Monday, October 24, 2011

Allowing Your Blog To Age

This is one of those things you're not going to want to hear, but I have to say it all the same:

You must allow your blog to age.

Yes, age.  Like a fine wine.  You will not be getting thousands of visitors overnight.  Traffic generating services or paid ads are a complete waste in the early days.  Yes, you will generate traffic.  But for a blog, a temporary boost in traffic will do nothing.  You need quality subscribers that are not only commenting on your blog but also maybe sharing your links with their friends.

To give an example, when you first start your blog - as in sign up and put your first post - it takes about two weeks just for the blog to become part of "the internet."  That means that not even typing in the exact name of your blog in the Google search bar will bring it up.  For the first two weeks, the only way to bring a blog up is to type in the exact address (myblog.blogspot.com or whatever).

After it finally filters into "the internet," it will take another six months before search engines such as Google start to take the blog seriously.  You have to think of the thousands of people every day who start websites or blogs, only put one post and then burn out.  If search engines counted every single one of those sites as viable search results right away, we, the searchers, would be flooded with useless information.

Therefore, you have to prove to the search engines that you are viable content.  Consistently posting high quality, focused content  over several months makes your blog appear more worthwhile in the eyes of a search engine.  A blog with lots of posts with similar keywords, comments and backlinks (people who copy/pasted your link somewhere else on the internet) will always rank higher than a fresh blog.

So you're just going to have to wait.  And be patient.  And continue to post.  If you don't believe me, take a look around at any popular blog in an category.  Yes, they will have fun content.  But they have also all been around for at least two or three years.  Aging your blog is key.

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