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Chapter 6 Creating Engaging Content
Everyone who publishes a blog has two main goals in common. These goals are to bring people in to read their blog and to keep readers coming back to read it as often as possible. Regardless of anything else you do or don't do with your own blog, these must be your two main goals as well. If you do not have visitors to your blog, and those visitors do not click on your AdSense ad links, then you will not make any money with your blog. It is just that plain and simple.
What Should I Write About on My New Blog?
You have gone through the process of setting-up your blog, you have AdSense strategically placed on it for maximum clicks, and now you find yourself with zero idea what to write about. Been there, done that, bought the proverbial t-shirt. Most of us with our own blogs have been in the exact same position. We want to blog, we know how to write a decent paragraph or two, but faced with the blank text box on Blogger we sit and stare at it. We think to ourselves that no one wants to read what we have to say. Or, worse yet, we can't think of a single thing to write about. We have temporary blog writer's block. Don't worry, there are simple solutions to the problem.
One of the best ways to build-up a popular blog, translation -one which has the potential to earn you lots of money, is to have both frequently updated, engaging, content and good ad placement. In my humble opinion, ad placement is the easy part. The hard part, at least at first, is thinking of a topic which you can write about day after day.
You quite literally have unlimited options as to what you can write about on your blog. However, this can be more of a curse than a blessing. It's like a child walking into a toy store who has been told they can have anything they want. It is overwhelming. What do they choose? There are so many options. Being told "write about anything you want" is similarly overwhelming; there are just too many options available to you.
To help you decide what the topic of your blog should be, it is important to understand a bit about how search engines and AdSense work. If you were simply interested in publishing a personal, non-monetized blog, then you could write about anything you wanted. You would send the link to your friends and family, post updates about your life on it from time to time, and you would be good to go. However, if you want a monetized blog, then you need to understand how to get visitors to come to your blog, how to make them keep coming back, and how to make the most amount of money possible from your visitors clicking on your AdSense ads.
We will examine Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the inter-workings of AdSense more in other chapters of this ebook. For now it is vital to the success of your blog that you understand that knowing a bit about how both SEO and AdSense work can be a big help in deciding what you should blog about.
If you are interested in making money with your blog, then you want to find topics which will bring you traffic through the search engines. Search engine optimization can help to bring you some readers, fresh content keeps all of your readers coming back and relevant AdSense ads on your blog help to get you the clicks that make you money.
Just simply looking at search engine optimization or AdSense will not guarantee your blog success with any specific topic. However the additional information search engine optimization and AdSense provides can help to steer you in the right direction with your blog. Use these two things as guidelines in building your blog and all of your content. It will be to your advantage to do so.
So, how do you really come up with a topic for your blog?
Think long and hard about your life. Think about your skills. What do you do for work? What do you like to do in your spare time? What are your hobbies? What are your unique skills? Do you have children? Do you have pets? What are your dreams and aspirations? What is unique about you? What is unique about what you know versus what other people know? You can easily use the answers to these questions in your quest to find a good blog topic.
If you have trouble answering the questions above then find someone close to you and ask them to answer the questions about you. Find out what others would suggest you might want to publish a blog about. Often you cannot see what is right before you, but others who are close to you can. You might be surprised at the great ideas they might come up with for you. Listen to their suggestions. Answer the questions for yourself, and decide on a good topic.
The most important thing you can do is to blog about something interesting, both interesting to you and to other people. Something you either know a lot about, or have the desire to learn a lot about. For example, I may find that a topic like "lime green paint" would be good blog topic for search engine optimization and AdSense, however after about three posts then what would I write about that could possibly be interesting to anyone? There probably isn't much after those first three posts to write about. This would make lime green paint probably not the best topic for my blog.
You will need to strike a balance between search engine optimization, AdSense ad block placement, your knowledge of your potential topic, and your interests.
Finding a topic you like and are knowledgeable about helps you be able to write interesting posts. Your posts do not have to be brilliant works of literary art. They simply have to be engaging, interesting, and most of all fairly frequent. You will find blogging to be the easiest and most enjoyable if you pick a good topic for yourself.
