How to Create a Free Blog using Blogspot.com with Images

Do you want to create a blog using BlogSpot blogging platform? Not found a great guide on creating a blog on BlogSpot?

If you want to start creating a free blog on BlogSpot and drive quality website traffic to it, in this easy to follow, beginners tutorial, you’ll learn a lot of things on how to create a successful blog on BlogSpot including my personal experience.

So, are you ready to start your blogging career on Blogger?

Yes?

So, why we wait? Let's start...

This guide has seven sections. Let’s start from basics. Here’re a few of this important sections.

1. Basics – Why you should create a blog, what’s the difference between a blog and a website and why you should choose BlogSpot.
2. Things to do before creating a blogger blog.
3. How to create a free BlogSpot blog easily.
4. Useful tools for your very first BlogSpot blog.
5. Essential things to do after creating the free BlogSpot blog.
6. Important things to do for your BlogSpot weblog.
7. Best advice to maintain your blog and increase blog traffic.

What’s a blog and why should you have a blog?

If you’re a new to blogging, you might be struggling to understand the difference between a blog and a website. Although I am not going to very deep into what’s blogging and its origin, here’s a brief description about the term of blog from Wikipedia.

A blog (a truncation of the expression weblog) is a discussion or informational site published on the World Wide Web and consisting of discrete entries ("posts") typically displayed in reverse chronological order (the most recent post appears first)

If you want to learn more about the blog and blogging, you can get a lot of knowledge from Wikipedia.

Do you know that in every second, two new blogs (yes, brand new weblogs) created anywhere on the world ?

Amazingly a few of them survive on the Internet and get the success that web-owners hoped. Now you may think that if there are more than 5 million new blogs publicized monthly, what will happen to your free blog. Can you create a successful blog?

Although there are already more than 152,000,000 million public blogs in the world, a few of them dominate the web and get the attention of people.

Do you think by now there’s nothing to blog about, because of the number of public blogs and the post frequency on the Internet?

No, Google states that in every single day, people type millions of new keywords that they never heard! Amazing?

In other hand, the main decider of surviving a blog is the blogger who handles the weblog. If he or she doesn't have the characteristics of consistency, dedication and the ability of creating new unique content or the creativeness, so there’s no chance to survive those blogs on the Internet.Period?

I think that by now you know what a blog is and why you can create a blog in any niche any time.

Let’s discuss why you should have a blog and why you should choose BlogSpot instead other blogging platforms such as Tumblr and WordPress.

First answer to these questions…

1. Are you a good writer ? I mean can you write for a five grade student ?
2. Are you a web designer or other freelancer who has the creativeness ?
3. Is there anything you know very well (ex: cooking, gardening, software development, teaching, camping etc.…) ?
4. Is there anything you’re very passionate about? (Ex: cricket, volleyball, writing, translation)?
5. Do you have specific skills such as speaking attractively that many others don’t have?
6. Do you want place the full-stop to the 9 to 5 job and make some lucrative monthly income online ?
7. Do you want a part-time job ?

If your answer is the “yes” for one of above questions, so you should start creating a blog. Owning a blog will not only give you residual income, but also give you a self-rating as a teacher, blogger and an creative Internet marketer.

Make money blogging is not hard, if you know how to build a successful blog and what’re your potential readers’ feelings, ideas and problems. If you want to start creating a successful blog online, today I will show you step by step how to create a free blog and how to develop it to get quality traffic to your very first online blog.

Why BlogSpot? Not WordPress or other Blogging platforms?

There are a lot of blogging platforms online. Many are free to use. Others premium or freemium that have limits. Sure, you can choose a hosting company and start your WordPress blog today. But, if you aren’t an expert in blogging or Internet marketing, I recommend you to choose other blogging software such as BlogSpot. It is no doubt that WordPress has a lot of features and the flexibility you receive as a blogger. But, what’s the best thing about BlogSpot is that it’s free to use everything and you can start making money blogging right today. Let me explain it better.

Although there are a lot of plugins and features in the WordPress blogging platform (I am talking about self-hosted blogging platform, not WordPress.com), it’s not guaranteed that you’ll blog securely and you’ll make money blogging within hours.

In the other hand, there are a lot more chances to be hacked a WordPress blog rather than a Blogger blog. Have you ever heard that any BlogSpot blog has been hacked? I guess your answer isNo. Because of Blogger blogs are hosted on Google servers. You know that Google has the best technology in serving content to people.

If you don’t use a reliable and WordPress optimized hosting for your WordPress blog such asWPengine, you’ll not be able to blogging confidently. Because you can't believe that your blog will not down when tomorrow morning.

Another thing is that prevent you from creating a self-hosted blog is that quality website hosting companies charge higher price. If you are starting your blogging career from scratch, so you have to start from a hosted blogging platform.

After you learned basics of blogging (how to write quality content, how to build a loyal audience) and other stuff such as conversation optimization etc, you can migrate from Blogger to WordPress.

But, now let’s learn how to create a free blog using BlogSpot.com from scratch. Yes, create a successful blog from scratch.

In a previous Article, I talked about why you must have a Tumblr blog. If want to learn more about Tumblr blogging platform and its features, I suggest you to read it: Tumblr Blogging – Reasons to have a Tumblr blog.

So, by now, you’re concerned about why you must have a blog and the reasons to choose BlogSpot as your blogging software. Here are a few things you should do before creating blogger blog.

Things to do before creating a blogger blog

Before learning how to make a free blog on Blogger, you should know why you’re blogging, what’re the reasons and what about you should blog.

I don’t want you to be like another 98% of bloggers who start a blog with a good motivation and after a few days they give up because the lack of few characteristics.

A few reasons why amateur bloggers fail (Giving up blogging):

1. Doesn't have the consistency – If you distract from new things on the internet (ex: a new online money making trick, new way to sell products online), you’ll not be able to engage in blogging successfully. This is the main reason why many bloggers fail from blogging.
2. Can’t make money blogging – If you want to make money blogging from day one, sorry to say that it takes some time than you think. John Chow, a multi-million internet marketer has said that he got his first one dollar to his account after eight months of blogging. So if you want to expedite the time to take make money blogging, you have to dedicate more time to blogging.
3. Doesn't have a Plan – To do everything you should have a plan. Without a plan, you don’t know from where you should start and from where you should end. If you want to survive in the blogsphere, you should start creating your own plan.
4. Try to do many things at one time – Do you know a secret how pro bloggers dominate the Internet, earn millions of dollars from blogging? Because they do what they do in quality. Do you think that they can do tens of tasks at once? No, they take some time and do it with quality. If you are planning to start more than one blog online, I recommend you to stop it and create only one successful blog. When you grow, you can create more blogs online.
5. Don’t know what’s happening currently in the industry – If you are using old fashioned techniques, you’ll not get the success that you’re expecting. So you need to watch what’s happening in your industry. (Ex: Google’s new algorithm updates, new blogging tools,keyword research tools, new ways to success online such as competitor analysis etc.)
6. Doesn't have the motivation – This is one of the top reasons why novice bloggers give up blogging. Read your industry leaders' successful stories and get motivated.

So now you know why many bloggers are failing from blogging. You should take above statements seriously and start optimizing your mind in a successful way. Before you start creating a free blog on BlogSpot platform, you must concern a few things.

What is Your Blogging Niche?

Blogging niche is the blogging topics that you’re talking on your blog. Ex: cooking, gardening, eCommerce, stock-exchange, web design, games, software development, Internet Marketing.

You should use a broad niche as your blogging field. Ex: Blogging (we can break down this topic into various categories such as blogging tips, blogging platforms, blog hosting, SEO, SEM, content marketing, affiliate marketing, tools reviews, copywriting, conversion optimization, make money blogging etc.)

You may find that by using a broad topic as your blogging niche, you can write variety of blog posts. The list never ends.

How to find your blogging niche?

There are a few ways you can follow to find your blogging niche. The best way is finding what you are passionate about. In my case, I love blogging, Internet marketing and SEO. If you’re passionate about cooking, you can start creating a blog about cooking: cooking recipes, deserts, fruits etc.

If you’re passionate about cricket, you can teach others how to play cricket, cricket news, etc. If you like fashion, you can create a fashion blog.

Another great way to find your blogging niche is by your skills and knowledge. If you know how to design a landing page or create a web application, you can start creating a technology blog like Amit Agrawal from Labnol did.

It doesn't matter how you choose your blogging niche. What matter is how much do you like that field and how much time can you dedicate for your niche. 

OK, Now you have the basic ingredients of creating a free BlogSpot blog. You know why you blog, what about blogging and what should you do to prevent failing you from blogging. Now let’s learn how to create a BlogSpot blog within a few minutes.

How to create a free blog using Blogspot.com

You can create a blog very easily. Here’s a video tutorial to create a new blogger blog.

 
If you miss something in the above YouTube video, here’s the step by step guide to create a free BlogSpot blog.

1. Sign into your Google account. If you don’t have a Google account, you can create a free account from here.
2. Now go to Blogger.com website and click on ‘New Blog’ button.

3. Fill the necessary information about your blog. In the title field, enter your blog title. This will show in search engine result pages. You can change it later. In the blog address field, type your blogspot website’s address. You can use hyphens (-) to differentiate words. It doesn't necessary if you’re going to add a TLD (Top Level Domain) to your blog.

4. Choose a Theme for your blog. You can change the blogspot theme later.
5. Click on Create Button.

Now you have created your BlogSpot blog. It’s time to set up your blog for people and search engines.

Note: If you want to restrict the access to other peoples, you can create a private blog on Blogspot. You can make your public blog the private blog easily on settings page.

Essential Things to do after creating a BlogSpot blog

There are a lot of things to do after creating a blogger blog. Below are a few of them. Follow them and make your website stand out from the crowd. Remember I said that more than 5 million blogs originate monthly. Below is the exact way how to specialize your blogspot blog from other blogs and get the attention of people.

Set Up Custom Domain Name

Why do you need to set up custom domain name for your BlogSpot blog? Why should you not use the sub domain name (yourblogname.blogspot.com)?

Have seen any web page from a .blogspot.com sub-domain blog rank in higher for any particular high competitive keyword? Sure, if you write more about BlogSpot blogging platform such as social share widget for blogger and Facebook comment box for blogger, you can rank first two pages for any keyword including blogspot keyword very easily. Because of there is the Blogspot term in the root domain.

However, you can’t do it too long. Because Google prefers to rank TLD domains than sub domain names in SERPs higher. If you want to drive long term traffic from search engines, you must set up custom domain name for your blogspot blog.

Another thing you must set up the TLD for your blog is that it gives an authority in your niche, build trust, increase CTR and you can easily create the brand awareness. People will address your blog and search your blog on everywhere, search engines, forums and social media. Here’s how Google identified the Pro Blog Tricks as a brand.

How to buy a Custom Domain Name for your Blogspot Blog

You can get a top level domain name for your blog very cheap price. Only $12 per year. There is a lot of domain extension like .com, .Org, .Net, .Info, country specific domain names and new domain extensions like .Photo, .Club, . Guru and .Tips etc. However, if your target audience is not country specialized, you should use a TLD domain such as.com.

Get .com TLD domain name just for $1.99 – special deal for Pro Blog Tricks readers

Now you can get a .com top level domain name for your blogspot blog for dirty cheap price. Yes, .com for $1.99. We’ll use world’s best domain name registrar, Godaddy to buy a domain name.

Click here to get your own .com domain name just for $1.99 right now. (Save $10.00)

You shouldn’t be late to buy your .com domain because actually there are minimum .com domains available. So more you late, the less .com domains will be available for you.

Here are a few tips to consider before buying a top-notch TLD name.

• If you want to set up a unique blog that no other bloggers have, be creative and buy a unique domain name. ex: labnol
• If you want a keyword rich domain name, do keyword research on Google or SEMrushto find high volume low competitive keywords for your blog domain. You might use a keyword rich domain name such as Pro Blog Tricks, blog boost traffic or use a keyword mixed domain name such as SEOmoz, backlinko etc.
• Don’t use weird words within your domain name.
• Don’t use too many characters in your domain.
• Don’t use one letter two times together. Ex: socialmediaacademy
• Use easy to pronounce, use and remember domain name.

After purchasing your domain name for Blogspot from Godaddy, follow this article to mapping your domain name to work with Blogger.

Install a Premium Template for BlogSpot blog

There are a lot of debates about free blogger templates vs premium blogger templates. I have comprehensively explained what’re the differences between a Free Tumblr theme and a premium Tumblr theme and why you should use a premium Tumblr theme than a free Tumblr theme. Same circumstances include for BlogSpot platform.

Free BlogSpot templates are good and free of cost. However premium Blogger templates are great and have many features. I have shared a few premium Blogspot templates. But also to get more up-to-date, attractive Template for your Blog, you can purchase a premium Blogger template from Themeforest here.

After creating your blog, second most important thing is to install a premium Blogger template. Now you have a great looking website with a custom design. Here’s the third most important thing you must do after create a blog on blogspot.com.

Set Up Google Analytics for Your BlogSpot Blog

Google Analytics gives you in-depth insights about your blog, blog design, user engagement, user behavior and user activities. Every webmaster has set up the Google Analytics for their blogs. So you should do the same.

I have written a detailed guide on How to Set up Google Analytics for BlogSpot blogs. Read it Here:How to Set up Google Analytics for BlogSpot blogs

Verify your website ownership with Major webmaster tools

Verifying your website ownership with webmaster tools is very important than submitting your website to search engines. Here’re major webmaster tools and the link to particular tutorials on how to verify your website ownership.

Google Webmaster Tools: Google Webmaster tools is for Google and Google’s other search engines. By submitting your website to Google webmaster tools, you can control over the SERP appearance of your blog. And also find what keyword drives you most of the traffic and what should you do in order to fine-tune your website for getting more search engine traffic.

Bing Webmaster Tools: Bing webmaster tools helps you control the search appearance in Bing and Yahoo search engines. Sign in using your Microsoft account to Bing webmaster tools and start optimizing your website for Bing search engine.

Baidu Webmaster Tools: Chinese largest search engine is the Baidu. According to Alexa rank metrics, Baidu is one of top 10 most popular websites in the world. If you didn’t verify your website with Baidu webmaster tools and start optimizing your website according to Baidu recommendations, it will take longer, actually months or years to drive significant traffic from Baidu Chinese search engine. So follow this tutorial to learn how to verify your website ownership with Baidu webmaster tools.

Yandex webmaster tools: Yandex is a Russian based search engine. By submitting your website to Yandex webmaster tools, you can increase the organic traffic that comes from the Yandex search engine.

Not only verifying your website ownership with webmaster tools gives you the ability of deciding how much traffic you’d receive organically, but also can increase the search traffic very easily. Because you know how you can increase the organic traffic using webmaster tools.

Set up social media profiles/channels for your brand new blog

Not only social media help to drive insane traffic to your website, but also help in increasing the brand awareness and increase the search traffic indirectly. Except the Google search engine, Facebook and YouTube is the world’s two most popular social media websites. Facebook is the world’s largest social community while YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine which can drive highly engaged visitors to your website.

For Pro Blog Tricks, I have set up the social channels in most every popular social media sites. Below are a few of those social channels. You can use below links to create your own business pages for your BlogSpot blog also.

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google+
• Pinterest
• YouTube
• LinkedIn
• VKontakte
• SlideShare
• Instagram

Make sure you set up an attractive page design in those social media profiles and follow these timings to post updates to get maximum awareness.

Create special pages for your blog

Creating a blog is like starting an online business. You should add important pages on your website.

• About – who you’re and what’s your story.
• Contact – ways to contact you. Add a contact form.
• Privacy policy – mention here if you collect user information and/or use cookies.
• Terms of service – mention here if you give any service to people.
• Earning disclaimer – your claim about making money from your blog.
• FAQ – if you give a product or service, add frequently asked questions.
• Help – if you provide any service or product add frequently asked questions and allow them to contact you.

You don’t need to use all of these important pages. However, you can add the most important pages such as about, contact and privacy policy. Don’t forget to create those pages on static pages.

Setup FeedBurner feed service for your BlogSpot blog

Now you have a well set-up blogspot blog. The next thing to do is set up the Feedburner for your blog. Go to Feedburner.google.com and burn your blog address to get a unique RSS feed page for your blog updates.

Allow your readers to sign up to RSS feed by displaying buttons on your website. Here are working tips to increase RSS feed subscribers.

Start capturing potential readers of your blog

This is one of the most important mistakes that most bloggers do in the beginning of the blogging. Honestly, I did this mistake. What is it?

Not start collecting the email addresses of blog readers.

Now you know it. If you didn’t collect email addresses of your readers, you put huge money on the table. Why?

Email list owns you. But social followers aren't owing to you. Another thing is that Email marketing has the highest ROI (return on investment), which is 4000%.

What that tells you. Averagely from one subscriber, you can earn $40. To learn more about collecting email addresses of blog readers, read this article: Power of email marketing – why you must have an Email list

That article guides you how to create an email list and start collecting email address from your blog readers. If you want to know the features of a great email marketing solution, click here.

Add Social Media buttons to BlogSpot blog

Social media optimization is one of hottest topics talking in these days: How social signals influence to the search engine ranking, how social media can drive viral traffic, how to use social media wisely to drive spikes of traffic, how to use social media to increase the leads and how to use social media to promote blog posts.

Every blog in today uses social media to drive extra traffic. The good thing is that you can drive quick traffic to any blog post using social media. You just need to do is let people share your content on the social web.

I have shared a few tutorials about social media sharing widgets to blogger. But, I recommend you to read this article:  Best Social Media Sharing widgets with Analysis

I have listed a few social media sharing widgets. They also provide you in-depth social share and social click analytics. You can use those stats to determine what content does well and what content are weak at getting user attention.

Start writing high quality content with better keyword research

Now you have a well-set-up BlogSpot blog. It is the time to start creating a few blog posts. You’re going to write content for people. So you have to find what people are searching on the internet, not what you think they might people want to read.

How to find what people are searching on the internet?

Keyword research is very essential when it comes to blogging. That's why i have listed a great keyword research tools for blogging and SEO prospects. You'd find a lot of keyword research tool over there.

Many people use Adwords keyword tool to find keywords. Here's the step by step guide to find SEO keywords using Adwords tool.

I use several SEO tools to find lucrative and low competitive, but high volume keywords for my blog posts. Keep reading. I will reveal it later.

Optimize your blog for both people and search engines

This is one of important things to do after creating a free blog on blogspot.com. You should optimize your website for both people and search engines. Use a mobile responsive template for your blogger blog. If you use a premium blogger template from Themeforest, so don’t need to worry too much. Because of most of premium BlogSpot templates out there are mobile responsive.

Add relevant meta tags in your BlogSpot blog. Use blogging tools listed in below to increase the search appearance and get more search traffic. Also, don’t write only for search engines, don’t keyword stuffing; instead do keyword stemming (keyword variations) and use visual content to grab the user’s attention.

There are a lot more to do to optimize your blog for both people and search engines. Download and read this Google’s SEO starter guide. This will walk you through how the Google search engine works and how to optimize your website for both people and search engine bots. Read Neil Patel’scontent marketing guide to find how to write content which drive traffic from both search engines and social media.

Useful Tools for your FREE BlogSpot blog

Here are a few useful tools for your blogspot blog. Use them wisely to increase your blog traffic and take your blog to the next level.

SEOmofo – Google SERP Snippet Optimization Tool

You can use this SEO tool to optimize title and description of your blog and blog pages for search engine visitors. Very useful to preview how page information will perform in Google SERP.

Pingler – Ping your Blog post to various websites and search engines

It will take some time to crawl a new blog by Googlebot. But you can expedite it by pinging your latest posts to search engines. Pinler allows you to ping latest content to hundreds of search engines at one time.

Hoostsuite – Manage social media profiles

This is very popular service to manage your social media accounts. Create an account and add your accounts to Hootsuite. Then you can bulk share or schedule social shares on different social networks.

SEMrush Keyword difficulty tool – Find Low competitive keywords

The SEMrush keyword difficulty tool shows you how much it’s easy to rank #1 for any particular keywords. SEMrush keyword difficulty tool is a very useful keyword tool used by thousands of professional bloggers to drive huge traffic to their websites. Click here to create your account.

SEMrush competitor Analysis tool - Spy on your competitors

I use SEMrush SEO tools to increase blog traffic fast. SEMrush has very powerful tools. Read my comprehensive review of SEMrush search engine marketing tool over here. Some of very useful tools are: competitor analysis tools, backlink checker tool, keyword position tracking tool,siteaudit tool (very useful to improve on-site SEO)

If you want improve your blog fast, you should consider using SEMrush for your blogging and SEO aspects. Read my case-study on How i increased website traffic fast without no manual link building.

Google Analytics Extension - Analyze your blog stats without going to Google Analytics

Use this Google Chrome extension in your browser to examine traffic of any web page very easily.

Baidu Ping - Ping Content to Baidu Search Engine

If you didn't ping your recent blog posts to Baidu search index, it will take some time to Baiduspider to crawl your website content. So every time you update you blog, make sure you use Baidu Ping SEO tool to expedite the content crawling rate.

Fetch as Googlebot - Get Google Indexed Your Web content quicker

Google may not crawl your blog posts right after you hit the "Publish" button. So what do you do ? site and count to next website crawling date? No, follow these steps to get Google index your web pages fast. (Generally, Google index my posts within 5 minutes)

Important things to do for your BlogSpot blog

Now you have a good BlogSpot blog with quality content. But there are some important things to do for your Google blog. Here are few of them.

Backup your BlogSpot blog (Not Template)

Although your blog is on Google servers, it’s not guaranteed that your blog will never break down and lose all your posts. So, the best thing to do weekly basis is that backing up your BlogSpot blog. Go to Settings >> Other >> Exports >> Download blog to back up the blog.

Monitor website traffic and user activities in daily basis

Who knows when your blog hit by Google panda, penguin or other Google update? So you have to monitor your blog traffic via Google Analytics. Do this as a daily routine. This will not only show you how much traffic your website receives, but also motivate you to increase the blog traffic.

Monitor SERP performance

Use above webmaster tools to find the SERP positions of blog posts and the traffic driving keywords. This will help you determine keyword positions and increase the CTR from changing the title tag. SEMrush also provides a few great tools such as Keyword Position tracking to monitor SERP positions.

Nofollow comment backlinks

Spammers add links in their comments. So you have to block the passing of link juice to those web pages. The best way to do it is add the nofollow tag to links in the comments section.

Delete All Spam comments

Spam comments add irrelevant keywords. They also decrease the keyword density of primary and secondary keywords. So the best thing to do is deleting those all spam comments. You can also restrict anonymous comments in Blogger.

Use an Attractive HTML menu for your blog

HTML menu bar, especially the horizontal navigation menu helps to increase the page views per visitor and decrease the bounce rate. Also by using the header navigation menu, you can get site-links placed in the Google search result pages. Click Here to get an Attractive HTML Horizontal Navigation menu for your BlogSpot blog.

Best Advices to maintain your blog and Increase the Blog Traffic

By now, you have a very good BlogSpot blog which has the potential to get quality traffic and make money for you. So now you might want to maintain your blog well and increase blog traffic. Here’re some ethical blogging tips to take your BlogSpot blog to the next level.

Use social media to promote your blog/posts

Social media have become more powerful than any past day. It can drive viral traffic to your blog instantly, if your copy is stunning and informative. From your Facebook page to your Pinterest business page, use social media profiles wisely to build the brand awareness and increase the number of loyal readers. If you have a budget, make use of Facebook post promotions to increase the traffic and email subscribers.

Social media not only gives you instant traffic, but also boost your organic traffic indirectly.

Use social media outreach and email outreach to find new readers and link building prospects

Social media outreach is new to blogosphere. But, it works like a miracle. What’s the social media outreach and how it works?

Social media outreach is finding new people who are interested about your niche.

Ex: let’s say your blogging niche is cooking. You have written a great post about decorating a desert. Now you want to promote it in social networks. But what’s the best way to promote your piece of content is that finding people who are interested about cooking and get your post promoted by them.

Here’s how to do social media outreach on Twitter briefly.

Step #1. Create your awesome content. Give a reason why your blog post should be promoted on the social web. Make it longer and detailed as much as you can. In my case, I have created a post called: Tumblr SEO – Best On Page SEO Tips. It exceeds 5000 words and has step by step tips to increase the SEO of Tumblr blogs with images. So I know that I can introduce that content to a person without any hesitation. Here’s what to do next.

Step #2. Go to Buzzsumo website and click on Influencers button. Also, you can usesocialcrawlytics to find social influencers.

Step #3. Enter your keyword. Ex: cooking. You can filter out people who has the reply ratio is less than 4% by clicking the “Ignore broadcasters” option. Then click on “search!” button.

Step #4. Here’s what I got within two seconds. Thousands of influencers who talk about cooking. Erika and Gina almost reply to one of every two/three tweets. So you can contact them using a short outreach message on Twitter. To increase the conversation ratio, follow the influencer first and then send him/her the message you want. Remember, to do all things you have only 140 characters. So use a URL shortening service such as Bit.ly. I use bit.ly because later I can analyze who clicked the links and when they clicked.

I also followed this way to find new influencers for the Tumblr SEO post. Here’s the tweet which I sent to Hockeyguy13.


Social media outreach is very powerful and if you used it correctly, you can get instant traffic to your new BlogSpot blog very easily. You don’t need any premium tool to do social media outreach. Follow this method to connect with influencers in your niche and get your posts promoted on social networks.

Like social media outreach, email outreach has become very powerful and given wonders to webmasters. Brian Dean has written a great post about THE Backlinking Strategy That Works – 2014 and Beyond on Smart Passive Income Blog. I recommend you to check it and follow the methods that Brian explained in that post.

You can also use email outreach to get shared your content over social networks. You just need to have a good appealing email template. Follow these steps in this blog post on QuickSprout to learn how to use email outreach to find new influencers.

Focus on building your email list rather than increasing followers on social profiles

Earlier I have listed the building the email list as one of important things to do after setting up your blog. If you didn’t read my previous post, here’s the link to it again: The power of Email Marketing – why you must have an email list

Now I suppose you have created your list and want add new subscribers into it. Here’re a few list building tips to increase the number of leads.

• Give a bribe to exchange the email address: Giving a bonus gift or service such as a PDF book, eBook, video course or coupon code is one of the best ways to boost the number of subscribers. You should experiment new things to increase the leads. Because people have the mind-blindness. So you may use header widgets, menu bars and footer widgets to increase the conversion rate.
• Use attractive sign up forms: The very first thing before getting people signing up to your newsletter is that getting their attention. You can do Spilt tests and A/B tests to increase the conversation rate.
• Use Pop up sign up forms: Pop up forms is one of effective ways to grow the email list. Don’t overuse this because it can increase the bounce rate. I suggest you to use cookies or Session storage or local storage for pop up Sign up forms. It can give a huge boost in growing the email list without increasing the overall bounce rate.
• Use exit pop up box: Exit popups are very effective at retaining the visitor on the web page and get their email address.

A few months back, I started building my email list. It is still growing. Every time I post a tutorial or guide on Pro Blog Tricks, I share it among the subscribers in my email list. This helps me in driving instant traffic and getting some quick social shares. Building your email list is what you should do just after creating your BlogSpot blog.

Google+ increases the organic traffic

Recent studies proved that Google uses social signals to rank web pages on SERPs. Among those social networks, Google plus takes an important role not only because Google plus is another big giant Google's social network, but also the readers coming from Google+ are highly engaged and read the articles thoroughly. As a result of this, averagely every Google+ visitor lands on our web pages retain on the web pages more than three minutes.

Here are a few Google+ communities you can join right now:

• Search engine Optimization
• Professional Blogging
• Online Marketing
• Content Marketing
• Social Media professionals
• Blogging
• Browse All communities

Use visual content on your blog

If you’re only posting texts on your articles, no one will read it thoroughly. You need something that gets the attention of people in the first few seconds. Use an attractive and relevant image on the top of the blog post (Above the fold). Whenever a person lands on your blog post page, he or she looks at the visual content, not the texts.

There are various visual content you can use within your blog post. That Not only gets people read the posts, but also increases the time per visit and add some new look to your post.

Videos: You can easily create a YouTube channel for your blog and add some relevant videos to your blog posts. Then embed them on your blog posts. It doesn’t matter if you embed others YouTube videos on your blog posts. It helps boost the average time per visit ratio of your blog posts.

Infographics and Gifographics: These visual content has become very effective at getting more social shares and quality backlinks very quickly. Neil Patel from QuickSprout uses infographic very effectively. You can create your own Infographic on Visual.ly for free or hire someone on freelancer.com or Elance.com to get it done. However, even it’s very effective at getting link baits at very cheap price, it’s not cheap at creating an attractive infographic.

You can also embed others infographics in your blog posts. Just need to use specific social networks such as Pinterest and Google+ to find relevant infographics on your niche.

SlideShare Presentations: I have been using Slideshare presentations on Pro Blog Tricks. It’s very effective, because it retains readers more time on the page. Another thing is that Slideshare presentations rank on Google. So I get extra relevant traffic back to my blog posts. If you didn’t use Slideshare to drive traffic to your blog, promote your business, I recommend you to use it.

Content Repurposing

Like other methods listed in above to increase the blog traffic, content repurposing is another very effective way to increase the blog traffic. When your blog has older content, you can repurpose them.

Convert blog post into PDF format. You can do this very easily using PrintFriendly. Then use a subscribe locker or social locker widget on your BlogSpot blog. People need to like/share or subscribe to your newsletter in order to download the PDF version of the blog post. It will drive constant social traffic to your blog post.

Now you can upload the PDF version of the blog post into various content syndication websites such as SlideShare, Scribd etc. These websites have good page ranks. So the links within the blog posts get the link juice. The downside of this content syndication is that there is no anyway to nofollow affiliate links in PDFs yet. Remember that I said Google can crawl the content on PDFs.

Ensure that you didn’t make the PDF to get hit your original content due to duplicate content.

When you have Slideshare presentation, you can record it using a screen capture software such as Camtasia. After recording and making necessary enhancements, you can upload it to YouTube, Vimeo and other video sharing websites.

It is not only drive traffic from video sharing websites, but also drive huge traffic from search engines due to video snippets get a high CTR averagely.

Create Different Types of Blog posts

To drive traffic to your BlogSpot blog, you have to test different post types. Because every post doesn't perform well due to the post type. Meanwhile you write ever-green content, write about trending topics in your industry. You can use Google trends to see what the trending topics in your niche are.

If you are writing only How to posts for your blog readers, try writing guides like this guide:Keyword Research Guide: How to keyword research on Google Keyword Planner.

There are a lot of post types you can use on your blog to get the users attention. Read this post on QuickSprout, how to find what blog type perform well on your blog.

Pro Advice: Analyze your competitor and steal their ranks, money and readers

This seems like weird, however, this is what exactly probloggers use to multiply their traffic, revenue and increase their SERP ranks. Ok, tell me what’s the best way to increase the traffic and revenue from blogging?

The best way is using profitable keywords (also known as buyers keywords) within your blog posts. Do you ever think that keywords followed by free increases your income? No.

But if you used keywords like “cheap WordPress hosting, Amazon coupon codes, Ebay Mac Book Pro promo codes, Hostgator coupon code, SEO techniques, create a blog etc.”, you can increase the revenue very easily.

How to find your competitors’ best keywords and keyword ranks?

You can find the best keywords which drive huge traffic and sales to your competitor’s website through SEMrush competitor analysis tool. Here’s how to spy your competitor’s best keywords using SEMrush. You can create a SEMrush account from here.

Step #1. Go to SEMrush keyword research tool and enter your competitor’s website. I entered QuickSprout website in the text box. I want to know what the best keywords which drive more traffic to QuickSprout from Bing.com are.

Step #2. Pay your attention to the organic keywords. Click on it to get more in-depth analysis reports.

Step #3. I take “how to get more followers on Instagram” long tail keyword as the example of this guide to teach you how to steal the keyword rank and traffic.

Do you know why QuickSprout's post gets 25.26% traffic from Bing search even its position is 10 (bottom of the page)? Keep reading. You'll find what's the reason to that.

Step #4. Now let’s check what Bing displays on the first page for “how to get more followers on Instagram ” keyword and how many web pages rank for this keyword.

Step #5. At this time more than 11,400,000 web pages rank on Bing.com for this keyword. Let’ see how many articles are there with the title and the URL of this long tail keyword.

Step #6. As you can see only 6,050 web pages rank in Bing with the title of “how to get more followers on instagram". It is really awesome. Because, now you can write an awesome content article with step by step, adding visual content on how to get more followers on Instagram. Websites rank on the top are Instagram followers exchanging services. That's why QuickSprouts post gets 25.26% of traffic. Because people want to learn legit and practical ways to increase the Instagram followers. So, you can also do the same thing by writing a few quality articles about Instagram and how to get followers, likes etc. Make sure do use these keywords in your blog posts.

If you filter the search result with the title and the URL of “how to get more followers on Instagram”, you can see this screen at this moment.

That means there is no article with the title and the URL of “how to get more followers on Instagram” keyword.

After you wrote your awesome article about increasing Instagram followers, you can use social media outreach and email outreach as I explained in above to increase the social shares and get some backlinks. That will give a huge boost in search engine ranking.

Analyzing your competitor’s best keywords and their rank is the best way to increase your traffic and revenue. Because they rank higher on SERP means, you can also outrank them. You just need some hard work. Use SEMrush Keyword difficulty tool to find how much it's hard to outrank them. I recommend you to create a Guru account, so you can get more in-depth analysis and get more quality traffic than ever you got.

Conclusion

Creating a free blog on BlogSpot is not a hard work. But, the hard work is maintaining your blog clean and gets rid of Google penalties. In this ultimate guide, Create a FREE Blog on BlogSpot.com, I explained you what’s a blog, why you should have a blog and why you should choose BlogSpot at first for your very first free blog.

Then I showed you how to create a free blog on BlogSpot.com blogging platform and other important settings for your BlogSpot blog you should implement just after creating your very first online weblog. To works done easier, I cut off each sections and walked you through from the basics of blogging to how to steal competitor’s traffic and rank very easily.

You may hear that some people say that you can’t increase the traffic, make money blogging, if you blog on BlogSpot blogging platform. Now you would know that how to increase the blog traffic with Blogger and how to blogging without hesitation about whether your blog is hacked by someone.

To learn how to increase your Blogger blog traffic, make sure you check Blogger SEO: On-Page SEO strategies guide. Which will walk you through how to optimize your blog for search engines and drive more blog traffic.

I hope you’d like this guide on How to create a free blog using Blogspot.com. Please can you favor me by sharing this tutorial on creating a successful BlogSpot blog among your social friends and relatives?