Blogging 101 – Optimizing Your Blog

I hope you’ve been keeping a tab on the series – “Blogging 101”. This is the fifth and the last post in the series.

Today, we shall deal with one of the most important concerns of a blogger – Optimization of a blog. This is a a tricky process and often involves spending long working hours on the blogs. It has given a lot of bloggers several sleepless nights, testing ad units and their placements and finding an appropriate network to get on board. Boosting your profits can be simple if you are a keen observer and can interpret and match the layout of your blog with a great theme. Having your own winning formula apart from the money you make from your content consistently includes ad placement skill, use of  plug-ins, choice of colors, text, etc. which can make a big difference.

Let us focus on few requirements which can shape your idea to fit into the frame of profit making business.

Suggested Plug-ins

It is strongly recommended to spend some time making your website appear distinguished, particularly if your aim is to eventually decrease the bounce rate. Plug-ins for the Wordpress play a great role in helping you out with this.

There are a lot of plugins which bloggers use to get the best out of a blog. We shall check out 5 of the must have plugins to help you run a blog at ease. Some of the plug-ins are especially useful in reducing your ‘hand-work’ to the bare minimum and makes managing your Wordpress blog easy.

1. All in One (SEO) – By far the most widely used plugin to get that search engine optimization you always wanted. The pack allows you to specify the title, description and keywords for your blog and individual posts.
2. Akismet – Spams are a blog’s worst enemy! This plug-in comes with a standard installation of Wordpress and virtually eliminates spam comments, reducing your burden to mark them as spam manually.
3. Related Posts – A major problem a blogger faces is to dig through old posts that are related and manually link them in the new post. This problem is solved with Related posts which inserts relevant posts automatically.
4. Wordpress Database Backup - Backing up your blog is crucial and this plug-in allows you to back up everything in no time.
5. Top Commentators - It lists the visitors who have commented for most number of times on your blog, hence showcasing their name on your blog. You may find a lot of commentators returning back seeing their name in the list! It also adds value to your blog to help new visitors to stay longer to dig into your blog’s content.

Positioning of Advertisements

Perhaps one of the most common mistake that a newbie blogger makes is with the positioning of advertisement itself. The theory is pretty simple – if you have the capability to analyze where people actually look while exploring your blog, you have solved half of your query.

When you look at the front page of blogs like that of ProBlogger Darren, you will notice that only a part of the page is displayed and to see everything on the page you need to scroll down. The elements of a website below the fold are seen by significantly less readers than elements above the fold resulting in lower conversion of ads.

The content of your blog is another place where most of your readers are drawn to. Different bloggers have different opinions on the positioning of the ads between the posts. Say - Engadget places a rectangle AdSense unit between the second and third posts on the front page. The Movie Blog uses a rectangle ad directly under titles and aligned left on individual pages. Practically, there is not just one thumb rule. You need to experiment to find what works best for you. Your ads are often accepted differently by different visitors

All in all, you need the best optimization to unleash the profit potential lurking in your blogs. Convert your blog into a cash-cow with mantras like ads placement, software store commissions, your own products, your affiliate program etc. Opt for a good color combination if you’re getting your blog designed. Alternatively, you may intelligently choose a free theme or one of those paid themes like Thesis.

Image credits: Jose U

Related posts:

1. Niche Blogging: Blogging Models That Work!
2. Top Free Blogging Tools That Help You Blog Better
3. Blogging 101 – Top tools to monetize your blog
4. Authority Blogging: Blogging Models That Work!
5. Autopilot Blogging: Blogging Models That Work!