Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
Every day thousands of new websites and blogs pop up on the Internet. However well over 90% of them never achieve anything and end up being parked or expired. So if you’d like to start an extremely successful blog that will be around in another 5-10+ years, you need to read this. When I first got started with online marketing, I came across blogging within days.
I got bombarded with the “make money blogging” crap that’s been floating around the web for the last decade. Back then I was struggling to build my Network Marketing business and I didn’t really know what I was doing. I figured I could use online marketing to generate leads to build my business. At the time it seemed like an intelligent idea.
BUT – the buying of get rich quick crap was inevitable. I ended up spending several hundred dollars on $20-50 courses about things like blogging and affiliate marketing. I was suckered into the “online guru’s circle of suckers” where I remained for quite some time. The point being, I wasted A LOT of money before I really learnt how to market online and build successful blogs. After a while I started my first blog and gave up on it within 3 months. Two years later… I’ve figured it out and know exactly how to build a ridiculously successful website or blog. Let’s get started:
Choose Your Niche Carefully And Sort Out Your Vision
Hopefully you already know exactly what niche you’re in for the long run. Where your business is heading and what you want to use your blog for. Before you do anything else, you need to sort out your vision. It shocks me how many people start blogs with no idea of what they’re going to do with them. Most people just say well you know… “I’m going to get some followers and some traffic, then make money somehow”. That’s not good enough; you need to figure out exactly how you’re going to monetize your blog.
Setup Fundamentals
Once you’ve figured out what your niche is and exactly how you’re going to monetize your blog, you can move onto the fundamentals. The fundamentals being buying your domain, installing WordPress and finding keywords. First of all you need a domain name. Just think of a cool domain name that suits what you’re going to do with your blog. You DO NOT have to have a keyword in your domain name, just make it niche generic. Once you’ve bought it you need to install WordPress. Once you’ve installed WordPress, you need to install a theme.
There are hundreds of great blog themes to choose from, you just have to look around until you find something nice. I 100% recommend investing in a paid blog theme even to begin with. You can find a cheap blog theme for around $20-$50. Next you need to configure everything. WordPress plugins, permalink settings and more. All the basic WordPress settings. Your homepage should be your blog page, not a static page.
Once you’ve sorted everything out and are happy with the basic look of your blog, find keywords. You need to establish a group of 4-12 keywords for your home page. Keywords are terms (phrases or words) people are searching on search engines like Google. In the Network Marketing niche my blog ranks for terms like “MLM Training, MLM Business and others”. Search engines are a major source of traffic. So you need to target extremely difficult keywords for your blog’s home page.
The idea is to go crazy with your blog’s homepage as you can rank for the keywords in months or even years down the line. Meanwhile be posting regular blog content that ranks for lots of easy keywords. So find, analyze and select between 4-12 keywords you can target with your blog’s home page.
You can find them from the Google Keyword Tool and analyze them with a free tool like Traffic Travis. But that’s something you need to look into. Once you’ve established your group of home page keywords you need to incorporate them all into your blogs title and description. You can do this by using the All In One SEO plugin. (Search for IT)
Basically you need to fit all of your keywords into your blog’s title and description. For example you might want to target: ways to make money online, make money online, ways to make money, how to make money online, how to make money and make money. The title and description could be:
- Title: Easy Ways To Make Money Online | Learn How To Make Money Online
- Description: Want to learn easy ways to make money online? Well checkout our blog and learn how to make money online today.
Make sense right? Once you’ve found your home page keywords and incorporated them into your title and description, save. What you’ve just done is bought a domain name, installed WordPress, a theme, plugins and configured your home page’s SEO details. That’s it for part one.
>>> Click Here For Part Two<<<
Comments
Elena Martinez, November 28, 2011, 10:15
I really appreciate this post, David. Your insights into blogging are invaluable. I’ve been struggling to grow my blog, and your step-by-step guide is exactly what I needed. Keep up the great work!
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Reading this changes nothing. Doing it with people who show up changes everything. That is the whole difference between the people who transform and the people who keep starting over.
Start free →Michael Chen, November 28, 2011, 12:30
Thank you for this comprehensive guide! I learned a lot about the importance of choosing a niche and setting up fundamentals. I’ve always been confused about keywords, but your explanation made it clear. Looking forward to part two!
Sophie Becker, November 28, 2011, 14:45
Great post, David! I have a question about finding keywords for my blog. Do you recommend using any specific tools besides the Google Keyword Tool and Traffic Travis? Any additional tips would be greatly appreciated!
Liam O’Connor, November 28, 2011, 16:00
While I found your post informative, I think it would be more helpful if you included some case studies or examples of successful blogs. This would give readers a clearer idea of how to apply your advice. Just a suggestion!
Natalie Gomez, November 28, 2011, 18:15
Hi David, it’s been a while! How have you been? I loved this post; it reminded me of our old discussions about blogging. Let’s catch up soon over coffee. Keep inspiring us with your great content!
Oliver Adams, November 28, 2011, 20:30
This post hit home for me. I’ve been struggling with the same issues you mentioned. I started a blog two years ago and gave up after a few months. Reading your experiences gives me hope to try again. Thank you for sharing!
Rachel Kim, November 28, 2011, 22:45
David, your advice on blog setup fundamentals is spot on! I recently came across a tool called Yoast SEO, which has been incredibly helpful in optimizing my blog posts. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to improve their SEO strategies.
Jake Muller, November 29, 2011, 01:00
I find it hard to believe that just setting up a blog with the right keywords can make such a big difference. Do you have any proof or case studies that show the effectiveness of your methods? I’d love to see some real-world results.
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How do you pick between four and twelve home page keywords without just diluting your ranking for all of them?
Ivy, that’s the same trap as a diner menu trying to be everything to everyone. We had a menu once with four pages of options and it took me a full year of watching people stare blankly at it to realise we needed six dishes done extremely well, not sixty done adequately. I’d guess a blog homepage works the same – pick the two or three keywords that actually describe what you do, and let category pages or later posts pick up the rest instead of cramming twelve into one title and description.
The post opens by saying over ninety percent of blogs never achieve anything, then spends the rest of the article describing exactly the steps that put you in the other ten percent, as though following them guarantees the outcome. Worth separating rare from impossible here: doing the domain, WordPress, keyword steps correctly moves you from a near-certain failure pool into a smaller pool where success is possible, not one where it’s likely. That distinction matters for what you should expect in year one.
Hector’s median-case point is basically survivorship bias applied to a how-to guide, and it’s worth naming as such – the post reads like it was reverse-engineered from the outcomes of blogs that worked, then presented as a forward-looking recipe for anyone starting from zero. This is a well-documented problem in the small-business survival literature: the steps common to the survivors are rarely sufficient on their own, because the failures in the same dataset usually did most of the same steps too, sometimes more carefully. What tends to separate the two groups in the actual research is thinner and messier than ‘pick a niche, install WordPress, find your keywords’ – timing, distribution luck, and persistence past the point most people quit all show up more than any setup step does.
Philip’s survivorship point maps cleanly to a process model: inputs, niche, domain, keywords, theme, go through a throughput stage, execution quality, consistency, market timing, before you get an output, successful blog or not. The post documents inputs in detail and almost entirely skips throughput, which is where Hector’s median case actually gets decided. Two blogs with identical inputs can diverge completely based on throughput alone. A checklist of inputs was never going to predict which one survives.
Ninety percent fail, and the post’s cure is checklist items ninety percent of them also did.
Roy’s not wrong. I did every step in this post almost to the letter when I started – domain, WordPress, theme, keyword list – and still spent four months getting almost no traffic before anything moved. What actually changed things wasn’t a step from this list, it was switching from targeting broad homepage keywords to answering specific questions in individual posts. The setup checklist got me a working blog. It didn’t get me readers.
Roy’s line is the whole post in twelve words. I did the setup checklist over two exhausted weekends and I’m still waiting for the part where it starts working.