I have been confused on a number of times thinking what should I do next? Should I write another post or should I concentrate on getting more traffic or do I try out different advertising networks. Even after I have decided to get traffic which method should I use? Blog commenting or article marketing or link building or social media marketing? Do I write keyword driven posts or posts that will do good on social media. The confusion meant I ended up spending more time reading other blogs and less time working on this blog.

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The importance of feedburner is evident from the fact that it is rare to find a blog that does not have a feedburner subscription box. So I will directly get into how you can get the maximum out of it. I shall be dealing with 3 broad topics  in this article

1. How to get more visitors to subscribe to your feed
2. How to make more % of subscribers to actually click into your article
3. How to get more benefit out of the subscribers once they land on your page

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Ajith just published a really intelligent way of exchanging deep links. That just got me thinking. Can we not do more together that does not risk the wrath of Google.

1. Tweet my post and I will tweet yours in return. Not only increases traffic to both the blogs, it increases followers and makes your twitter page more valuable as well.
2. Stumbleupon: Increases the profile strength and gets more traffic
3. Social bookmarking
4. Nofollow linking : A nofollow link from the body of the post gets traffic.

What do you think. Hope you will give me a tweet or stumble.

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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It has been close to a month since I wrote the last post. Everyday I think that I must write a post today. Then I sit down infront of the laptop, log onto the admin page and start thinking about a topic to blog about. Then it happens. My mind comes out without any idea. It feels like torture after sometime and then I decide to postpone the process to the nextday. I am afraid I am suffering from the dreaded writer’s block.

How did I get the writer’s block?

I think I got to this condition by reading too much advice about how to become a better blogger. I was never a blogger in true sense. I am good at creating websites that solve a specific need like the website for walkins in India, sending sms through resume and a website for buying and selling used mobiles. Binaryday was started to help me prepare for the second hand mobile website. I started writing about mobile phones and related stuff to understand popularity of keywords and other market study related thing while the website was being developed.

However while blogging I got to know many wonderful bloggers and I started to like the blogosphere. Unlike the website world where another person with a similar website becomes a competition, in blogosphere others writing about the same topic become your friend. Then I started writing about my experience about doing seo for my own website. However all along I did not follow any rule. I wrote about anything I wanted to write about.

Then I started to read about how to become a better blogger, because I believe in being the best in whatever I do. People suggested focus, so I started to focus the blog on a particular topic. That is where the problem started. I started to enjoy blogging less and less. That started showing up in the results. To solve that problem I took the path that had always helped me in the past i.e the technical way. I started focusing on keyword research and seo to become successful at blogging.

That is when I got into the writer’s block. I am still trying to solve the problem and this post is an attempt at the same. Let us see how things move from here.

It is applicable to a situation when a person/team/organization spends too much time analyzing a problem that they are left with too little time to work on the ideas generated by the discussion. I have suffered from this disease myself in the past.

Here are some symptoms of paralysis by analysis

• You spend more time reading blogs about blogging and less time on writing posts for your blogs
• You have not changed your blog theme in the last 3 years because you have been searching for the perfect theme
• You never get time to build links for your blog because you were busy reading articles about how to get links
• You have not sent an email to another blogger asking for link/interview/review because you are not sure if he will read it

Just Do it

The easiest way to find out if a trick works is to just do it. If it works great. If not big deal. I will try out something else.

Blogging

1. Motivates me to research about topics I care
2. Allows me to put my thoughts into perspective
3. I can control what anyone will find on Google about me
4. One task that I do not HAVE to do but rather LOVE to do
5. Make Money
6. Be friend with some really wonderful persons
7. Everyday I wake up with the same dream I have joined the A-List and Amit Agarwal has sent me a link request

Now

Yes, now is the perfect time for starting your blog. The greatest problem with many wannabe bloggers is that they read too much, think too much and do nothing. I will never understand the hesitation in starting a blog. The domain name costs 8-9 dollars. You can get a decent web hosting for another 8-9 dollars. 18 dollars of investment. That is what you spend on a single night out. But when it comes to starting a blog, you hesitate.

Some people do not start a blog because of technical challenge. Well wordpress has already made it exceptionally simple to set up a blog. However if you are still not sure that you can set up a blog, drop me a line at ask[@]binaryday.com and I shall personnaly help you set up your own blog.

Exercising or blogging, the first step is the toughest one. If you can beat the inertia, you can reach the top. Many of us are guilty of providing an overdose of advice to you. Ignore us. It is perfectly ok if you have not figured out a topic to blog about. I had started blogging about entrepreneurship, moved on to technology and now giving you advice about blogging, making money and seo.

I wish my post can convince at least one person to start a blog now. If you know someone who has been thinking about starting a blog, please send across this post to him/her and ask him to start blogging now.