Having a blog can be a great start to an online writing career. A blog will allow you to express yourself, providing you with an outlet for your stress, which can be especially useful if you are working or in school. A blog can also allow you to share your experiences with friends and family, and you can simply post your pictures and diary entries without having to tell the same stories over and over again. Aside from all these, you can also use your blog to sell things, organize your web pages, and even earn some money.
Thanks to the power of technology and prospecting, there are now many ways through which you can make money through your blog. For instance, you can get commissions through paid advertising on your site. There are two ways that you can do this: you can either solicit offline and get brick and mortar companies to pay you to post their ads on your site, or you can join an affiliate marketing network and get paid for each click that visitors make on your ads. You can also blog for a living, and get paid for each entry that you write.
Either technique, however, demands that you have a lot of people visiting your site every single day. This can be a daunting task: you will need to be able to market your site so that it stands out amongst the millions of other blogs online. You will also need to sustain this onslaught of people reading your site by constantly adding to your content, keeping your content useful and fresh, and of course, never lagging in your marketing efforts. One way that you can promote your blog is to post in forums with subjects that are related to your blog posts.
If you are interested in promoting your blog and getting more people to read your work, then you may be interested in posting in forums and knowing how to go about it. Here are a few tips that you may need when posting in forums.
- Always pick a forum that has something to do with your blog. You may think that this is common sense, but you need to know why it’s the best practice for any blogger. Many bloggers make the mistake of spamming blogs in an effort to spread themselves throughout the forum and have their news spread faster. This can be a costly mistake: you do not only alienate your potential market, you will make yourself appear desperate. This air of desperation makes you appear like a hard-selling puppet of capitalism, and in the world of the Internet, where free and open source rules, you can work against your own potential.
- Avoid text lingo and spell like a pro. You may think that your audience is young and on the go, and would not care about your spelling. However, if you cannot even spell well, how can anyone trust you to blog well? How can anyone trust you as a credible source of high quality information? Spell well, check your grammar, and look at your punctuation. You need to look like you are someone who is meticulous and knows what people want, so don’t risk damaging your reputation by taking the shortest cut.
- Help people. Put your blog address in your signature, but start out by helping people with their problems. If you allow people to feel that they are important, they will be interested in you.
