Craig GarciaBlogging is so much fun and therapeutic at the same time! It is a way for the author to express emotions, feelings and insight as to what the author is thinking. I want to encourage all you bloggers out there to stay focused when blogging. I’ve seen many bloggers who write about what they are feeling or what they are thinking about for that day and the theme of their blog is not congruent. My first tip when blogging is to have the end in mind. Meaning what is your goal of the blog? Who do you want to attract to your blog? Then ultimately, who do you want to do business with?

The reason this is important is because you need to blog to a niche target market. A specific group or groups of people are who you want to attract to your blog. Why? These are the people that you will ultimately do business with. That’s why you can’t blog about just anything. You can’t blog successfully when you are writing about anything that comes to mind for that day! So pick a theme for your blog. Is it going to be helpful tips, is your blog the authority on a specific topic, is your blog inspiration, helpful stories, pick me ups and just stories that you get out there that you think will help other readers through your shared experiences. All of the above and many other themes are all correct and there is not one that is better than the other as they will all attract a specific target market to your blog.

Having the end in mind for your blog will help you direct your theme in a specific direction. Even if you don’t have a product or service to sell, your blog should still have a theme and be targeted to a specific group of people. You never know where this blog will lead. You may find a product or service to recommend to your blog followers or who knows; maybe your blog is turned into a book. Being a blogger, means that you are now an author too!

Now that we have a theme and an end in mind, how do we attract the right readers to our blog? The first thing you can do is to create good titles for your blog. For example if you are blogging about weight loss, a good title might be how to lose weight fast and easy or Weight Loss made easy or 7 tips for fast weight loss. These are just a few examples, but these tips work for all businesses, you just have to be creative when writing your titles. I always recommend writing a title with key words. So think of the key words for your specific target market and then create a title based on those top 30 key words. If we look at the example above, “how to lose weight fast and easy” if you go to  https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, you will find out that lose weight fast is searched 40 to 50 thousand times per month and how to lose weight fast is searched over 100,000 times every month! Now wouldn’t you like to have some of that traffic coming to your website? Why not? It’s free! It doesn’t cost you a single cent write this way. You can still stay true to your blog and your character as an author, while being smart about it too! It is okay to be successful, so go for it!

How to make friends in the blogging community and how to drive traffic to your blog site? The first thing you should do is search for other successful bloggers with a following that have a similar blog theme as yours and make comments on their blog anytime they write a new blog post. Be sure to write nice things about them, their work, how their blog affected or touched you in a certain manner. Compliment them on their work. Be polite. Proper blog etiquette for bloggers who receive comments on their blog is to return the favor and go to your blog and comment on your blog too! This will then get them looking at your blog and the more they visit your blog, the better, right? The easiest way to stay on top of new blog posts is to subscribe to their RSS feed, which gives you constant updates when they have a new post. Don’t be afraid of competition, rather, embrace others work and befriend them. Much more will come out of a friendship than if you bypassed that person because you were afraid of the competition. I have made friends with many people in the industry and they have brought traffic to my site, had me on as guest speaker or guest blogger. We’ve traded links and have quoted each other’s work and used back links to each other’s blog, driving a continuous influx of traffic to each other’s blog. If you provide valuable content, people will respect you for your work and you will attract quality people to you!

Blogging works to drive traffic when used properly. Many little tasks repeated over and over form layers and layers of content out there and the more blogs you put out there with quality content, the more people will read and follow you. The search engines love new content, so write well, stay within your theme, make friends with other bloggers who already have a following and share each other’s work and knowledge and great things will start to happen for you. Blogging is also a way for people to understand who you are; what your passion is and you can showcase your work through your blog. A good blog shows intelligence and people read quality literature! So, always put out your best work! Always!