2015 Blogging Tips 101.

Last night I heard on the John Tesh show that 25% of adults admit to not even reading one book in the last year.  So, if this huge number of people is not reading books what are they doing?

I researched this topic and discovered that watching TV is still the number one leisure activity.  According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average person spends 2.8 hours a day watching TV.  But this is the startling truth:  Young people are reading less and less.

Time spent reading for personal interest and playing games or using a computer for leisure greatly varied by age.  People aged 75 and over averaged 1.0 hours of reading per weekend day.  On the other hand, teenagers only read about 8 minutes per weekend day.  Look at the US Bureau of Labor Statistics table 11:  http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t11.htm  for it is shocking how little people spend time reading these days.

So, if reading is on the way out, how can you possibly make money blogging.  It sounds like a bad time investment, does it not?  At first glance, it does seem that what is the use in blogging if nobody is going to read it.  However, if you tailor your blog posts to a certain age and keep them consistent for this age group, you can capture an audience.  

Blogging tip number 1 - Blog to older people!  

• Maybe they want to read about what made them happy as kids.
• Maybe they want to read about old stuff like old t.v shows, crafts, old furniture, etc.
• What was popular 50 years ago?  These topics will be hot blogs.  Drive-In movies, old movie stars, etc. etc. 
• Blog about money, stocks, bonds, retirement income and anything else that can benefit older people like hospital equipment, news on aging.  etc. etc.

If you blog to older people it will be easier to capture a greater readership due to sheer numbers of older people reading.  However, older people may tend to stick with the older ways and may prefer reading actual page books than to read blogs on the computer.  For this reason, the next age group you should target is individuals aged: 45 to 54.  

Blogging Tip number 2- Blog to the 45 to 54 age group.

• This age group is where the money is.  They are old enough to still like reading, (on average they read 15 to 20 minutes a day on the weekends)  they generally have money to buy stuff from your blog, and they are growing older and will read more in the future which provides a larger readership for your blog.  
• This age group is generally less technologically advanced, meaning it is a great group for blogs that teach people how to do something or for blogs that compare products that they might buy.

Blogging Tip number 3 - Forget about the kids.

• The kids are in a new technology world full of video games, YouTube, socializing with friends and could care less about reading your blog.  If you tailor a blog meant for teenage reception, watch out as the average teenager reads only 8 minutes a day.  That means that there are a whole lot of them that never read outside school.  

Help the aging population with your blog and it will grow faster than if you are targeting young people.  You might need to "ground pound" it a little which I will go over in a different post, however, you are going to have a more successful blog if you go this route.

Is There a Super-Fast Way to Move Your Blog Up in Search Engines?

Let's face it; in order to make any money with your blog you are going to have to have some traffic coming to it.  You can have the best blog in the galaxy but if you have no visitors coming and reading your content, you will make zippo with your blog.

So how do you get traffic?  Is there a super-fast way to move your blog up in the search engines and then you can just kick back while thousands of people swarm to your blog like bees flying to a honey hole.  The answer is unfortunately, no.

The goal of having any blog is to provide good content for your readers so that they will come back. Have you ever gone to a website that was just a bunch of links taking you to other pages with absolutely no content for you to read?  These hop sites might make some money for the people who placed links on them but I would bet that the return traffic is nil.

Somebody told me the other day that in order to have a good blog that brings in traffic you need to have your own website and have the website as a page and not hosted on a subdomain like "blogspot.com."  So, I finally decided to peruse the web looking for the real answers.

I found plenty of so-called SEO pros that confirmed this statement.  The truth is I like to have my blog as part of a website anyway because I don't like the real long "blogspot" url.  A lesson I will teach soon.  However, I don't believe it makes a difference when it comes to traffic.  You can do more with an actual website so this is a plus but traffic comes gradually as you keep adding good content.

I have had many websites and a few blogs over the last ten years and I can tell you that I have been happy with how all of my sites were indexed by the search engines.  For this reason, I do not recommend spending a lot of money on SEO.  What I do recommend is adding good content for your readers that they will want to read.

The robots that the search engines use today are smart and according to the article below they can easily differentiate between websites and subdomains.  This means that there is no longer any advantage to hosting your blog on a top level domain.

So keep on writing good content and the smart robots will reward you.  The following article is proof enough from Google:  Is It Bad for SEO to use Subdomains

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