How to Create A High Traffic Top Level Blog

1. 1
   The first thing you will need to do if you decide to start a top level blog, is a hosting company to put your site at. The most important thing about choosing the hosting company for your blog is knowing the amount of downtime you can expect. I once used a company with 88% uptime and I thought that was a high rate but realistically it meant that 12% of the time my site would be down, guess what time that was. It was the hours between 9 am and 5 pm, in my time zone. Not good for local business at all. So choose a hosting company that will be up most of the time. Additionally, get a hosting company who will allow you to have unlimited space for your websites so that you can host more than one site and so that you can have a site that is really large and has a lot of pictures on it. My recommendation for a great hosting company is GoDaddy.com, this site has great uptime, it is very inexpensive (14.99 a month for an unlimited account) and you can put multiple domains on the same hosting account. I have 39 on one hosting account.
   
2. Step 2
   Next, you will need to choose a short, to the point domain name. Something easy to remember like if you have a bike shop that sells accessories as well you could be bikesandstuff.com or if you talk about financial information, you could have a site called wizardoffinance.com. Think of something that will make people think of you. It is very important that you be easy to remember. If your name is Katherine Johnson and you own a bike shop, kjohnson.com is surely not going to tell anyone that you have a bike shop, so be careful to choose a site that best represents what you do or sell.
   
3. Step 3
   Choose the right niche, comes next, if you have a website you can stick to one tight niche more easily than with a blog. Here is why. With a website you just need great content and something to sell. When you have a blog you have to constantly update that blog so it is important to choose a niche with a wider base. If you have a dog website, you can limit yourself to learning how to buy the right shampoo for your dogs grooming, with a blog you need to know the right thing to feed your dog, clean your dog, walking your dog, and training your dog, so that you have daily updates and keep your readers returning on a regular basis.
   
4. Step 4
   You will need to have great keywords for your site as well. This is really important to the success of your business. I hear that there are many different sites that will give you a keyword list or two, however for me I come up with my own keywords then I search them on Google. I then get to see what other websites are doing, I go on their sites for word counts of their articles, links that they have, how many times they used the keyword, and how many ads they have as well as the positioning of those ads. Then I use my research to get to the top of the search engine. All of my top level domains are on the first through third page of Google because I took the time to see what the top sites are doing with their niches to get there.
   
5. Step 5
   Design impressive content, I hear people all the time using PLR articles or some other persons work and while that certainly makes the job easier it will not help you bring in traffic. Most of the time if the person has been looking up information about your topic, they have read the article you submit hundreds of times because PLR companies sell the same article to many people at one time. However, if you are going to use PLR articles, either rewrite them or get someone to do it for you and update the information so that it is relevant for today. If you are writing for yourself, you should research and develop outstanding articles that say exactly what you want to say and what you want your readers to know. If it is at all possible provide resources so that they can get more indepth information on the topic. They will see you as a good source of information and will return when they are researching a topic similar to yours. If they are an enthusiast of your topic they will follow you or put your site into their RSS Reader.
   
6. Step 6
   Lastly you will need to take the time to really promote your site. I have found that there are several great places for promotion. One is BlogCatalog.com, they are a social site that puts your site up for others to check out before they follow, it has thousands of people coming their everyday and you can always find someone to check out your site. Blog Explosion is where you go read other peoples sites for points, the points get you traffic because in order to get points the other people will have to read your site. Then you can list your site on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StartupBiz and many other social networks. You can also write articles to the dozens of article submission sites. My favorite thing to do is to go to a site called Redgage, you can get tons of traffic not just to your blogs but everything that you write online, which ultimately means even more traffic to your blogs.