Blogging has been a wonderful way for me to further my enjoyment of the fantasy sports industry. By blogging about an industry I enjoy, I am able to get even more excitement out of fantasy sports by sharing my knowledge, experience, insights, and opinions on the fantasy sports world. While it was not easy getting my blog started at first, with the right amount of time, dedication and hard work, I have been able to build a loyal following of readers. Here are a few tips you can use to help you build your blog from the ground up the same way I have built mine.
WordPress and Plugins
WordPress has been my content management system of choice since day one. I started blogging without much knowledge about how to build a website and WordPress has made the entire process very easy to execute. All I have to do is copy and paste my posts into the backend of WordPress and the CMS program takes care of the rest. Also, with so many different free themes available, my website can have pretty much any type of layout I desire.
The plugins that you can download for your WordPress site are another great reason to use WordPress over any other CMS program. One of my favorite plugins is All in One SEO Pack. This plugin ensures that each post on my blog is optimized for the search engines, allowing me to gain additional organic traffic. Installing a Google Analytics plugin is another must for any blogger who is looking to take his hobby seriously. With this plugin, your Google analytics code will be present on every page of your blog, allowing you to track all of your site’s visitors to further optimize each page of your blog.
Find Target Audience
Once I created by blog and started posting high quality content, the next step I knew I had to take was to find my target audience. While I was performing a search engine optimization campaign, I knew that would take several months to show some real results. I wanted to start driving traffic to my blog as quickly as possible to start building a following of loyal readers.
In order to start getting traffic on my site, I searched the Internet for various websites where my target audience would already be gathering. I targeted sports websites, fan forums and fantasy sports forums. By entering into the conversations on these sites, I was able to provide insightful content and raise awareness of my new blog. Once I became a respected member of those online communities, I started to notice some people clicking through the link on my signature to visit my blog on a consistent basis.
Web Analytics
Installing a web analytics program is an absolute must for any blogger. Google analytics is one of the better free web analytics programs out there, and will provide you with all of the information you need to know about your site to make sound decisions to grow your blog in the future. Through my Google analytics account, I am able to see which posts are the most popular, which posts are receiving the most comments and any interesting long-tail keywords that are driving traffic to my site that can incorporate into a future blog post.
Using the information contained in my analytics account enables me to fine tune my blog and generate content my readers are interested in.
Added Value to My Blog
After I appeared to have an established blog, I added more value to the blog by placing advertisements and affiliate links to products and services my readers would enjoy. Namely, I started reviewing all of the major daily fantasy sports websites and listing the pros and cons of each site. These reviews will help my readers find the best fantasy sports sites to play at where they can feel safe and know they are playing in the best possible fantasy games.
While my blog has been a success so far, there is a lot more I can do with it in the future. I would like to add a newsletter to my blog to keep my readers informed on the latest happenings within the fantasy sports industry. I will also be able to position myself as an industry expert by sending out this newsletter on a regular basis, which will help drive more traffic to my blog in the long run.
Virtual Private Server Blog Hosting
Check your traffic expectations for hosting a popular blog before choosing shared hosting. It’s often better to directly speak with someone who can confirm that their systems are able to handle your expected traffic. Juliana often handles such enquiries when refering clients to InMotion Hosting, A company well known for their range of software platforms compatable from their VPS Hosting which comes prepackaged with a Cpanel License to help you with your wordpress and joomla installations.