Blogging & Squidooing

Well it's the last days of April which means that it's the last days of the A-Z Blogging Challenge that I have been undertaking on two of my other blogs - All Eighties, All the Time & Unique and Funky Gifts.   I must say that the challenge has been fun and challenging (as a challenge is supposed to be by definition).   It has taught me something however - I can do it!

I have managed to post a minimum of 12 blog posts per week for a month.   In that month I've spent 2 weeks overseas with restricted access to a very slow internet connection, had to survive 9 days of school holidays and a 5 day long weekend with the whole family at home wanting my time.   If I can do that I know I can at least make 10 blog posts a week, every week :D

Why is blogging so important?   One word - backlinks!

Now there are a couple of different ways to blog and it's easy to get confused by them.   Many people blog for traffic hoping that people will click on adsense or purchase products listed, other people just blog for backlinks.   For Squidoo purposes you don't have to garner 100s of followers and thousands of hits every day because what you're after is backlinks - of course if you can achieve all of these things then that's even better.

A lot of people get discouraged when blogging because they don't get feedback and wonder if it's worth it.   One of my blogs has never received a comment, but it's given me a number of backlinks, while another blog has made sales, I think both of these blogs are successes because I established them for different reasons.

Niche blogs or general blogs is a question that a lot of people have and if you only have time to write one blog and you cover a number of different subjects on Squidoo as well as other sites you may belong to then stick to a general blog.   For each blog post focus on one thing and make sure that you write the post with seo in mind and then add the link to your lens/article/zazzle product etc.   This will ensure that you get a good backlink.

If you're after a blog that sales then you definitely need to go niche as you would with lenses, but to get backlinks for your Squidoo lenses (and whatever else you do online) then general is absolutely fine.