Success with Blogs is a cycle, where one factor decides the other and one depends on the other. To make the best of your blog, you need to have visitors. To increase visitors to your page, you need to do some tricks. When you have visitors, you have to make them stay longer in your blog. To make them stay longer, you need to have a blog that is good in contents. However, having good contents may make the readers stray longer in your blog, but good content is not enough to bring readers to your blog. Unless you bring readers to your blog, what is the point in writing great content?

If that sounds a bit weird, let me try to keep it simple. In this discussion where we see what makes a blog tick, let’s tackle the issues one by one, so that we see how things are inter-connected when it comes to making success with blogs and making money from blogs. Just to give a hint of what was lacking in the first paragraph of this post, the missing piece was “Keywords”. When keywords are missing, your blog makes no sense!

Step 1 – Have a Blog Rich in Quality Content: When you do this, you are off to a start. If you already have a blog, focus on what you need to do in your fresh posts to have a great content. If you are starting off with your blog, make sure you have the contents right. That “Content is King” may sound cliché but unless you get that right, there is no point trying to make money out of your blog.

Step 2 – Have the right Keywords: Your content is useless unless you have the right keywords in them. Intersperse your blog posts with the right keywords that would act as hooks that would get you web traffic. You can’t go fishing without the right baits. Your keywords are the baits that would fetch you visitors.

Step 3 – Let Search Engines search and find your blog: if you click on any option in your blog settings that would make your blog private, you are better off writing a personal diary rather than use the internet to blog. Make sure your blog is public and has the right keywords. Once that is done, search engines would do the rest. Keywords get search engines to your blog and your blog would be listed among search results for readers to get there.

Step 4 – Keep posting contents on a regular basis: Search engines respect blogs that are updated regularly. If you posted contents for a couple of months and forgot about your blog for the next couple of months, do not blame the search engine for not tracking your blog. In the business of blogs, freshness matters.

Step 5 – Focus on Content again: Merely because you have succeeded in getting traffic does not mean you have won the match. Blogging is continuous business and search engines operate in a dynamic setting. You let your hold loose and someone else would be at the mantle. Your visitors are there only because of your content. Do not focus too much on keywords and forget about contents. If you do, your readers would get pissed off. All they need is a few seconds to judge if your blog has stuff. Readers do not visit your blog just to read a long list of keywords. And there is no point getting readers on board if you can’t keep them focussed on your blog for long.

Step 6 – Monetise your Blog: Monetising your blog is a separate topic by itself. But before you monetise, make sure you have all the five steps done. Make a thorough check of your blog to make sure it is legible and is easy on the eye. Have your blog statistics taken and form an idea of where you stand with regard to your blog in the blogosphere.

Step 7 – Make Money with your Blog: That step is self-explanatory. When you have monetised your blog, it means that you are ready to feature advertisements and sponsors on your blog. The key here, again, is to make sure that your readers stay on in your blog. You need to be prepared to wait for a while before you actually start getting payoffs for your blogging efforts.

With rich content, readers would spend more time on your blog. As they stay longer, the probability of their clicking on any of your numerous advertisements increases. Hence, you just need to stay focussed on getting your contents right. There could also be minimum payouts before you start making money. Cheques are paid out in minimal denominations and you have to be patient and you need to build contents and drive traffic to your blog so that your payout limit comes due earlier. As long as you stick to these 7 steps to making money online, you can be sure that your blog would give you many times return on your investments.