Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers

Problogger's Darren is inviting bloggers to a group writing project on Habits of Highly effective Bloggers. Having written blogs, for 3 years odd, and still struggling for visitors and google referrals, I have observed the blogging habits of many effective bloggers, and these are some of what I have learnt. One has to do something repeatedly to make it a Habit, and that is where we fail. Like they say, successful people does what failures avoid to do and make a habit of doing it.



Effective Bloggers update consistently: Effective bloggers update their blogs very consistently or regularly. I don’t mean to say that you have to post every half an hour, but even if you do post thrice a week make it consistent. When your readers visit your blog thrice a week, there should be a new content each time he is there.

Effective Blogger are thorough: Effective bloggers do a very thorough research and write only after they have crossed checked facts before clicking the publish button. Effective bloggers also don’t feed their readers with sloppy grammar and misspellings.

Effective Bloggers serve a niche: Identify a niche you can write about comfortably. That is what most effective bloggers do. I have been writing this blog, for the last 3 years and I still struggle to get a good traffic. That is because this is a very general blog and I write about anything and everything. It has no focus and serves no niche. I started another blog about 6 months back, based on Bachelor Cooking. I now have more than 5 times unique hits than this blog and 10 times more page views. It was incidental, but I had hit a niche.

Effective bloggers don’t miss opportunities: Effective bloggers never miss an event or news in their niche. Whenever there is something new happening, your bloggers will expect to read something on your blog. And of course, the google referrals from all the searches.

Effective bloggers are good at networking: Effective bloggers attend networking events regularly. They are also known to hang around in social networking sites.

Effective bloggers are witty: I mentioned that effective bloggers chose and write about a niche, but there are quite a number of generalist bloggers too, and a few things which I have found to be common amongst the generalist bloggers are that they are witty and they are interesting, but then this is true with most effective bloggers and I don’t know if witticism can be formed into a habit. Either you have it or you don’t, but one can always copy witty writers and maybe with time it will form into a habit.


Interactivity: It has been written about many times over that Bloggers that respond to readers are more effective. I tend to disagree here. Interactivity can be good to a certain extent. It can help build say 100-200 repeat visitors, but for most effective blogger with 10000+ hits, they just can't respond to all readers. Moreover, instead of spending time replying comments, they scrounge the net looking for new things to write and write more. It takes a lot of time replying to comments, which will eat away your blog writing time. Interactivity is necessary during the traffic building early time of a blog, but more effective bloggers tend to spend their time writing valuable content, which leads to another habit.

Content: Content, content and content. Content is the key to building a successful blog. I have noticed that most successful blogs get more than 90% traffic from search engines and if you run text ads like adsense on your blog, somebody coming from a search engine is more likely to click the links than your regular visitors. And if your blog is content rich in a particular topic and have a decent page rank, you will get a constant stream of referred visitors. I have seen sites with page rank of 6 getting more than 25000 page views a day while a site with page rank 7 gets 4000 hits. The key is content and constant update.