It seems like forever since I started this site. This was my very first site, didn’t know anything about running a site on a domain or SEO or promotion. I basically taught myself everything with some tips from other people more knowledgeable than me. While a year doesn’t seem like much, I don’t have a offline job so I could spend hours a day working on websites and learning about website promotion. In the last year I was able to not only build this site up, but while learning things here, I was applying it to my other blogs, and websites.

I decided to list 5 major things that every beginning blogger should do to be on the road to a success.

1) Write lots of unique content. This will make a lot of your posts visible to the search engines due to the unique nature of each post. Copying exact content from other sites will give you little traffic due to the search engine duplicate content algorithms.

2) Pagerank and site “authority” is important. This one we should all know.

3) Optimize your site for SEO. Most free softwarelike wordpress and SMF forums are very underoptimized for SEO. You should also optimize your on page keywords for the targeted keywords you want.

4) Dont pay for traffic to your blog. Internet advertising is only worth it if it’s for a commercial internet business.

5) Don’t rely on Google. Exclusive use of Google Adsense for earning money on a website is usually not the best way to maximize earnings. It is also not a good idea to put your eggs in one basket. You should rely on a variety of advertisers and affiliates instead. Many bloggers also fear Google “punishment” in search engine rankings and therefore don’t participate in sponsored post opportunities. Depending on the site, this may be a mistake. You might earn a lot more through sponsored posts, than from what maintaining your rank in Google would give you via traffic conversions.