It feels really great when someone shares your blog post on the social media websites, which immediately indicates that your content was worth that extra step that your readers took to share it with their friends/family. Driving traffic to your new blog is little tricky at the beginning and often frustrating. If you’re not following some of the common practices that have been proved to work for many popular websites/blogs, then you’re simply going to choke it to death.
As I mentioned in my previous post, we have registered a new account on blogger service by Google – which is dedicated to providing the mentorship and guidance that we never received during our startup. I am sharing these tips and tricks to help you avoid making the mistakes that we did at the beginning and wished someone could point us in the right direction. We got lucky and got exposed to the inspirational work of Yeah! Local, which gave us our direction and in turn, momentum. Fortunately, if you’re reading this post – then you’re on the right track.
Social sharing buttons are a crucial part of any website/blog. You’ll find it everywhere in one form or another. Even Websites likes Facebook, Twitter, Google+ has their own internal sharing tools which help their users share stories or snippets with their friends/families.
Speed Matters
It is a fairly simple job if you go ahead and add the codes directly, or use third-party services such as AddThis, Shareaholic, SimpleShareButtons, ShareThis etc. One thing which is common with these services is they all use a set of their own javascript and CSS files, which drastically slows down your blog. Google itself admitted in the official blog that they prefer faster website over the slow one, which is something you shouldn’t take lightly.
There could be many factors that might be affecting your web page load time, but if you’re using social like buttons on your blog than replacing it with our social sharing tool will make a noticeable difference to overall load time. We are using it on our own website and compared the performance with the regular social tools available out there.
What makes it so special?
First of all, there isn’t a single line of Javascript code used to render this social sharing toolbar on the blog, which reduces the number of requests to be made by clients to the web page. On traditional social buttons, it loads JS/CSS files for every social button included. For example – If you use Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons on your blog, it would load 3 different JS files along with 3 CSS rules to render these buttons. That’s totals 6 requests, not to mention that it increases the bandwidth and total page size of your blog, as each file adds up to the total size of the page.
Using our tool, you reduce these request to 1 (One), as it only requires single CSS file (of size 9KB) to render all the buttons. It is SEO friendly, fast, super slim, light weight and beautiful.
Where can I get it?
To add it to your blogger website, simply head over to our Blogger Lab, where we shared the Live demo and simple instructions to implement it on your blog.
I started my journey 6 years ago on blogger as well, and I do recommend this platform to any new blogger who comes to me for advising. I did share my side of the story and how I started my journey with DigitFreak, what were the initial mistakes and how I choose to be a full-time blogger/writer. If you didn’t read it, you can find my post here. This is the first post in the series where I will disclose how to establish a successful blog — one post at a time.
Choosing the right platform for your first blog is essential as it is going to be your laboratory to test and adapt things that pile up as a secret of becoming a professional blogger over time. In fact, DigitFreak started its journey on Google blogger service (called blogspot back then) and everything that I learned was because of this platform. Being able to create a website with your personalized logo, and capability to write about almost anything and observing the users visiting the website from around the world is something that comes as a perk at 0 (zero) cost with blogger.
New bloggers often gets confused while choosing their first blogging platform, worrying they will miss out features and flexibility of other advanced options available and ability to scale the design and structure of the website when the time comes . Guess what? You’re not going to need any of these advanced features at the beginning. While there is truly nothing you should be worried when choosing the blogger for your first blog, but to answer the query — You can easily migrate from blogger to any other popular CMS out there, whenever you want.
I will not populate this post with Pros and Cons of having a blogger over other platforms/CMS, as my main goal is to teach the readers how to start with blogging and turn it into a successful business. This is the first milestone of becoming a blogger, which I am outlining in this article.
Why Am I suggesting everyone to start with blogger?
To point out few – it’s free, secure, easy to understand, highly adaptable, and newbie friendly ( doesn’t mean he’s non-tech savvy). In so many cases, blogger is much better than WordPress or other CMS platforms out there — it’s simply blogging.
While starting your first niche blog, you should always opt for blogger platform even if you are tech friendly and learn things quickly. Blogging is not always about how good you’re at managing websites, it is about the content. Keep in mind we are talking about a specific stream of bloggers, who want to earn money from the quality content they can deliver.
The things that I evaluated to conclude my suggestion:
Whether the platform is focused on serving beginners or experts: blogger is super noob friendly.
The cost of using the service: the cost to run a blog on blogger is $0 (zero).
customizations and scalability offered in the price constraints of service: You can make your blog stand out from others If you have little knowledge of CSS/HTML/java. Don’t worry if you don’t; there are the plethora of themes available for blogger targeted to almost any type of website.
There are the points you should keep in mind while opting for any platform. Remember that it can be easy to upgrade to a better platform in most cases, so starting with an easy-to-use option is great for anyone just starting out in the blogosphere.
The fact that blogger qualifies the above-mentioned guidelines, you can easily crown the winner for new bloggers. Starting your blogging career with blogger is just a click away. You just need to have a Google account.
Some things to keep in mind
Don’t hesitate to choose blogger: This is the best blogging platform you can have for your first blog. This is the opportunity to move fast and break things without losing anything. There are other websites who would suggest that new bloggers should always go for WordPress or other CMS which is more popular, but the truth is your popularity or ability to earn money doesn’t depend on any platform you choose. As a beginner, you probably wouldn’t want to spend much, and blogger offers just that.
Learn things quickly: This is the time you spend to learn the common principles, way to create viral quality content and how to drive traffic at your website. Create a user base and continue writing about what your readers like the most. This is how you get to know where you should head in the future.
Be expert in your niche: Now based on the analysis over time you will figure out what topics you should focus on and what your readers wants to read. This is the time to learn new things about those topics, and provide tips and resources for your readers that would solve common problems or give value to them.
Don’t wait to monetize your blog: Some experts suggest that you should not bombard your readers with advertisements when you are just starting, but my experience has been a bit different. While it is true that most of us don’t like ads, but almost every internet user is now familiar with advertising model incorporated on websites and has adapted to banner ads. If you add Adsense ads on your blog even before publishing your first article, they wouldn’t notice it – why? They simply don’t care. In fact, if they don’t see the ads they would probably think your blog is inactive or not so popular.
Edit: Monetizing your content shouldn’t be confused with allowing paid content on your new blog. I wanted to suggest selling the available ad spot to contextual banner ads and rewarding yourself some cookies for spending time to write quality content for your readers. You should not accept paid content advertisements at the beginning, no matter how much the advertiser is willing to pay. More on this topic in my next article.
Be ready to move on: Once you start receiving more than 2,000 unique visitors every month, it’s time to move on and ditch blogger. Now you are getting bigger, your readers need better user experience and better website structure. Time to invest some money in your new business and move to the self-hosted platform.
Get yourself a custom domain right away
Most of the experts suggests that you shouldn’t worry about having a custom domain right from the beginning, but I beg to differ. As we are opting for a business model over the personal blog, it only makes sense to get your blog personalized before publishing your first article. Custom domain or web address is the unique identity of your brand — http://www.yourblog.com sounds way better than http://yourblog.blogger.com
It is true that you can have a custom web address at any point after establishing your blog, but it is advised to use a custom domain if you want to earn serious money from your blog.
Introducing Blogger Lab by DigitFreak
To share my journey and experience from the past, I have registered an account on blogger again. It’s been so long since I last used blogger, there are so many new exciting features and options available now.
I will be sharing all my custom widgets, tools, blogging tips and tricks at Blogger Lab – DigitFreak. It is going to be our laboratory for testing and sharing awesome tricks that you can use on your blog to make it unique. We are already working on some widgets and basic design of the blogger lab. It is currently closed, but we will open it soon for everyone to visit.
No, we are not going to post articles on that blog directly. Rather we will be using it to showcase our codes and scripts that we will share over time.
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It may sound like a regular work at home and earn thousands of dollars at home, but to be surprising it is a fair deal. Andrew Sullivan earned $333,000 within 24 hours after asking its followers and regular readers to pay for the subscriptions.
The Daily Dish, is brewed by Andrew since the last decade or so and it is now turned to be a potent mixture of serious moral analysis, must-read aggregation and plate-cleansing videos (the “mental health break”).
Currently Adnrew’s blog is sponsored by “The daily Beast” but he has now decided to work independently, cutting advertisements and adding the subscription based options (“fremium-based-meter).
You’ll be able to read any story on the site for free if you get there via a link or social media. In fact, you’ll still be able to read most of the content on the Dish even if you go straight there.
Sullivan is merely blocking you from clicking “Read More” halfway down his longer stories. Well, actually, you’ll get a certain number of “Read More”s per month for free anyway.
Despite the lack of any real restriction in that setup, 12,000 readers have already ponied up $19.99 or more for a year of content. Some 2,000 chose to kick in an extra $5, though they didn’t need to, and nearly a thousand have contributed $50.
“On average, readers paid $8 more than we asked them to,” writes a stunned Sullivan.
Sullivan and his team expects to achieve their funding goal of $900,000 fir the first year. The new blogger has lots of new aspects to be learned from this scenario. You should not depend on the advertisement on the website and reach out the new possibilities to keep you going on the mission.
