My first blog - any advice?

Great info! Thank you!

• The most important point is to write original content, the content is not copied from anywhere.
• The content you are posting must me informative
• Use images, videos to make blog more attractive.
• Post fresh content, and keep on updating your blog.
• Use your keywords in blog, but the keyword stuffing is not too much.

Thanks for the great replies! I agree with having quality content, which is why I'm always looking to see what articles have the greatest number of shares and seeing what they are doing. An example of this is I saw an article on 25 Quotes about True Wisdom. This got me excited about an idea of having multiple posts with each one reflecting on a different theme. When I come up with my blog headlines I always try to follow the rules of either: a number-related one such as 'The one big secret to...', or 'How to/Want to know how...' and I also try and have a few statement ones like 'Assume you are valuable in any situation'. This gives me a mix of attention-grabbing and regular yet still appealing ones.

As a general note, I'm not referring to giving too much information as in I want to offer nothing substantial, but I think there does need to be a line in the sand. For instance I know a large number of NLP techniques and if I was to give each of them away over time my thinking was I would then give too much away. Although I now see that this doesn't stop me from combining them together to publish in an ebook, or at least as part of an ebook.

Marked09, thanks for the kind words. I'm curious why traffic generation would be trivial? I love the squeeze page idea, will put that into consideration. I am keen to get a mailing list happening so that would be a good incentive.

Alvinhy, cheers. Money leads to the emotional value of free time, etc. I am definitely passionate about my chosen market. I recently saved about 1000 blog posts from the industry onto my phone for my own benefit and now I'm combining that by paying attention to what catches my eye for potential blog articles.

Ronrule, thanks for that great advice! I think I realized that because as I was writing my good ones I'd mentally tag it as something I wouldn't use right away. What would you recommend writing instead though? If a new blog just has mid or low-value posts it might not garner as much interest. Perhaps a mix.. From your advice I've decided to create a database or possibly excel spreadsheet of all my posts with tags and estimate dates. This also allows me to easily link relevant articles together. And I'm going to create some regular posts such as a weekly review by category one and use a flow chart to work out branch offs for later posts such as a quarterly wrap up, combining several categories together related to a topic (such as apps for managing your health), then I will consider the possibility of combining all into an ebook.

Mariamcm, thanks I will check out those links. Will take a look at your blog.

karlstech, thanks heaps for the two links. I remember Pat's stuff being really good actually.

Alexa,

Thanks for the detailed response. Lots of information to chew over. Based on advice I may skip Adsense as I was under the impression that the user would be taken to the site through a popup and would then return to the blog. I don't believe that selling advertising space and selling digital products require two completely different sites. When the products become available I will then add a horizontal navigation bar to make it much easier to navigate. If the hypnosis audio option does work and I decide to make it something larger I can consider having a separate digital 'shop' and link to it through the navigation as well as in relevant posts. Selling advertising space would require content that people want to actually read. When I said affiliate marketing I meant having relevant links within blog posts.

In terms of my content I haven't bedded down the plan exactly however I am planning to stick to mindset, changing your beliefs, etc which will naturally lead to other niches through way of metaphors and cross-referencing. Over time I will begin to expand into other niches. Again I will most likely incorporate this into the navigation. Either by having the links set to the tags of the blog, or having separate blogs. I don't have any intention of just throwing up random articles in a chaotic mess of topics. By cross-referencing I was intending to, for example, write an article on how I learnt recently to drink more water. This is technically health-related except the article is based around the concept of goal setting by using my story as the vehicle to deliver the message around goal setting. This would then also relate at some point to a weekly app review (I've downloaded something like 100 apps in the last few weeks) for apps around goal setting.

Thanks everyone!