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It continues from How To Create A Blog (Part IX). Now lets continue with How To Create A Blog (Part X).

How To Create A Blog (Part X)

20. Monitor your blog

Once your blog is up and running, when it starts to have some traffic, it will start to be important to keep track of various aspects. This can be done with free tools that because they are not free cease to be very powerful.

We didn’t go into the details of each tool because this was going to require another “mega-guide” for each one, but we’ll do a brief review and give you references to keep going deeper on your own. In fact, to handle these tools in depth requires a significant amount of learning time.

But don’t worry: you don’t have to have them from day one. I don’t want to overwhelm you by crushing you with tasks, it’s just about tracing your path in the medium term as a blogger.

It’s enough to start slowly for when you start to have a relevant traffic (>daily visits). For example: getting to know them little by little during your first 6 months as a blogger would be a more than reasonable time frame.

a) Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools is a set of tools you can use under a Google account once you’ve linked your blog.

• List of keywords in Google searches that have brought traffic to your blog, the number of impressions of each page (how many times it has appeared in search results) and the click rate on your pages.
• List of all internal and external page links to that site.
• Detection of broken links.
• Submit and check the sitemap of the site (site URL map).
• View Google site indexing statistics and any errors found.
• View and configure the Googlebot crawl frequency (how many requests/second the indexing robot makes to the blog).
• Create a robots.txt file and verify its correct operation.

b) Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web analytics tool with which you can obtain very rich and interesting information about the functioning of your blog or any other website that, as in the previous case, analyzes how well or badly your site is working, what are your specific strengths and weaknesses, etc..

Among its most interesting functions we found:

• Blog traffic statistics for an X period: total visits, recurring visits (people not visiting the site for the first time), page views, average page views per visit, rebound rate (how many people leave the site as soon as they arrive), time spent visiting the site, etc., etc., etc..
• All of the above applied to specific pages.
• Measurement of user-defined objectives. For example, the conversion rate of your mailing list.
• Track visits in real time. That is to say, to see in every moment how many people there are navigating by your site.
• Sources of traffic. Direct traffic, search traffic, social network traffic, etc.
• Traffic and conversion funnels. Where your traffic comes from, what pages it passes through, what % of this traffic fulfills the objectives defined by you, etc.

In addition, Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools can be integrated between them.

c) Pingdom

Pingdom offers two very simple but very useful free services:

• The monitoring of the state of health of your site (response times and falls), including warnings via email in case of falls.
• A speed test that measures the loading times of your pages.

Create a professional blog and become a “top blogger”.

At this point you already have a good infrastructure to start working. So to finish this post I want to give you some of the most important guidelines to create content, take your blog down a successful path and, if that is your intention, make money with it.

21. How to write good content

If there’s one important thing on your blog, that’s the content.

First of all, get the idea that you have to offer quality content. At this point this phrase is already widely seen, but it has not lost any validity. Rather, it is becoming more and more true because the supply of content does not stop growing and the amount of garbage does not either.

Ask yourself the following question, why should a reader waste time with you if he has better alternatives?

And, of course, forget about copying, believe me: it doesn’t work. Either you find your style and your original content or it doesn’t make any sense for you to follow through with your blog project.

Okay, you have the knowledge and ability to do it, but you don’t know exactly what good content is and how to create it.

22. Content strategy + SEO

Excellent. We have reached a point where we are already beginning to glimpse the route for our content.

To do this, first, I would recommend that in a first phase (the first 30-50 posts) do not plan too much your content. At this point it’s much more about practicing and “finding yourself”, that is, putting your theoretical idea into practice and contrasting it with the reality of content creation and audience feedback. Therefore, there is no point in over-planning.

Obviously, this does not mean that chaos reigns, a minimum of planning is essential if you want to achieve a coherent line of content. Make, at least, an outline of your main thematic lines and think about how to translate them into WordPress categories, which I would recommend not to exceed 8-10 categories maximum.

After this first phase (typically after 6-12 months), you should draw up a more definitive content strategy in which you review your initial thematic lines and elaborate a vision of where you want to go in each of the lines, what types of things you want to publish and in what order.

This strategy should be reconciled as best as possible with the SEO aspects. That is, it contrasts what you want to do with what people actually search on Google and other search engines.

Here the main idea is to know what and how people search in your thematic niche, that is, what keywords, what phrases they use. With this information in hand, if you see it convenient, you can adapt your contents so that they fit as best as possible with the phrases that people write in search engines. Essential SEO is basically as simple as this.

How To Create A Blog (Part X)

How do you know what people are looking for?

Very simple: luckily there are tools that “sing it” to you. A free one, for example, is the Adwords keyword planner, but I can already tell you that if you want to take it seriously, you should use a professional tool like SEMrush, which is, by the way, the one I use.

With a tool like SEMrush you get to another level: you can do incredible things far beyond finding out what people are looking for, you can do things like “spying” on the websites of your competition by finding out exactly which are the keywords in which they have been tried to position themselves, in which positions they are, etc. Already this (which is one of dozens of features of this tool) is an incredible shortcut to find good keywords and justifies spending some money on this.

A very successful strategy in that sense is to identify posts pillars that are specially developed, take into account the demand for SEO, are trunks in the theme of your blog and that, somehow, you could consider your small “masterpieces” within your blog.

How To Create A Blog (Part X)

It is vital that these contents are especially well profiled, that is, well thought out to attract the type of audience you are interested in each case. This same post is a perfect example of this applied to our blog within the category of Blogging.

If you get that type of posts right, they will become very important traffic sources and will lead to divert that traffic to the rest of your blog since a post that stands out is much more likely to be shared or linked. In addition, many opportunities for internal links to the rest of your content will naturally arise. Again, this post is a good example of that.

But the priority is your reader. Therefore, the result always has to be natural. That is, don’t design content for Google, remember that you don’t write for Google, you write for your reader. Now, if you do a good job of content conciliation and SEO, you will be rewarded with quality traffic and an important boost to the reputation of the site and its authors.

Did you like How To Create A Blog (Part X)? Continue reading at: How To Create A Blog (Part XI)