Members. All blogs that have great longevity have got members, and you will notice more and more that people are offering free newsletters, updates on articles, extra content and more when you visit their blog. When you have a member base on your blog, you effectively have a captive audience, which you can keep updated with all your latest offers and updates. It is a very good thing to have extra content available on a weekly basis for these members, because they will follow links through to your site, and that steady stream of traffic will keep returning week after week. You must never over-market this list either. It is generally not a good idea to send out offers to them at all until you have had them as members for a long time, receiving free information and such. WordPress does not have this built in as standard, so you have to be creative and use plugins, or at least use AWeber or a similar autoresponder that can send out offers at a time you specify.

If you start by offering free information, and build their trust and respect as a blogger, you can then begin to send out paid offers or links to affiliate sites later on. Using AWeber to manage your list is much easier than using WordPress plugins, and you can send out a ‘paid’ email 28 days after the initial contact email, so your member has had free content for almost a month before you hit them with a paid ad.

Most people assume they have to create new content regularly for their members to ensure they retain them. This is not always the case. If you wrote up a synopsis of a great article you found on another marketer’s site, and linked them to your blog to read that synopsis… and THEN linked to the marketer’s blog – then this is a great way of keeping your readers entertained, as well as providing great free content as a build up to a paid ad.

Blogging can be a pain in the butt if you do not want to spend time ensuring the site is up to standrads that search engines now demand.  They require more and more from a webmaster now, than ever before. Usually, it’s content. Content can make or break a site, and the only real longevity a site ever gets is from unique regular content being added, and Google seeing this happen over a length of time.

You can argue the point that most of the autoblogs out there are spinning content to 30% unique, and they are getting away with page one rankings with Google – but for how long? You really need to add enough content to ensure Google thinks you are an authority on your niche subject, and starts pumping traffic your way, based on this trust. That word has now become a beacon for most webmasters, because Trustrank is well and truly here. Google is now ranking sites NOT just based on their inbound links, but also on their outbound links (amongst other things under the Trustrank banner). If your site has no selfless outbound links – which can link to any site – then your site has less chance of ranking higher. The best place to observe this is on website flipping sites like Flippa.com. You can check the micro-niche blogs that advertise Amazon products. These guys rank up high in the SERPs, and all include Trustrank methods. You will see few that do not have outbound links in their sidebars…

Another big deal over at Google HQ has always been backlinks. You may have seen recently that Angela and PJ’s backlinks have been penalized by Google, and their sites have received a drop in Pagerank. This is testament to the fact that all your backlinking activities should be natural and relevant. Always be wary of purchasing backlinks – it may harm your site if you do!