1. Why do you want to blog?
   I started blogging as an extension to my reflection routine. I work as a manager and used to reflect each Friday. Now I blog a lot and it has become my #1 hobby. If you want to blog for money, you might have a rough time ahead of you. Reasons to blog should be: Passion for writing, online branding, great knowledge on some topic, reflection, writing for yourself.
2. What do you want to blog about?
   If you are serious about blogging find a topic and stick to it. Random topics of suggestions: wine, food, fashion, motor, leadership, personal development, blogging, writing, book reviews, movie reviews, travel, boats, local politics, news, flowers, hobbies.
3. Are you good enough?
   Yes you are! There is no requirement to blog, but your audience might be few is the quality is low. Anybody can blog, even my mom if she wanted to. If you are very good at something you might end up building a lot of followers. Everybody can blog!
4. What platform to use?
   I have tested a lot of different blogs and if you trust me you will start with a wordpress blog. If you want to blog for free and not risk money you could start with blogger.com or wordpress.com, no need of a hosting plan or domain name. But as you grow you should consider creating your own domain. I started with http://properpants.blogspot.com/ and after about a year I moved to http://www.nevermindthemanager.com/ To move from one to the other is not difficult.

So I hope that you are willing to try blogging. It is fun it is cool and you will end up meeting great people from all over the world. I have made a lot of online friends where about ten have become as close as online friends can get. I have met fortune 500 leaders, authors, fellow bloggers and some great people blogging. I also want to give you some starting tips.

1. Write 10-15 blog posts before you start
   Write as many blog posts as you can, at least 10-15. Publish 3-4 of them at once when you start, and automate the next 11-12 posts with one week between. For instance a weekly update on Tuesday. Now you got more than two months to write some more and your blog will keep updating on a regular basis.
2. Keep your post short
   Online reading is straining on your eyes. So keep your blogs short. Anything between 200-1000 words will do.
3. Get to know the term “pillar posts”
   These are the best stuff you can deliver. Try to make a great post at a rate about every 3-4 post. You can chit chat in between if you feel like it, or have shorter posts. A pillar post should be about 1000-1200 words. (Not a rule of course)
4. Picture your reader
   Imagine your core reader and write directly to him/her. Imagine your audience, what are they looking for? This will help to keep you on track.

So get started blogging, you can do it. I could and I am just a plain ordinary joe from Norway with good but not great English grammar and spelling. And do read how to blog blogs as you will get a lot of knowledge about your new hobby. This equals subscribing to my blog about blogging.

Did you know that I can set up and run a full running professional blog for you? All you need to do is figure out a domain name, your topic and leave the rest to me, while you write on your initial 15 blog posts. I will adjust design to your topic and I will set up all the technical mumbo jumbo. Please do contact me if you are interested. I would love to help you. And yeah… do check out how I optimized one of my own blog posts to get great results.

Re-writing and correcting misspelling

Norwegian is my native language, so writing in English can be a challenge. I got help from a good friend to proof read this article and correct the language in it. I made use of H2 header tags, I used the micromanagement word in one of the headings. I made sure to use it in the title, description and keyword meta tags. I used it also two more times in the text.  The article is better and it is also more optimized for search engines.

The project and the article
I am refering to the “Dealing with Micromanagement” article at Never Mind the Manager - I wrote “What is Bounce Rate?” earlier as a part of this project. My project is to reduce the bounce rate at Never Mind the Manager within the next 10 blog posts. (8 to go as this is written)

What is the result so far?

First thing first my blog post jumped from page 4 to the top of page 2 when performing a google search. But there is more good news when considering readers behavior on my site:

I have compared two weeks before and after the change:

People stay on this page for an average of 3 minutes and 21 seconds now, to 1 minute 52 seconds before, this indicates that they probably read it all now.

Considering this is an “old” blog post growing in popularity is a good sign. The changes applied are making a difference, not a huge difference but over time it will make an impact on overall visitors to my blog. I was hoping that it would reduce bounce rate a bit more, and are a bit disappointed in that particular result. But the page has been stumbled and this attracts a lot of visitors that just pass thru. I believe in order to reduce bounce rate further, I probably need to write a follow up, part two kind of blog post.

My conclusion for today

The most interesting findings in this experiment is Average Time on Page that increased by 79,56 % – this means that my visitors is actually reading the article. It underlines the importance of good language. I know that good flawless language is necessary to compete with the big guys, in my defense English is my second language, but if you could afford a proof reader or if you have a great friend that will for free, it is worth it.

Did you miss out?
I am running a project to optimize my other blog. You can read about it here: What is Bounce Rate?
Getting your blog visitors to stay at your blog is an important success factor: Read Another Visitor, Stay a While – Staaaaay Forever for more great blogging advice. I almost forgot: Remember to subscribe to my blog as well
 

Advice 1: Short and Interesting Ingress

Tell your reader what you want to accomplish. Do start with the conclusion as most readers online won’t read a lot of text to find what they are looking for. If you save the conclusion until the end you will lose readers on the way. If your conclusion is interesting, they will read the rest to get the supporting arguments.

Advice 2: Keep your Paragraphs Short

Reading long bunches of text online is a pain for the reader. Most online readers scroll down to see how long your article is. If your text is long with long paragraphs people will skip to something else. Remember a lot of people enter your site from search engines; this gives them the choice between many similar articles.

Advice 3: Perfect Language

This is my “downfall” as English is my second language. I know my English is far from perfect, but I try my very best to supply you with well written articles. If you write in your own language, you should strive to keep your language flawless.

Advice 4: Write a List

Not all blog post should be a list, today I am writing a list, sometimes I write more article like. This is an example of another blog post using a list. Here is one not using a list.  You will notice that the paragraphs are still short.

Advice 5: Trust your Skills

Trust your own knowledge on whatever topic you are writing about. Blogging is not scientific articles and you do not need to back up your knowledge with references. Write what you know and if people disagree they will comment. But if you know how to write scientific articles you could do so as well. But do not spend a lot of time validating your knowledge. I usually write my blog posts within 20-30 minutes.

Advice 6: Mix your Content

There is a term called pillar articles. These are the articles that make you proud. These should be about every third or fourth article that you publish. Fill the others with lists like this one, short blog posts and smaller articles. A normal blog post could be about 500-700 words. A pillar blog post should be longer than 1000-1200 words.

Advice 7: Try to Keep your Reader on your Blog

An indicator of the blog success is something called a bounce rate. You can read more about it here. http://hostbeetle.com/2010/07/10/what-is-bounce-rate/. Bounce rate is measuring how many just hit your blog and leave without moving to other pages on your blog. Your goal is to attract the attention to other articles. I could do that by recommending you to read my post about how to grow the number of twitter followers. (It is by far the most popular post on this blog)

Advice 8: Use a Picture

A picture is a must to any blog post. I always include pictures in my blog posts. Today I used an image of this blog. Be creative.

Advice 9: Write a Summary at the end

You concluded in the ingress, at the end you should have a summary. In this post you learned how to write a good blog post. This post is about 600-700 words, just long enough for you to read fast. I hoped you enjoyed my list and that it is useful. If this is inspiring you to write a blog post yourself, feel free to comment and share your link.

Do you like my blog?
You could follow my blog by subscribing to my blog - There is different ways to follow my blog so check it out.

I just need to include the opening from the game here today, yes this game stole many hours from my childhood. Keep reading below the movie for hot tips!

But you need your visitors to stay, thus meaning that you want them to find your content good enough to keep reading. You need to get them to hang around for a while, maybe comment a bit, and buy your services or you might just want to see that your visitors enjoy your content enough to continue reading. There might be several reasons you want your readers to stay. No matter what your reasons are visitors who linger around is a healthy sign for your blog.

I recently wrote about Bounce Rate here. Read it and follow my blog to see how my project is doing.

Tip 1: The End Teaser

The teaser at the end is actually the best tip of today. I have included an ending about what to do next on several posts on my leadership blog. I will have a teaser at the end of this blog as well. I will even call it a teaser, but be more creative; “what to do next!” “Other fun stuff to do at my blog” and so on.

Tip 2: Use Google Analytics

In Google Analytics you can see your most frequent landing pages, and the bounce rate for each of them. You might want to tweak these pages, especially those with high bounce rate, as it might give great return on your time spent. If you do not have a end teaser, insert one, proof read and even update.

Tip 3: Make a how to subscribe to my blog page.

Instead of sending your traffic instantly to feedburner, twitter or facebook, create a subscribe page like this and display all your options for your reader in one page. This gives your readers a chance to see all the options and select the one best fit.

Teaser
Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoy my blog. There is more to do, and you should read the post about bounce rate as I am implementing these tactics to my leadership blog as we speak. My goal is to reduce bounce rate from 75 % to less than 60 % within the next 10 blog posts. So far I have managed to reduce it to 70,73 % in just three days. If you like my blog please do subscribe to my blog or continue reading other blog tips. 

How can you grow your followers by getting rid of your followings?
I have been following a lot of interesting people at @frodeheimen and @hostbeetle. I was following twice as many as I had followers. I decided to stop listening to you today unless you are listening to me so I removed all the people I am following, who aren’t following me back. And to be a good friend I followed all those who follow me.

When you remove weed, sprouts grow up
I had 777 followers before my cleansing, I was following 1750 people. As I was removing those that don’t follow me back, I noticed that a lot of them probably have a warning when people unfollow you on twitter, because I had 814 followers when I was finished. I got 37 new followers just by cleaning them out and they keep coming back as I am writing this. Those that now are deciding to follow you are the sprouts you should cherish.

But how can you do this in Twitter you ask?
You can’t, you need to use a tool and I want to recommend http://www.buzzom.com/ a great tool to administer you followers and those that you follow. You can unfollow those that don’t follow you back if you like. I would recommend it. You can “lock” those you follow that you want to keep following.

I have tested different tools and some remove people you actually are following Buzzom.com is doing the job good and it did not mess up. Two thumbs up.

@frodeheimen got 37 new followers
@hostbeetle got about 50 new followers

And I am now following everybody that follows me, and there’s the key to good communication, both need to listen to each other.

Good luck tweeting.

Are you finished reading?
You could always read about how to succeed as a blogger, if you are wondering what to do next. You could also check out the front page of this blog for more articles about blogging.

 Join the love! If you like my blog you could subscribe to keep up to date.
Subscribe by Email
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Or if you just want to contact me for some other reason, fill out this form.

But whatever you do! Do not leave my blog, as that looks bad for my bounce rate!

1. Most of the how to succeed guides are crap. They are written by either people, who have been at the right place at the right time, and they quite do not know how they became a success, or they are written by people that found a way that worked for them. Neither of the guides will be an automatic success for your blog.

2. Pay for traffic will give you traffic. StumbleUpon is great for that: http://www.stumbleupon.com/ I tried it out. For $50 I got 1000 visitors within a few days. Great. But the bounce rate was almost 100 %, meaning everybody watched my site for a few seconds at most. Meaning they did not manage to read anything. The average visitor pr day before the campaign was 45, after the campaign it was 47. I do not think that this is the result of the campaign, rather than just the natural evolution of my blog. You could be in luck with such a stunt, and it is not all bad. If you follow my blog you will find out why, in the future.

3. Comment on other blogs is one of the few tips that make some sense. This will drive traffic back to your blog. Wrong! This will drive some rare but good traffic back to your blog, but it won’t create heaps of visitors. I have commented on high traffic sites, only to get a few visitors in return. But it is still important to do so, because of a ton of other reasons besides traffic.

4. Get listed in search engines. Unless you are a search engine wiz you won’t succeed with this. I am a search engine wiz, and know all the tricks, so do a lot of my competition, and I find it hard to get noticed in search engines. But by all means you should optimize for it, but do not expect great traffic in return, but you will get quality traffic, people who are interested in reading what you write. I get about 40 % of my traffic at Never Mind the Manager from search engines and with Google being the number one visitor provider delivering good traffic.

5. Content is king. This is one thing I do believe in. If you got something wise to say, write it down. Produce great articles and the readers will come to you, but not in huge crowds, you are not rich yet. A couple each day might come to you each week. If you write something unique and outstanding the visitors will come to you faster. How many blog posts do you think there is about my topic of the day? “Make your blog a success”. I’ll guess I have a lot of competition, and this one is just as useless as all others. But please keep on reading, as this is important to know. And I will soon reveal my secret to successful blogging to you.

But first here is a nifty little hint; Even if Shakespeare has not published in a while you should. Do not cramp out articles. If your blog is new, and you write seldom, do remove dates from the blog, as you have 80% new visitors anyway the content will be brand fresh for your first timers. And for each post your write there will be additional readers to your blog. Imagine 2 people visiting each blog post every single day. Providing 200 blog posts that 2 people find in some way each day will attract 400 readers to your blog on a daily basis.

6. Is a big audience the motivation for you blog? Then you might be in for a challenge. It is easy to drive traffic, but hard to gain readers. I rather have one new reader than 10.000 new visitors for my blog. And you should want this to, because the fans that subscribe and the fans that keep returning to your site are your true friends in the blog world. Cherish them and love them.

7. Myth Update frequently. A lot of how to blogs says that you should update each day or at least 3-4 times a week. If you got nothing to say, shut up. If you write 5 great articles a year I still would like to read them. Huge masses still read Shakespeare today, and he has not published anything new for centuries.

8. Why do you blog? This is something to think about. What do you want to accomplish? Who do you want to be your reader? The real and true reason why you blog will be your drive and motivation to continue even when you are still writing for a little few. I have two blogs, at one I want to share my knowledge about leadership, motivations and work life. At this blog I want to write about blogging, as I love to blog, share my experience and maybe I can help a few creating great blogs.

9. …time. It takes time to gain followers. I have been running one blog for about two years slowly growing from 1 reader to about 130 readers. The blog has an average of about 50 visitors pr day if there is no stunts going on.

10. Stop searching for “How to make a successful blog” or “How to attract readers to my blog” at google. Start searching for “How to write great articles” or “How to reduce bounce rate” If you don’t you will end up reading crap like these steps that will take you nowhere.

11. Find blog post that you disagree with. And publish a response at your own blog. And then comment the other blog, saying that you have just made a response. This will attract readers to your blog, and those that agree with you might rather read what you are publishing, as they agree with you.

12. My secret is really not a secret. I am a webmaster by education and know a lot of technical stuff that you will benefit from knowing. Keeping your code tidy is one of the important steps you need to take. And you need to be patient, it takes time. And you should blog about something of great interests to you. Start participating in online forums, grow your online community and you will get readers.

What do I do next?
I hope this article shows that there is no shortcut to making your blog successful. You should make sure that the technical flaws don’t get in your way. I have seen some great content on almost unreadable blogs. You could ask me to take a look at your blog if you like. Or you could keep reading some of my earlier writings about bounce rate or read about 10 things your blog needs. And if you like my blog and would like to keep track of my writings, do feel free to subscribe by e-mail or by RSS. I am also on twitter.

Define Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate is the amount of people that visit ONE page on your site and disappear in thin air. They did not find what they were looking for, or they did not find your blog interesting enough to bother staying around.

What is a good bounce rate?

There is no good answer here. There is a lot of blogs claiming that less than 40 % is good, yes that is good, but it is all about what kind of site you have. The main purpose is to be aware of this factor, as we are in this game for progress. If you have a bounce rate at 80 % you might want to set a goal to get it down to 60 %?

The strategy Factor

The bounce rate is also determined by your marketing strategy. Depending on how you are attracting your customers, you bounce rate will be influenced. Some marketing strategies attract thousands of potential readers/customers like fishing. While some are more targeted, like going to the fish market.

The Content Factor

If you have a blog, you might get a lot of readers that have been reading your blog for a while, these readers will return only to read new blog posts at most. These readers are loyal readers, but they might bounce after reading your article.

If you are offering a service or if you are hoping your readers should take some action you might want to have a lower bounce rate, as this is indicating that they are willing to do the action you want them to.

The New vs. Returning Reader Factor

If you have 25 % returning visitors and 75 % new visitors, your blog might either grow fast or not catch the eye of the reader and be exciting enough to return. What you want is to get your reader to subscribe. If you have a high bounce rate among the new visitors you need to produce more interesting content or review your strategy to attract the new reader.

The Keyword Factor

If you are accidently writing a blog post about let’s say cars. And Disney Pixar launch a new move about cars, you might get a lot of hits looking for Cars the movie. These visitors will bounce fast.

Bounce Summary

As you probably understand there is no correct answer on what is a good bounce rate. It might be anything from 20% to 60 % depending on a lot of different factors. What is important is to know what this is and the meaning of it, analyze it, and do figure out what actions to take next.

I am currently doing a bounce experiment on my other blog: Never Mind the Manager. (If you do visit it, take a look around and do not bounce) – There is a high bounce rate about 75 % at that blog, and I am taking action to get it down to 60 % or less during my next 10 blog posts. This requires some planning. 1. Get visitors to visit internal pages. 2. Provide some info on what to do next. I have some other tricks as well, but I will save them for later.

What to do next?
Why don’t you read 10 things your blog needs? You might get some other good hints as well. And you will help me to keep my bounce rate low.

Please do take a look at my menu bar at the top, and read about the server, about me and about my idea if you like.

My experience, your first advantage

I have been blogging for a few years. But I have been working with web development since 1998/99. I have a great experience when it comes to publishing solutions, e-commerce and scripting. I have tried different solutions when it comes to running a blog, and all my experience is hopefully resulting in a great partnership with you. I have tried and failed. And I am still experimenting with my own blog to find out what works and what don’t. I want to share my knowledge with you.

Hostbeetle.com

A beetle is a small insect. I am not the large hosting company. I have selected a narrow niche and will stick to it. Here at hostbeetle.com I am going to write articles about blogging and share much of my knowledge for free.

Oh where art thou my first customer?

I want to host one blog for free. My very first customer will not be charged anything the first year. But I do have some requirements. You must be a blogger that will be active and want to become great. You will be my test customer and you will be able to help me become great as well. And you must have a good idea as well. You will also provide a link back to this service. Please do contact me if you think you are the special one!

My Philosophy!

I selected a wind power solution first of all because I care about the environment. I feel strongly about education as well. And if this service should be a business that will make money in the future I will make funds to support establishing schools in third world countries.

I love the Fish Philosophy about work happiness and I want to have fun with this project. I want you to know that this is fun, and I will use humor when I feel like it. Life is not serious and work should be lots of fun!

But at the end of the day, you should be my friend, satisfied customer and a great blogger.

Welcome!

1. SEO Optimizing
   SEO = Search Engine Optimizing. This is giving your blog a fighting chance when it comes to attract readers from the major search engines about half your traffic might come from search engines so this is very important! I will also install a XML-Sitemap
2.  Social Media Integrations
   I get a lot of visitors from Twitter and Facebook, and a also a few from other networks, but Twitter and Facebook should be a must. You can integrate this into your blog so Twitter and Facebook gets automated. I can help you with a good twitter design if you like as well.
3. Spam Prevention
   As you blog grows in popularity you will need to protect your blog posts from spammers, and yes they seem to arrive early. I install a few plugins that will remove this problem for good.
4. Post Revision
   There is a default autosave in WordPress that stores a copy of your work in progress in the database, if you write like me, you will end up with one post and 25 revisions pr post. This is storage demanding and totally unnecessary for most bloggers. I will turn this off for you.
5. Statistics
   You probably want to know who is visiting your blog and how they interact. I will set up your blog with google analytics and/or sitemeter to provide you with some nice stats.
6. RSS and E-mail subscriptions
   You want your readers to be able to subscribe to your blog. I will set up feedburner for you and optimize it for your use.
7. A good design/template
   The default template is boring, you would like to install a template of your choice, I can assist you according to your specifications. Some templates are free, other is worth the money.
8. Readers
   There are so many different ways to attract readers. They will not necessary come flooding into your new blog. It takes persistence and a stable stream of good posts to succeed, and you might want to promote your blog from time to time. I know what gives you the most ROI.
9. Focused Strategy
   Do not write about everything, find out what is your passion, who will be your reader, what problems you can solve for your readers and write to the person you imagine as your reader.
10. Me
    Your blog needs me. If you are passionate about writing, I am passionate about the geek stuff. I love optimizing and tweaking web pages. I know what works and what don’t. You can focus on writing and producing and I can make your blog ROCK and attract readers.