How to be a successful blogger

This is the conclusion to a series of articles in which I shared with you my knowledge of how and why Technology Bloggers has been so successful, so fast. Learn more about this series by reading our Technology Bloggers success article.

So there we have it, the first Technology Bloggers series has been brought to a close.

For the last six weeks, every Monday I have released an article as part of a series, explaining how and why Technology Bloggers has become such a successful blog in such a short space of time. This is the last article in that series.

So what have we learned over the series?Learning is a crucual part of bloggingFirst off we learned the importance of a reputation in blogging. If you have a positive one already, great, if you don’t have one, you need to start to build one to become known on the blogosphere, and to run a successful blog. A reputation can give you authority and respect in your niche.

Second we learned how promotion is a key factor in blogging, and how you need good promotion from the start to have sustainable success. Utilise social media and your online connections. Also, make sure you comment on friends blogs and if you have a blog or website already, plug your new site there too!

Then we learned about how respect is a key part of blogging. To conclude an entire article in just one sentence: basically, if you respect your readers, they will respect you, hence why we are a dofollow technology blog 🙂

The fourth in the series taught us why competition in blogging is important. Competition in blogging helps you to gain readers, especially commenting readers. Competitions contests themselves can also attract many people to your blog, from others on the net.

In the penultimate article in the series (excluding this article), we were shown why it is very important to give your readers lots of ways to subscribe to your blog. Email Subscriptions, Facebook and Twitter are what we use, although no-doubt that list will change in the future 🙂

The final article in the series taught us to follow the experts in blogging to succeed. You can either learn what works and what doesn’t work for yourself, – the hard way – or you can look at the experts, and see what works for them. Learning form your own experience is good, learning from others is more productive and wise.


The end of this series has got me buzzing to write another, but what about? Is there anything technology, blogging or science or related that you would like me to either teach you or research for you?

Any suggestions? Throw them at me below 🙂

Thanks for following the series and all also thanks for all the comments along the way. I hope you have learned something useful, which you can hopefully apply to yourself and your site 🙂

Learn from the best for success in blogging

This is the sixth in a series of articles in which I hope to share with you my knowledge of how and why Technology Bloggers has been so successful, so fast. Learn more about this series by reading our Technology Bloggers success article.

Ever heard the phrase:

Learn from your mistakes, but if possible, learn from others mistakes.

Well, this can also apply the other way around.

Learn from your triumphs/successes, but if possible, learn from others triumphs/successes.

If you learn what works from others, you can be successful much faster, as you can avoid all those newbie blogger blunders. What lovely alliteration 😉

Homer Simpson slapping his hand to his forehead, whilst shouting 'D'oh!'

Learn from your mistakes, or better still, learn from others mistakes

So who did I learn from? Many great bloggers that I have been following for some time, as well as myself. I had run three blogs (and still run two of them) before I started Technology Bloggers, and I had learn a lot about what works and what doesn’t in my time.

For example, my ‘recent commenters’ widget on my philosophy blog showed me how important competition is. A lack of comments on my social blog and now retired technology blog taught me that not giving readers the ability to comment was probably a bad idea. My comment enabled, WordPress powered philosophy blog affirmed this.

But as I mentioned earlier, most of my leaned ‘success strategies’ are from other bloggers. Justin (from Dragon Blogger) taught me how it was important to create a comment policy. Justin and Ari, (from AriHerzog.com) taught me that GASP (Growmap Anti-Spambot Plugin) is one of the best anti-spam plugins available.

Chadrack (from Web Income Journal) runs a monthly top commenter contest using a ‘Top Commenters’ widget, this showed me that it would be wise to add a ‘Top Commenters’ widget to Technology Bloggers to thank commenters and encourage competition. Chadrack and Diana (from Elephants Eye) showed me the importance of reading your commenters responses and replying to them if you feel their comment needs a reply.


Lillie (from Lillie Amman’s Blog) compiles a list each month, thanking her readers for their comments, I used a similar method to thank our readers in my the importance of comments post.

One of the most important lessons I learned is that you need to be kind to your readers and writers. For that reason, Technology Bloggers is a dofollow blog. We have dofollow comemnts and use KeywordLuv luv to help you get the most out of your commenting experience. We also use dofollow CommentLuv 🙂

A whole host of great blogs, as well as past experience has shown me that it would be wise and fair to be a 100% dofollow blog.

You are not on your own out there, their are other bloggers too. Find the successful ones, learn why they are successful, and then use this to make yourself successful.

Over and out!

Help your readers follow your blog

This is the fifth in a series of articles in which I hope to share with you my knowledge of how and why Technology Bloggers has been so successful, so fast. Learn more about this series by reading our Technology Bloggers success article.

As many of you know I used to run a tech blog of my own – entitled Christopher Roberts Technology Blog. Now on that blog I made a key error that many bloggers still make today. I didn’t make it easy for people to ‘subscribe’ to my content.

If you have a great blog, but no really easy ways for people to subscribe, the chases are that you won’t be able to retain visitors for very long. If you have a blog with good, (not great, but good) content, but you give readers loads of ways and incentives to subscribe, then you are much more likely to get loyal readers.

So if you have good content you could have more visitors than someone with great content, simply because you make it easy for people to keep up to date with your content.

With Technology Bloggers I hope I have created a blog with great content from a load of fantastic authors, as well as multiple ways to receive that content, making it really easy to subscribe.

So how can you ‘help’ your readers to follow your blog? Everyone is different, so I find there is no ‘one way fits all’, but there are a few ways that I think cover them all.

FeedBurner

If you use FeedBurner, FeedBlitz or some other feed subscriber, you can instantly give readers tens of ways to follow your content. Check out our feed or look at the image below to see just how many ways FeedBurner lets users subscribe to your feed.

Ways to subscribe using FeedBurner

Ways in which you can subscribe to Technology Bloggers via our (FeedBurner) RSS feed

Furthermore, if you use FeedBurner, you can get your feed to link into your Twitter account. This means that every new article you publish can appear in your twitter stream just seconds after publication. This means that all those people who prefer to receive updates via social media, can do so via Twitter.

Another great feature about FeedBurner is that it lets you give readers the option to subscribe via email. On the sidebar of every page of our blog you can input your email and get updates by email. Interested in trying it out?

You can use Facebook too

Facebook also gives you the option to import a feed as notes which can appear as a status update. Import your RSS feed to Facebook page and you create yet another way for people to follow your blog and read your content. All you need to is ‘like’ Technology Bloggers and you can get our feed! The one thing I would say about Facebook is that its updates aren’t nearly as frequent as Twitters are!

Click ‘Like’ below to see what I mean.

So now you know that you need to make it easy for people to follow your blog, do you have any amendments to make to your feed or social profiles?

Useful reference: How to add an email subscription form to your blog.