Anyone have any experience with building a blog?
I am looking for tips on how to get more linkbacks and make it more popular.
Any suggestions?
I am looking for tips on how to get more linkbacks and make it more popular.
Any suggestions?
Writing good content is key, just like what SilentPanda said. You don't have to be the first to talk about it, but you have to put your own spin to everything.
You're already on a like-minded website, and I'm pretty sure you've gotten a few visitors from here surely?
Anyone have any experience with building a blog?
I am looking for tips on how to get more linkbacks and make it more popular.
Any suggestions?
I've run a movie website for the last seven years, and my first advice is: Do it for fun.
I know people who were racking up 750,000 pageviews a month and not making a dime... basically all their money went to their hosting plan. They were cranking out all kinds of pieces on any subject, large or small, to increase pageviews, and working around the clock, going to film festivals out of pocket, etc. and basically went broke doing it and had not much of a backup plan, so they're all scraping by on other jobs now.
So, number one: Don't quit your day job.
There are easier ways to make money, but if what you primarily want to do is write for the sake of writing, then keep focusing on content that interests you and find genuine ways to make it interesting for your readers. 90% of every site's traffic is the index page. Even large traffic sites don't generate much return readership and it's disappointing.
What you want to do is commit to a set of ideals that represent why you're doing it. For me it was that I wanted to be a better writer, and a better movie critic. All else was secondary to my mission. That's how I developed a reputation among the readers I do have, and among the film criticism community.
I may not make a dime and I may not be famous, but my respect for proper journalism got two other professional film critics to write for me and now we represent significant voting power in the awards season. For a site that is small fries we have a lot of clout... and that its perks....
Not every site that the editors/writers are passionate about takes off... Sometimes it's the luck of the draw, unless you have millions of dollars to throw at the public, because the internet is much more crowded now than it was if you had started ten years ago. But if you don't have a passion for what you're doing, and you don't take it seriously in your writing and develop your own "voice" that sets you apart from the umpteen zillion other sites that write about the exact same things you do, then building a following will be very difficult.
I think another key factor is how your site looks. It has to be reader-friendly, and you have to assume that the average reader isn't computer-savvy and doesn't know how to navigate a website. It has to have a good look and "feel" (i.e. the color scheme, the theme, etc.).
^^ That. Usability is key. Don't be afraid to take criticism, either. I've gone through multiple site redesigns over the years and early on I learned that rather than being combative with people who picked apart flaws in my original design, I was wiser to let them do all the testing and thinking and then quietly make the modifications that made the most sense and solved the largest number of usability issues.
The W3C (WWW Consortium) and php.net have a number of articles on usability and accessibility as well, based on large volumes of research conducted that have identified very critical components to optimizing usability for audiences with varying levels of web savvy.