subject: The 4 Essential Stages To Creating Successful Blogs [print this page] The 4 Essential Stages To Creating Successful Blogs
The key to creating successful blogs is to fully understand the four distinct stages involved in developing them. By being aware of these four stages you can maximise profits from your blog by knowing what to expect and what to do at each stage.The four essential stages involved are getting the blog up and running, generating traffic, becoming established and long term maintenance. By paying attention to each of these stages, you will ensure the continued success of your blog as a means of establishing your market presence, building your list and generating income. 1. Getting Started. In this first stage, you set up your blog site, using a free facility, like Blogger, or my recommendation, a WordPress site. Using Wordpress, you can find a template that suits your blog and add all the plugins and SEO information that you need, to optimise it.Then you start creating content good quality information specifically aimed at your target market. You blog, blog, blog and publish three posts a week to begin getting your site noticed and start getting visitors.At this stage, it's all too easy to get diverted on to how to get income from your site. However, this detracts from the task of building a top quality site where visitors really enjoy reading your posts. So, for now, you must concentrate on consistently adding good quality, relevant content.2. Generating Increased Traffic. Once your blog becomes established, with regular content being posted, you will naturally see an increase in the number of visitors. You can tell that you've reached this second stage when people start leaving comments and, you begin to get visitors via search engines indexing your content.At this stage, your focus needs to be on traffic growth. Right now, this is still more important than income growth and understanding this is always a key factor to creating successful blogs. The prime way to grow traffic to your site is by continuing to add good content. In addition, you'll be looking to get back links to your site. These back links can dramatically improve your site ratings with the search engines, as well as increasing direct visitor traffic.A simple way to get back links is by joining relevant forums and leaving comments with a link back to your site. Although this is an easy way to get back links, they will probably not be very highly ranked.A better way to get higher quality links is by producing articles for publication on other websites and blogs in return for the opportunity to include a link to your site. Consistently generating increased traffic can be a lengthy process, but it is always a crucial part of creating successful blogs.3. Becoming Established. In this third stage, you can expect your online business to keep growing. However, although providing good quality content for your blog is still paramount, it will not now require the same level of effort and you can now turn your attention to creating more income.Now that you have a good stream of traffic and a wide range of high quality posts, you can develop your blog's income through ad placements, endorsements, affiliate sales and a range of other income producing methods.It is in stage three that you will really start to enjoy the financial fruits of all your previous efforts and where you will appreciate the long-term benefits of firmly establishing your content and traffic rather than focusing on short-term income generation.4. Long Term Maintenance. In this last stage your blog will be well established, attracting lots of traffic and generating a healthy income. It will require a lot less effort to maintain your blog success than the previous stages, and can be virtually self generating. However, to maximise the rewards from all your previous work it's essential to stay focused on your blog, continuing regular posting of quality content and always looking out for new ways of increasing traffic and sales income.So, if you want to have a long term income from creating successful blogs, take note of these four essential stages and remember that the majority of the work you put in to stages one and two is building the foundations for your future success in the income generating stages three and four.
