8 Tips For Writing Attention Grabbing List Articles

If I am a reader and seeking information about some xyz topic then I would love to use my precious time of research for a listified article which is not just evergreen but also viral than any other normal article. Listified articles provide you the same kind of links at the same place and save hell lot of time.

Now when I am a writer, I understand that readers are smart and you can’t just force them to read any piece of crap, and at the same time the content has to be interesting. I understand the importance of an attention grabbing listified article and so would be interested in knowing all the trades of creating such an article.

Frankly, it is not hard but at the same time it is not a kid’s lollypop to write a good listified article. From long time, I was thinking about sharing my experiences and here I am; sharing some nice tips to write a good listified article which grabs attention and makes your writing efforts worth.

Listified articles are great way to get traffic, new readers attention and link love. More over, list articles are very popular for social media sharing and bookmarking. (Ref: Content people love sharing on Social media)Writing a listified article is an art, and it has to be done after great research. It doesn’t matter if you have an experience in particular topic or not (having experience is always a bonus), but with a detailed research, one can come up with great list article. Here I will share few tips that I usually follow to write a traffic generating list article, and it will help you to write one of your own.

Tip1: Trend is the Key; use it to create sub headings

Every minute tonnes of information is created and rolled over internet. In this digital age it is important that you cover the latest and most talked about or most searched stuff in your writings. It means you need to follow the trends and from this endless budging information, you can fetch the selective stuff by using online polling. Let’s say you get a topic and to weave a good listified article around it you can go on websites displaying votes from people related to your topic. This will help you to create your sub heads for the list of your article. You can also use Twitter, Facebook, Google trends etc. to keep yourself updated about latest trends. A good idea is to pick a topic that will last for long (evergreen topics).

Tip 2 : Deep research of your subject is the soul

Don’t write just for the sake of writing, instead collect facts and empower your article by providing in-depth knowledge and information to the reader. Read enough about your niche/topic and it will be wonderful if you can explore more about other areas as well. This can be a general tip for writing but when you apply this to a listified article it will enrich every subhead you create for the article and make it an interesting read.

Tip 3 : Know your Audience

Every article written must be written for target audiences. If not then it can’t grab attention and hence is a sheer waste of writer’s time. To write a good listified article a writer must know the taste, mood, expectations, language, and level of understanding, culture and perception of the readers. Creation of the subheadings keeping the readers in mind would definitely help. Only than a writer can successfully design his article and create an everlasting impact through his writing.

Tip 4 : Interesting matter will grab the reader

Writing is an art and nobody wants to read anything boring. You may be writing a listified article on technology but apart from the topics you are covering (which should be of your reader’s interest) your content should also be equally catchy and interesting. The beautifully written piece would attract a reader initially and only after it the authenticity and credibility are tested. If you want your reader to simply stick to your article then please hone your creative writing skills and lace your article with some skilled occupying way of writing.

Tip 5  : Attach thumbnail picture to each subheading/ use Pictures or videos

We all know a picture is louder than thousand words so it’s advisable to attach relevant thumbnail pictures to each topic if the size and template of your article permits. This will not only grab the immediate attention of the information seeker but also help him to understand the content quickly and easily. You can also use some short but informative videos which will further help your readers to understand and grasp the information provided.

Tip 6: Your own profile and reputation

If we talk about blogging, your reputation among readers to provide informative and authentic content will also help. Like if you already have a good reputation among readers that you always provide them with factual and credible contents on relevant topics then your listified article will no doubt grab attention and you will be happy with good amounts of hits for your matter. It is a give and take world so make your networking strong and authentic to earn credibility.

Tip 7: Interesting Title

The first impression is important. Sometimes Envelop grabs the attention for the letter. Similarly the title of your listified article must be catchy enough to grab the attention. Here also you can take help from latest trends and with your creativity and little smartness you can create a fabulous title served to the information seeker. A title can lure away a reader with your article even if at one point of time he is looking for something else. So a smart catchy title can actually distract and plays as attention seeker in this vast ocean we know as internet.

Tip 8: Length of the article

It is very important to understand and know about the media you are writing for. Like if you are writing for a normal blog on internet then generally 500-800 words is enough and if you are doing it for a magazine 1000-2000 words can be expected. So divide your topics fairly in length. Readers expectations are also set by the mediums they are using and hence writing accordingly will streamline your article to their expectations.

Well! This is not the end of the line but just a beginning of a beautiful journey. These were few tips from my experience in listified article writing work. As you go further on the path of writing such articles, you will yourself understand the crux of writing a listified article which grabs attention. May be one day you will be writing an article adding more tips for such writing. Best of Luck!

How I Spent my Professional Blogging Break

ShoutMeLoud was started in 2008 end, and it’s been almost 4 and half years that I have blogging. Over this period of 4 and half-year, I created many other blogs to add new challenges into my life and I was 22 when I chose to become a professional blogger. I’m going to be 27 this year, and for the first time in last 4 and half year I took a much-needed long-break. I have taken small breaks in the past, but those breaks never stopped me from blogging or to write anything new. But, this time (Last two weeks), I took complete off from Social media, Blogging and most of the usual online activities related to work.

Initially I had no idea how this break is going to be for me, and since I’m back to my usual spirit of blogging, I will be sharing today how I spent my last few weeks of break, and why this unscheduled break was important.

As a blogger, I keep getting chance to travel to many places, and usually those 1-2 days of blogging event are break for me. Last month, I decided to go completely offline (At least from the blogging and writing), and I stick to my plan. (No Emails, No Social networking, No writing and no usual work which I do on daily basis). The idea was to stay offline for a while, and lets see life from the point which I have missed in last few years, and it was indeed a great experience. I will be sharing few interesting things which I did over the last 2 weeks, and why this break was a big refresher for me.

Money on Auto-pilot:

I wanted to talk a bit about money part, as this is the main reason we work day and night. When we take a holiday from work or in no-work mode, it’s usually our income which goes down. Surprisingly, in last 2 weeks, my income didn’t get affected anyhow (Thanks to affiliate marketing and other monetization techniques which I use here), and I still l manage to make over $100/day. Which is not the same as my average daily earning, but considering the fact that I was not working at all, I find it to be worth mentioning. This is the first time I realized the true power of making money on Auto-pilot (One more reasons for you to take blogging as a serious career option).

Trip to Mohali:

As I mentioned this unscheduled break was un-planned, and this all started with Mohali trip for a blogger meet, where I gave the first ever presentation of my life. I already talked about my experience and other details in these two posts:

Trip to Goa with Ford Team:

 

Goa has always been my favourite holiday destination and when Ford team organised a blogger get together to try out their new Ford EcoSport in Goa, I couldn’t deny the invitation. It was a great experience driving brand new Ford EcoSport for more than 100 Km, and I loved enjoying the beautiful Goa beaches. You can check out the picture of the blogger event here, and learn more about this car here.

A book Launch: The Captainship

 

Last week I went to attend a book launch of “The Captainship“. This book is about the journey of  few Indian entrepreneurs. The event was quite engaging and I met few of the Indian entrepreneurs, who also answered many questions related to entrepreneur journey.  If you are in the journey of entrepreneurship or solopreneurship, this book is worth your time. You can buy this book from Flipkart, and is also available for Kindle and iTunes. You can learn more about this book on the official site here.

TED Videos:

I like reading and learning new stuff. Usually my first choice is site like WatchMojo or YouTube videos. TED videos are a big source of inspiration and motivational factor for people like me. These videos not only helped me to learn more about myself, but also helped me to understand deep dynamic of marketing and public relations. If you really want to know what TED videos could do for you, here is one video which will help you to understand the importance of body language science:

I also spent quality time socializing with people and friends, and over all these few days of off was a much-needed break. Unlike regular office work, in professional blogging we don’t get off or anything. For us, it’s always like work from anytime and anywhere. Taking such breaks usually helps in bringing back the freshness in work and overall outlook.

For regular readers; You might have missed seeing updates here at ShoutMeLoud, and it was all because of the break that I was taking. Now you will notice regular updates here at ShoutMeLoud. Also, keep an eye for this month contest.

 

My WordPress Adventures – how I almost lost my blog

Before actually starting to present my experiences with WordPress, I would like to make certain things clear:

I really believe that Word Press is a great blogging platform, with a nice user interface, AND SEO friendly;I have been using Word Press for 2 years now, and I had very little complaints. I really like their features and the numerous plugins they offer.

*If interested in installing Word Press on your site, then have a look at my “How to install Word Press on your blog” tutorial.

Okay, now since we got that out of our way, we can begin with THE WORD PRESS STORY.

It all started just a few days ago. I was busy writing an article for my blog (My successful blog story) and was getting excited about publishing it. I guess, that now with since I put the basics of Blogger Backlinks, my very hidden writer talents are starting to come out. So, I am enjoying more and more to create a new post.

I was ready with it, so I went into my admin panel, ready to publish it. I notice an update available for Word Press, so, I think “well, I should stay up to date. Let’s do it!”. I update to the new version of Word Press (3.4.1), and I continue with my things.

For the record, BloggerBacklinks.Com is doing decently well in Google, for some very high competitive keywords. Needless to say, I see this site as my baby.

Three days after I did my last post, I go to my website, and I notice that my entire website has vanished. I refresh, I check in a new browser, the results were the same: NOT a single file on http://www.bloggerbacklinks.com.

I completely panicked. I had no idea what happened to my site. It vanished in thin air. The best thing I could do, is contact my hosting company, and ask them what the hell happened.

I rush to talk to support, and they were just as confused as I was, the only logical explanation was that because of my Word Press update, the backup was not done properly, and therefore all my files were lost.

This explanation sounds rather vague to me, but that was the best I could get. My hosting company was nice enough to look further more into this issue, and sent a ticket to the security department.

BUT, at the time being, I had no more site. ALL my work was gone. Everything I wrote, every post I made VANISHED. Nothing was left of my site but an empty page.

This also means complete destruction in SE. Because if Google finds ONE tiny error on your site, it will push you down in the SERPs. They don’t like websites with error on them.

Imagine how many I had with a complete empty page!

WHAT to do? With all the pain in my heart, I thought “Well..I will have to start from scratch”. So, reinstall word press again (just to see that I still have faith in this CMS, even if it crashed on me), and start putting my site online..AGAIN.

Find all the posts, check the links…pfft it was a mess. The situation was completely desperate, but I really wanted to have my site up and running again.

During this process, after some time, I get an internal server error. I was astonished.  I couldn’t believe my eyes. For the second time in 2 days time my site was no where to be found!

I really thought someone played a bad joke on me. I mean what were the odds? I rush again to contact support from my hosting company, and they tell me that they have a server maintenance, and that I shouldn’t worry, things will be up and running again.

I was relieved. Even if I would have preferred to continue rearranging Blogger Backlinks, I was happy that my site was still there somewhere.

SO I thought. The next day, when I want to login into my admin panel, I get a database error. So for the 3rd time, my site was having issues. I was really starting to think that black magic exists!

AGAIN, go back to support, and after 2 hours of talking with a very nice and helpful agent, I managed to get my site restored. FULLY and with the initial database before being erased the first time.

I really thought I was experiencing a miracle. I asked what was the cause of my site disappearing, and it is still yet unknown.

BUT, from all of this I have learnt 2 very important things, that I would advise you to follow if you ever find yourself in a situation similar to mine.

READ GOOD before installing anything on your site. It doesn’t matter if the install comes from God, you read it again.BACK UP everything on your site. Keep a copy of your site, especially if it’s an important one. Don’t be a stupid moron, like I was and leave it all to fate.

I got really lucky in this case, and also I can’t thank enough for the help support agent from Host Gator (my hosting company). Without his input, there would be no more bloggerbacklinks.com.

I already did a back up of everything, just in case. I guess this experienced showed me that things can really change over night, and if you’re not careful you can lose one of the most important things you worked so hard for.

Improve eCommerce Conversion Rates

There is quite a bit of hype and lure related to starting and operating an e-commerce store. The news is full of stories featuring stay-at-home moms who are now making thousands of additional dollars per month thanks to their e-commerce store they run for just a few hours per day. In reality, running an e-commerce store is very difficult, and few people break even, let alone make thousands of dollars in their spare time. While we’re not trying to dissuade you from starting an e-commerce store, we are going to give you three tips which you can implement into your e-commerce store to increase conversions and sales, and ultimately increase profits.

Use Upselling and Cross-Selling Techniques

Upselling and cross-selling are two terms used to describe the practice of suggesting more products for your customers to buy while they are in the checkout phase. These products should be similar, or should be complementary to the objects they already have in their shopping cart. For example, if your customer has decided to purchase a cellphone from your e-commerce store, it would be appropriate to upsell cellphone accessories such as cases, chargers and screen protectors, since these items are generally bought in conjunction with cell phones anyway.

Another method you can use that is similar to up-selling is called cross-selling. There are numerous ways to go about cross-selling, but it generally refers to using incentives to get your customers to purchase more items from your store. One of the most common cross-selling methods seen in almost every e-commerce store is the free shipping incentive. This involves setting a subtotal threshold that will eliminate the shipping cost. The threshold should be high enough that the additional shipping cost you bear won’t cut into your total profit from the sale.

A popular way of incorporating cross-selling into your e-commerce store is to download a plugin that will automatically recommend products to your customers that will bring their total to the threshold before they checkout. This greatly increases the chances of your customers purchasing the additional items, thus giving you more revenue.

Simplify Checkout Process

UK SEO is highly dependent upon optimizing the store checkout process in an effort to make it as seamless and easy as possible. You would be surprised by the number of people who have decided to purchase something, but then abort their purchase when it comes time to checkout because the checkout page is unorganized, difficult to navigate, or doesn’t look trustworthy for whatever reason.

Many e-commerce websites incorporate confusing, lengthy and oftentimes malfunctioning multi-page checkout forms which are both annoying and difficult to use. Instead of using a multi-page form you can improve customer conversion by using a single-page checkout form that incorporates all needed information on the same page. This page will show both the billing and shipping address, the shipping option(s) available, the payment method, and obviously what items are being purchased, how they cost, along with the total. Users should be able to edit all information from this one page, making it much easier for them to complete the checkout process.

Remind Customers of their Shopping Carts

All too often people will go to your website and fill their virtual shopping cart full of items that they want to purchase. For whatever reason, they leave your website without making a purchase. Perhaps they were making a wish list for when they have additional money, or perhaps they wanted to see how much all items were on your website versus a competitor’s website. No matter the reason, you can often lose out on 15% of your profits simply because of people leaving your website without purchasing anything, even though they have items in their shopping carts.

One of the easiest ways to increase the amount of revenue you generate from your e-commerce website is to use email marketing to remind your customers about the items they still have in their cart. A good way to spice up the pot and make them more likely to make a purchase is offer some type of incentive if they purchase. This could be an overall discount on their order, free shipping, or something similar, as long as it gives them incentive to purchase.

Building do follow blog backlinks – where to start

This is a topic that will interest any blogger that is interested in getting noticed online. Many people have thought of various ways to gain popularity for their sites and attract visitors.

Some of these methods worked, some failed miserably. In the world of blog backlinks it’s all about testing and having patience. Especially now, when the online environment is so unstable, with the strangest updates that come from Google (Panda and Penguin). Makes you wonder, what other type of mammal will come along and ruin all your link building techniques?

If you are to look around, and search for “how to build blog backlinks”, you will get a lot of sites that talk pretty much about the same thing and they just repeat one another. The only difference is that they use different words.

Sure, some of the methods are generally acceptable and they still give results in building backlinks. For instance, blog commenting. I also talked about this topic on this post:  Blog commenting - does it work? You can read it, and maybe you’ll understand better why I, personally am PRO blog commenting, even if some people would moan that the links are not “do follow”. They really help your position in Google, and make your links appear as natural backlinks.

However, today I plan on talking about links that ARE “do follow”, and come from high PR websites. Because that is the new quality standard that SE, mainly Google have set for their users. So, in other words, if you want to rank high and get a lot of organic traffic on your way, you will have to play by the rules. Technically, but practically I have seen some slip-ups from the big G that really makes me think.

For instance, sites that are offering great quality are placed somewhere at the bottom of the ocean. Which is highly unfair, and it will definitely not help improve the quality of SERPs (since that is Google’s  objective).

An answer to such an event, could be that the respective site, despite the great content, didn’t have enough high quality backlinks, and it was out ranked.

That is a very high possibility, considering that there are millions of site in the same niche that I am, or that your site is in. So, that is why it is required to take extra efforts and improve our techniques for building blog backlinks.

If you are like me, then you probably already read here and there some suggestions, and you’re thinking how to implement them for your own site.

I can just offer some advice and some conclusions that I have reached based upon testing.

In my opinion, what works when it comes to building backlinks after Panda & Penguin Updates is blog commenting, social media, some Web 2.0 presence and possibly RSS.

These are the means that I rely on when I want to boost my websites’s rankings.  So far, I can’t complain about the results I obtained in SE which makes me think that I am on the right path.

Social media has gained A LOT of power lately. I see that reddit really sends a lot of traffic my way, and also my Delicious link stack seems to be helping me considerably.

Therefore, if you have been neglecting this aspect until now, please STOP. Start getting involved in social media marketing ASAP. I wrote some posts about this too, in case you may be interested:

1. What is the use of social media for your blog

2. Social marketing - optimize your social marketing strategy

Even so, building blog backlinks on your own without any help can be a very hard battle, you’d have more chances to lose than to win.

I am a fan of certain tools that help me find better keywords, or help me get new ideas on what to build sites around, maybe spy a bit on my competitors. All of these help you get a better idea where you stand, and some of the tools I use are:

MajesticSEO – really helps you get an overview of the backlinks that you get or your competitor gets.

Google Keyword Tool- helps me get good keywords for my niche.

SpyFU.com – Based upon the number of ads for a keyword I can get a better idea if is popular or not.

Rank Tracker –it’s a part of the SEO Power suite, and it helps you see what PR you have, and what is your position in SE.

Google Analytics and Webmaster’s Tools- these are extremely important to understand where does your traffic come from, and maybe decide where to head in the future.

These tools, I use relatively often, especially when I want to keep an overview on how things go. Recently, I came across another one, and it really helps me with my social network marketing.

NOW, I will finally get to the “do follow backlinks” part. This software it’s called Social Monkee, and it will make your life easier when it comes to building social networking backlinks.This program will allow you to build 25 UNIQUE backlinks to your page every day. This means 750 blog bakclinks each month. What is special about this is that all of the backlinks that come to your site, have unique IPs.

In the eyes of Google, this means that there will be 750 brand new sites each month vouching for you and building your trust more and more.

So, in 3 months time, you can have 2225 unique blog backlinks to your site and it will definitely improve your blog page rank. You have all the chances to make it in Top 10 results, even for No#1 for your main keyword.

I am personally very excited about Social Monkee, and I thought I would share it with you too. I am still experimenting with this tool, but I do like the idea that I get unique backlinks for my site.  This is the safest way to build your popularity and enhance your position in SERPs.

AND, the best part is, that Social Monkee is very cheap, it only costs 7$, and you’ll be granted life time membership. If you are interested, you can see this link, and maybe you’ll join also

Even if you don’t go for the Social Monkee offer, keep in mind that social networking is very important for you blog’s page rank, so try to be active in that are as much as possible.

Happy blogging

View the original article here

Writing for your blog. Where to get content from?

If it’s one thing that I learned the hard way is that blogging is much more than a simple hobby. And if you want to make money with it then you’ll have to get even more serious.

One of the difficult things about maintaining your own blog on the floating line is keeping it updated constantly. You don’t come up with something new to say, a fresh product to present an interesting topic to discuss, your blog will be forgotten within 1 week. I know it’s really unfair, but this is how it goes. The competition is high, and there will always be someone wanting to do just a little bit more to get ahead.

But writing about things can be an extremely demanding job
. At some point you just don’t know what to say anymore. And it’s not all about just writing something for the sake of it. Absolutely not.  In the world of blogging there a lot of other aspects to take into consideration. Such as: the length of your post, if it’s keyword rich, but not too much because then you’ll be penalized, if it has nicely written paragraphs, if there are no spelling errors, and most importantly is it SEO friendly and will your readers enjoy it?
If you come to think about it, there are a lot of elements that need to be taken care of when you’re writing. Of course it’s not as difficult as writing literature, but still, there are some rules. And the bad part is, that not all of us have such a gift to put words on a sheet of paper (well a post) so easily.

And that can really be damaging for your business. In the online environment, one of the most efficient ways of communicating with your potential customer is through writing. The manner that you present your business or how you describe your service will have a serious impact on your revenue. It will decide whether you will earn more, or you’ll just be on stand by.

And only if getting the right content would be the only thing to do in order to maintain a blog/website alive. It would be nice, wouldn’t it? But we all know that’s not the case. There are a bunch of things that need to be taken care of, for instance promotion. Building links in a natural way. And that is a real tough one. Then, also make sure that your readers are happy, talk to them, stay in touch. Look for new products to review, start new sites, promote those. It’s really complicated, and time is of the essence.

That is why, sometimes a little bit of help can really get you places. My plan is to develop more sites in different niches; most of them are something like my personal hobby. But even so, writing content for them it’s really overwhelming for me. Think about it. If you want to start 5 new sites for each of them you would need at least 5 pages with written text of at least 550 words.  So that’s 25 pages * 550 words. I think it’s safe to conclude that this will take time. At the end of the day, I realize I didn’t even eat properly. I mean okay, we should all work, but not kill ourselves in the process.

So, I thought to look around for someone to give me a little bit of help with my writing scheme here, and I encountered this group of professional writers and I was quite impressed with what they did. The site is called Article Writers SEO, and they have a pretty decent deal for your articles.

They provide only high quality content which is 100% SEO optimized. Also, all articles are written by native English speakers so there won’t be any weird spelling errors or sentences that don’t make sense.

Also, they are very much up to date with the latest changes from Google, and you can choose from 2 different types of articles: keyword or LSI keyword ones. I went for LSI (latent semantic indexing) keyword articles because I realized that SE like it much more when they find related searches of your main keyword. I guess it looks more natural like that.

I ordered 10 articles through them, and they were very quick with delivering them. And it really helped me a lot. I used the time for writing those articles to do other much more useful things.

It’s rare nowadays to find a service that has good report price/quality. But I think I got lucky with Article Writers SEO. If you’re interested in what they have to offer you can contact them here.

Outsourcing for content is starting to be a very “must do” thing nowadays. Google really got smarter and you can’t fool around with blog networks that have spinned content. And probably that’s why I consider Article Writers SEO to be such a gem.

I just thought I’d mention them to you in case you ever find yourself in the same situation as mine.

Happy Blogging! he aim in this article is not just to get a high Page Rank.
http://bloggerbacklinks.com/2012/08/writing-for-your-blog-where-to-get-content-from/ Marylin Newland
Spy on your competitions website backlinks if you want to create backlinks from the same sites as them
http://bloggerbacklinks.com/build-blog-backlinks/building-do-follow-blog-backlinks-where-to-start/ Suellen Locorriere
There are a number of other factors which could be turning the visitor to your site off. Things like a bad title (remember the 10 second rule), a bad intro, poor writing style, bad content etc etc.
http://bloggerbacklinks.com/bloggers-tips-tricks/how-to-use-blogger-backlinks/ Hoyt Schinker
Has anyone ever commented on your blog and have you been happy with the comment or just annoyed by the random comment and a link.
http://bloggerbacklinks.com/bloggers-tips-tricks/how-to-install-wordpress-on-your-blog/ Magaly Penttila
8. Article writing is a great way to create backlinks

Drive the people to your HELPFUL article, from there – if they are captivated by what you said, then they might click on a link which would take them to your landing page or blog. Basically you are walking with the customer through the final stages of their purchase life cycle.

Writing A Successful Blog

I am sure this question was on every blogger’s mind when they thought about setting up a site.

If you have your own blog, surely you have encountered situations where you just didn’t know what to write about, not to mention writing about interesting things that would be appealing to other people as well.

Unfortunately, when you started to be active in the online environment no one told you what steps to take in order to have a successful blog, or what topics to approach that will guarantee a lot of attention from your audience.

But you expected to discover the “recipe for success” on the way. The truth is, that no one can give you a book and say “Read this, and if you follow the rules here, you will be #1”. Unless you have met the magic gold fish and it grant you a wish.

The best you can hope for, is to get inspired from other people’s road to writing a great blog and try and learn from their experiences in order to apply it to your own case. If you copy a technique or someone, your results won’t be spectacular. Why? Because the concept already exists, and you won’t be seen as a person that actually gives real value to a subject.

This doesn’t mean that you have to go out of your way and find topics to discuss that no one else approached. No. This means that you have to bring your doze of uniqueness to whatever you do.

And with that in mind, I thought that I should open a section on BloggerBacklinks.Com, called “How to write a successful blog?”. Here, you will read stories about how other people, just like me and you, started their “blogging career”, and how things went from them from the beginning until now.

Hopefully, stories like these will get you more motivated and will help you hold on no matter how difficult things may get.

The first Successful Blog Story comes from Jeremy, who was kind to answer some set of question so that we would get a better understanding of how things evolved for him.
Below you can read the mini-interview:

1. Tell me about yourself, please.

My name is Jeremy Cook, I live in South Carolina and work as a Mechanical Engineer full time.  My site is all about the engineering-type projects that I do in my spare time.

2. Can you tell me a bit about your blog? What is the main topic you approach?

I started my website, jcopro.net, late in 2010 as a free WordPress site, eventually I registered the domain name, which is short for Jeremy Cook's Projects then went to self-hosting a few months after that.  The subject matter has always been about the projects that I do in my spare time, including Robotics, CNC machining, pneumatics, and some tutorials on the software I use to create stuff with.

3. Can you give me an overview of your blog’s evolution from the beginning until now?

As mentioned, I started this blog as a free WordPress site.  It took a bit of commitment to actually write a good blog to go to self-hosting since you have to pay for it, but it turned out really well.  My blog now pays for itself with ads, and helps offset the cost of making robots and other stuff that is pretty much for my (and visitors to my site's) entertainment.

4. Was it difficult to get visitors?

It was difficult to get visitors at first.  Probably my fist big "break" was getting one of my projects on hackaday.com.  Really exciting to see your hits rocket from a general number of 50 or so to over 1000 in a day.  That doesn't last of course, but if you can get listed on a larger site be sure to do it!

5. What were the methods you approached in order to increase your blog’s popularity? Which ones would you consider to be most effective nowadays?

Getting listed by larger sites can be great, but the other thing I learned to do was list my stuff on Reddit.  There's definitely an art to doing it politely so people don't think it's spam, but that can drive a lot of traffic if done correctly.  I've also been experimenting with Twitter, but I've yet to see great results with that.  I'm honestly not sure I know that I'm doing.

6. Do you interact directly with your visitors?

Yes, I definitely reply to comments that I get.  People don't generally contact me directly that much, but my blog has opened up some opportunities that I wouldn't have been able to pursue otherwise.

7. What was your traffic at the beginning and where did it get now?

The first few months were generally under 50 hits a day or so.  My traffic varies widely now, but generally 500 hits per day is normal.  A few over 4000 hits in a day is my best so far.

8. Do you monetize your blog? Are you satisfied with the results?

Yes, I monetize it.  As with raw traffic, I'm not sure I'll ever by satisfied, but I'm generally happy with my results so far.  I use Amazon and Google Adsense.  Both work well, but are used a bit differently in my blog.

9. What would be an word of advice for people that just started blogging?

If you're going to do it, write your blog about something that you really like.  If you can make money at it, that's really cool, but I think if that's your only motivation, you probably won't do it for long.  With me it was easy, I simply love making stuff.  Writing about it came quite naturally.

10. Thank you very much for your answers Jeremy and all the very best with your blog.

You can visit Jeremy’s site here: http://www.jcopro.net

Or follow him on Twitter: @JeremySCook

If you too want to share your successful blog story, leave a comment below, or write an e-mail to contact (@) bloggerbacklinks.com, and I will get in touch with you, and we will schedule a mini interview.