The sixes are sexy, macho and unsurprisingly fans adore the batsmen who have a capability to hit those large strokes. But then singles are more important than the sixes. More importantly there is a time to try those sixes. Too early and you do not get to play 50 overs. Too late and you end up with too low a score.

Why am I blabbering about cricket on a blog about blogging

Because I just realized that there are singles and sixes in getting traffic to your blog as well. Blog commenting, twitting, stumbling, enabling people to email your awesome posts to their friends are the singles of getting traffic to your blog. They are not sexy and hence no big blogger talks about how he gets 30 visitors a day from the comments he leaves on other blogs. It is not fashionable to talk about the second page rankings for long tail keywords.

Hitting the digg homepage, sphinn home page or number 1 rank for “make money online” on Google are the sixes. They get a lot of traffic at one go, get you 300 backlinks in a single day.

Both the singles and sixes are important. But they have an appropriate timing. Many bloggers start trying to hit the digg homepage and get frustrated because of the failure. And many people get so addicted to the singles that they just forget to accelerate. They get frustrated as well.

Start by concentrating on the singles. Build up your twitter follower base, stumbleupon friends list, the first few hundred backlinks and a handful of loyal users. Celebrate each landmark. It helps you stay motivated and it helps you get that all important user base which will hopefully drive your awesome posts to the homepage of digg.

Having done that do not stop at the singles though. Rather do not get content with increamental growth. Move in to the big league once your blog is ready. Aim for super competitive keywords, digg homepage and so on.

Let me know your views on the topic and do not forget to stumble and tweet my post.

There is no point in reinventing the wheel. The internet is full of people who have already done all hit and trial and figure out how to make money, build a successful blog, do affiliate marketing etc. No matter which part of the MMO world, you choose there are some gurus who are way ahead of them. It is really intelligent to learn from these gurus and then use the steps to build your blog / make money etc.

Having said that I don’t listen to what they are saying or writing on their blog. What the gurus say is marketing (well most of that). Because typically they have got a product/ a programme to sell to you. The blog posts are just commercials to sell that product/programmeto you.

A far more effective way to learn from the gurus is to observe what they are doing. The expert blogger may tell you about 100 methods to monetize your blog but he is using only 2 or 3. Obviously he is using them because they are the best. So what should you do? Try out all the 100 or go for the 3 being used by the master himself?

Look at their email marketing campaigns. Many of them use a single product. Do I need to read their articles about the best email marketing product? Think again.

• How did they get you to signup for their newsletter?
• What is the advertisement format that they are using?
• Which blogging theme are they using
• Look at the adsense block placement on their website if they have one
• What does the fact that most experts don’t have adsense on their site tell you?

What is your take? Do you listen to the gurus or observe them?

Blogging does not come naturally to me. But I want to succeed as a blogger. So this weekend I did what I do really well. Breakdown a goal to smaller steps and then go about getting each of those tasks done. That is how I came up with my roadmap to blogging success.

Having done so I realized that many of my regular readers may find it useful, it can be improved further with your comments and publishing it online will motivate me to stick to it longer. Hence here is the roadmap that I have created for myself. Detailed breakdown is available below the fold.

1. Create great/ useful content
2. Make the posts interesting and easy to read
3. Use tools to improve efficiency
4. Participate on other blogs
5. Make efforts to get more readers to the blog
6. Even more effort to convert them to long term users
7. Think beyond adsense

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