‘How to’ articles for blogs – How useful are they?

What is the first thing you do after setting up a blog? Well, if you ask me, I usually spend a considerable amount of time (about 4 hours) implementing the theme/layout that best suits the content of the blog. I’m a WordPress fan, and so spend another hour searching for the best plugins and sidebar widgets that add to the much needed cosmetic and functional aspect of the blog. When blogs were started a few years ago, they were mostly viewed as an electronic version of one’s personal diary – the only difference being that it is not under lock and key.

When the online advertising media, like Google Adsense, Text Link Ads, Chitika, woke up to the immense potential offered by blogs as a publishing medium, it started a whole new world for professional bloggers, and many of them started to make a living out of blogging!

Well, no one lives forever, but everyone wants to make money and ‘make money from blogging‘ became the new mantra for most of the online-blog-geeks like us. I believe there are over a hundred million blogs out there and still counting.

So, if you and me enter this ‘blogosphere‘ swarming with millions of other blogs, how successful can we be in making our presence felt, and ultimately, monetizing the outcome of this presence? This is when we look for tips and tricks, and those famous ‘how to‘ articles. Of course, one must understand that he/she cannot make a blog immensely successful overnight (unless otherwise he/she is already a seasoned blogger, routing traffic from his/her already popular blog to the new one – zero-investment marketing!)

What are the most famous ‘how to‘ articles that we search for? They are:

• How to drive traffic to your blog
• How to choose a funky name for your blog
• How to write an appealing ‘about me’ page
• How to write successful articles
• How to get sponsors for your blog
• How to make your blog search engine friendly (search engine optimization tips)
• How to monetize your blog
• How to make the most out of social networking

Phew! A nice laundry list!! Did I miss something? Let me know please.

When I see an article starting with ‘how to..’ I immediately get an uncontrollable urge to click on it, even though I may be partially true in guessing that the article, when the page loads, will not have anything great to say. Having said that, some of the ‘how to‘ articles that I’ve come across really added value to my site. They actually helped me:

• Choose an SEO-friendly theme
• Install the SEO-plugin
• Disqus comment plugin
• Feedburner subscription

and so on. You can check out the plugins that I’m using on this site over here.

After optimizing my site functionally, I checked with DomainTools to see my SEO score. Here is what it looked like at the time of writing this article..

Looks like the search engine optimization has been done pretty good on my site. I will also post a screen-shot of the Google indexed page link just to show you how effective the SEO is in making Google index this particular article.

Update: As promised, find below the screen-shot! The page was indexed in less than 12 minutes!!

So far so good! However, I’m working towards gaining more visitors, subscribers and returning visits to this site. I know I will make it, but it will take some time. I’m just a casual blogger, and ’tis been just six months and it doesn’t make sense if I expect 10,000 visitors per day just by reading all those zillion ‘how to‘ articles spread across another zillion blogs in this blogosphere.

Having said that, if you are a blogger and if you have been successful (even fairly..) in achieving targets like thousands of visitors per day, a few hundred dollars per month, and so on, please share your success stories over here. You can even contribute a small teaser of your blog backed by statistics like visitors per day/per month, page views per day/per month, and Google Adsense or other ad payout rates (no need for the exact amount, the range is enough!). Equally important would be that you provide the ‘top five’ essential tips that made you achieve those targets. Thanks in advance!

Look forward to hearing your success stories!