number of readers you receive… you will be well on your way to turning an undiscovered blog into a niche authority. Your routine should be unique to your particular needs as a blogger, and you should never try to overdo it as we all run out of time now and then.

Conclusion
I hope that you have enjoyed this series on creating your own blog. We’ve covered everything from finding a useful topic to base your website on, registering a domain name and even marketing your name to attract visitors. The length of this guide itself is a testament to how complex owning and operating a blog can be. It is important to know what you are in for before you start if you want to hit the ground running. If you have any further questions, feel free to ask me to work things out for you (jim@Jimvesting.com)… I’ll be happy to work with you to help you get your footing!

-Jimvesting