Blogging is a process. Every process is systematic.  Blogging entails a systematic approach to it and most rookie bloggers don’t seem to get it. Buy a domain; buy a hosting account and slap some content with some makeshift graphics and then wait for the cash to drop in; it’s not going to work that way. Here are some secrets for you to get started with blogging:

Start professionally and don’t monetize for the first 6 months: Don’t monetize your blog with ad sense scripts and other things. One or two banners are fine, but don’t really bother with monetization for the first 6 months at least; even better if you can stretch for as far as one year. You do this because you don’t want to make your readers think that you are in this for the money (even if you are).  Also, ad sense and affiliate marketing ads tend to take your readers away from your blog even before they begin to show you some love. You want them to stay, read and begin to trust you.

Write content first and populate before publishing: One of the other mistakes most bloggers do is to write on the fly or just before the designated date of publishing. This happens because that’s how you got started in the first place – set the blog up, write content regularly. If you write content this way, you could face a lot of pressure trying to publish regularly. The clever thing is to buy yourself some time by creating ‘buffer content’ – write a lot of posts worth 2-3 months of posting and use the auto-schedule feature to post them on the designated days of the month. This gives you a lot of time to think about future posts and publish regularly.

‘Targeted’ traffic is everything: It’s been said often that traffic is the key to your success online. However, it isn’t any traffic that will work. For blogging elements, as an example, the blog is for rookies and veterans of blogging who would like to know the basics of blogging and also new insights, tips and techniques on blogging. Would people looking for gardening tips be a part of meaningful traffic for us? No, they don’t. Focus on generating targeted traffic which makes sense of the time and effort you expend.

Have you used any of these secrets before? What worked for you?

There are posts on blogging and there are some really good posts on blogging. I happened to be reading a lot last weekend and I came across a post on Problogger – this is one blog you should read, if you haven’t yet done it – that made me stop and think about blogging as a business model, yet again. This is something I have always been thinking about and now David Risley drives the nail into my forehead. Soon after reading the post, I could help but think about some really valuable lessons those posts have to teach us:

Dude, where the hell is the product?

The one thing the post advocates: Have a real product you could sell, throw a blog for effect, value and marketing returns. Point made case closed. It is the product makes who make the most money and it is one model that has always been on the move. If you are running blogs as mini-newspapers on mini-subjects, you can only go so far – - a refreshing insight on Internet business. Isn’t it? Could you make a living on ads- here and there?

A Bad business model is bad, no matter which medium you choose

The newspapers and magazines are going to be out of business what with all that paper, gloss, expensive printing systems, journalists, systems, processes and licenses. David opines that the newspapers are going to be out of business soon and I second his opinion. If you are blogging and focusing on just providing information, aren’t you doing the same thing the newspapers are doing but on a much reduced scale?

The Blogging Myth Reinforced

If you were the owner of Problogger or Copy Blogger, you would make money and if you aren’t in the top 100 listings of Technorati, you just have two choices. First, you do all you can to get there or you quit and create an actual product that you could sell. The only way a blogger can make money by making the “blog” itself as the product is to follow the first choice. An easier and much more rewarding way to make money is to create a product and sell it through your blog by invoking trust of your readers by providing valuable content.

A majority of the posts on blogging elements have always been about the act of creation; it’s always been positive and it is mostly about building a blog along with a lot of other things – like streams of income, network, readership, assets in the form of lists and content, etc. What if you, like me, have tons of blogs that you wanted to start, purchased a few domain names and installed wordpress on them. Even worse, what if you got started on a few niches but couldn’t continue for some reason or the other?

You will dump those blogs, of course. However, you can do that in style as follows:

Set-it up for auto-blogging for content, automate the blog and let it go: I know I have been against auto-blogging for a long time now and I still don’t change my stance on it. However, if you are going to dump the blog anyway, perhaps this might be the only time when auto-blogging might make sense. Pick up some feeds on the same niche the blog is on, set-up auto-blogging using some plug-ins available. After you set-up the frequency for feed imports, your blog is on its own. You might also want to automate the traffic generation part for the blog by using any of the many means available. Usually when we speak of automated traffic generation, PPC comes to the mind. But I will not suggest PPC for your blog promotion automation for obvious reasons – you don’t spend money on a sinking ship.

Sell it: This one was obvious, wasn’t it? But then you won’t be able to sell it just like that. You got to make it sale-worthy. Your blog must be reasonably pleasant looking, it must have good content, it must have steady traffic coming in or perhaps even a free ebook/report. It will increase in value if you already have a list of subscribers. You do all that and then find the right place to sell it.

Allow others to run it while you claim a stake: Why should it be only companies getting sold or being divided into a million stocks or shares that can be stacked against profits to be claimed later? You can do it with blogs too. There are plenty of people looking for a lead on an online business and they don’t want to go through the trouble of picking up a niche, setting up a blog and running for a full 3 empty, cash-strapped years. Everyone wants to cut the learning curve and that’s why I think it’s a great idea to have someone post on your blog, run it, promote it and you give away 80% of whatever comes in the form of revenue to the buyer while you keep 20%.

What do you think about the ideas above? Do you have a way to dump a blog that worked for you? Do let me know.

I remember someone in the field of advertising say this about a good advertisement : ” One idea, one single idea, is the soul of a good advertisement”. That got me thinking — can a blog have a soul of its own? The answer is, I am sure you guessed it, is a resounding yes.

Can you guess what is the soul of a good blog? The answer: You.

You are everything for your blog. No matter how you choose to run your blog — whether you produce the content yourself or whether you outsource the writing part — you are still the soul of your blog. Your blog reflects your life, your personality, your idosyncracies, your temperment, your style, your words and your soul.

You could pick a niche and chances are that your blog must have been set-up completely and solely to earn money and nothing else. As long as you did the work behind it all and it isn’t some random automatic aggregation software picking up someone else’s content, the blog is all YOU in digital media.

So what does that do to you and blogging in general?

That’s what makes a blog special, strong and unique; it is this soul that differentiates a blog from a corporate static site. The soul of your blog is the reason why your readers will love you and will continue to frequent your blog. They subscribe to you, link to you, share your content, bookmark your blog, talk about what you talk about, comment back, argue, disagree, put up a fight or just read and enjoy.

They do all that and much more.

The soul of your blog is the reason why your blog is so special. When you steal content, it isn’t your soul on your blog; when you use automated aggregators to pump content into your blog, it isn’t your soul.

A blog without a soul isn’t read. Period.

What do you think? Does your blog have a soul

Who says a blog should be just a blog? It could be anything, don’t you think? I was thinking about he seemingly endless possibilities blogs can have, but mostly stemming from the fact that a blog first and foremost a publishing platform. Why do we we stick to “I-have-a-niche-I-will-now-blog” stereotype? Here are some more ideas to take it to the  next level:

1. A membership site: One of the most obvious, highly profitable ways to turn your blog around is to turn it into a membership site. There are plenty of plugins available to help you do this. You may also use amember.com if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty. The point is that when you have enough readership and your niche is well-targeted, your blog has all the makings for a full-blown memberhsip site. It also brings about a recurring stream of income. But let no one fol you, it takes a lot of effort to keep a membership site up and profitable.

2. Blog + forum: While a membership site might cost money and effort to keep it going, there is another way to get your blog to be more interactive  and sticky: install a forum script on your blog. When you go for a self-hosting wordpress blog, you wil have an option of installing a free, open source script onto your blog in a moment. The key  is to have a niche that calls for community involvement, has a burning need an your blog should have enough readership to keep your forum humming.

3. A magazine: I am of the belief that any blog — no matter how big or small –  is much like a magazine, except that we don’t run it that way. Now, when I say that your blog can become a magazine in itself, it calls for various things here. You got to have an editor, a writer or a team of writers, a way to market your magazine and needless to say, incredible, sticky, hell-I-want-to-read-this-again kind of content.

Have you any more ideas? What else can a blog be? Can a blog be made it a book? Can a book be made into a blog? Shoot your ideas people.