Blogging

A few days ago, I posed the question Are Bloggers and Blogs Ruining the English Language? In hindsight, only an hour after posting, I realized that I missed an opportunity and made a mistake with that article. It should have been formatted/ massaged into being part of my current series, Joining a Niche Conversation. The question is, should I have edited it and changed the title after I had already posted it live?

The article generated a fair bit of response, but it might have provided more value to the series than on its own. For example, had it been titled “Joining a Niche Conversation, Part 3: Avoiding Communication Breakdown,” it might have contributed to the series’ synergy. In the latter form, it would have to be tighter and maybe contain a summary and a bullet list.

It was an oversight on my part. I’d already produced a loose outline for the series, but had not included rules of grammar as a topic. Of course, that doesn’t mean I can’t go back and edit the article. This question has come up amongst members of The Hive, Performancing’s new authority forum: should you edit archived blog articles?

Here are a few considerations:

1. Website content gets edited. Why not blog content?
2. What impact will changing blog content have?
3. Is it worth the effort of editing archived posts? What value
4. Is it okay to change the title?
5. Should you change the URL?

You’ll have to answer #3 yourself, but I see no reason not to edit archived content to improve it. Improving your blog content can only be good, right? Likewise, there’s very little negative effect in improving a title. Still, you need to consider this:

1. Does your blog platform auto-generate URLs using the post title?
2. If you change the title, what happens? Will the platform change the URL? If so, will the old page cease to exist? If not, can you easily delete it? If not, do you have a means of redirecting the old URL to the new URL? (Assuming you don’t know how to write .htaccess rules.)

So the only problem I see with editing archived content is whether or not a new URL is generated. If you’re using something like WordPress, it’s not an issue. If you’re using, say, Drupal (which Performancing is on), then it is, but you can manually resolve the URL issue – though only if you have administrative privileges.

Ultimately, I did not edit my article because of time constraints. And now that Part 3 is the article you’re reading, it’d get too complicated. Providing you’re not inserting/ deleting articles from a series, editing your archived content is something to consider for those days when you can’t come up with fresh content.

Have you ever edited your archived content? If so, did you find it was worthwhile?

If you’ve watched the news in the past day, you probably already know that U.S.-based economic worries triggered a stock market meltdown all over the world. There are fears of a U.S. recession in 2008 – or the closest thing to it that it doesn’t matter.

While this isn’t something to be proud of, I’ve been saying for two years that a recession will come. However, I expected it to happen between 2009-2011, not this early. In fact, this Monday meltdown was triggered by President Bush’s announcement of an aid package to prevent a recession – or so I understand. (What’s more, Jan 21st is supposed to be the worst day of the year for seasonal depression.)

Unfortunately, that sort of talk from a head of state often triggers worse events rather than helping. The last thing a recession needs is for people to stop spending, but that’s what usually happens.

Now, should you as a blogger worry about this? If advertisers start to worry, there might be less ad inventory to go around – and it very likely will go to the top blogs in a given niche.

The easy answer to this question is “yes”, but let’s hope that we won’t be affected. Other indications are that more money will be spent for online advertising in 2008 than in 2007. So that might counteract any decreases due to recession. In fact, since it’s generally cheaper to advertise online, a recession could cause a shift in advertising dollars to the online domain.

Still, if you’re making your living solely as a blogger, I’d say be cautious, especially if your blogging income has been unstable in the past 2-3 months. If you blog part time but have a full-time job, keep an eye on your career. Jobs are already being lost, some possibly indirectly due to the Writers Guild Association’s ongoing strike. (When a multi-billion dollar industry comes mostly to a standstill, there’s a domino effect on related industries.)

Let’s cross our fingers that this Blue Monday market meltdown is a temporary glitch and that things will improve soon. Or at least after the U.S. elections.

So you’ve decided to start a professional blog and you know it’s important to “own your niche”. That means that to successfully blog a niche, you need to learn from successful blogs. However, unless you’re following tech or gadgets niches, do you even know what the top blogs in your niche are? And how do you even define a “top blog”? Is it the one with the most pageviews? The one earning the most income?

Answer: It’s up to you to decide because it really depends on how you’ll define your own success, and thus how you decide what a top blog is. However, there are some metrics, ranks and resources that I use in combination to help me decide what the top blogs in a niche are.

Metrics/ Ranks

1. Alexa rank. This rank is a relative measure of web traffic to a website. It’s considered to not be particularly accurate simply because measurements of traffic to a site are made via Alexa’s installable browser toolbar. Basically, if there are people who visit a site and do not have the Alexa toolbar, then their traffic is not accounted for. The smaller an Alexa rank is, the “better” it is.
2. Google PageRank (PR). This rank is applied to each page of a site and is Google’s measure of the “value” of a page. The value is determined by some complex algorithm that only Google knows for sure. However, it does factor in the number of quality in- and outlinks on a page. Of course, as many of us bloggers found out late last year, Google thought we were all too obsessed with PR and did a shakeup, making the algorithm even more difficult to determine. Some of us gained, some lost, to our dismay.
3. Backlinks. The number of links back to each of your site’s pages – from other sites – is arguably one of the most important measures of success. If lots of other “authority” sites are linking to you, then you are controlling the conversation. The drawback is that each major SE (search engine) has its own algorithm and thus the numbers can be wildly different. Google tends to be conservative, Microsoft very liberal, and Yahoo in the middle. At least the last time I ran my own “acid test”, which was around last summer.
4. Technorati rank and authority. Technorati offers two measures of “importance”: rank and authority. The rank is similar in essence to Alexa’s but is relative to only those blogs that Technorati tracks. (Technorati does not track non-blog sites whereas Alexa does.) Technorati’s authority measure gives a sense of backlinks for a site. The larger the number, the more “authoritative” your site is.
5. Pageviews. Pageview has long been an important metric to many bloggers and webmaster, simply because it’s such an atomic, simple measure. Though in and of itself, it’s probably meaningless. Pageview trend graphs are more valuable than the pageview count of your site on any given day. And a breakdown by URL is even more valuable (something that you get with both free and premium versions of Performancing PMetrics). Pageviews coupled with search traffic counts (below) can give you a better picture of the health of your site.
6. Time spent. Some pundits decided last year that the average time spent on a site, per session, is more important that pageviews, and the lemmings followed along – including ad networks. Problem is, all sites are not created equal and to put this metric above pageviews isn’t always fair.
7. Return visitors. For ecommerce sites, a valuable measure of success might be the number or percentage of returning visitors, since it’s often easier to sell products or services to such visitors. For a true blog, return visitors are also important.
8. Search traffic. For some sites, including those that mask themselves as “blogs”, search traffic is more important than return visitors.
9. RSS subscriptions. There’s a premise that people who use RSS readers are likely more technically savvy than people who do not, and that they’re more likely to be bloggers. Thus, they’re also more likely to link back to your articles. Whether this is true or not, when calculating ad payout rates, some ad networks do factor in the number of RSS subscriptions that a site has. Unfortunately, some networks only take into account Bloglines subscription numbers based on a premise that bloggers prefer that application over others. Depending on whom you believe, Google Reader is now more popular. Or not.
10. Comments. For some bloggers, engaging the readership is far more important than anything else. The number of comments for the site is thus an important metric.

These are not the only metrics/ ranks but I’ve found these the most useful. I tend to use a combination of metrics, depending on my purpose. Keep in mind that some of the metrics mentioned above simply won’t be available to the general public.

Resources for Tracking the Conversation in Your Niche

While the above metrics/ ranks give you many options for defining a blog’s success, how do you actually find the top blogs in your niche?

Well, once you decide which metric/ rank is the most important, you’d have to start a list of blogs then refine the list. Or you can use a number of resources others have built and track the “conversation” that way. Or you can build your own custom tools. Here are some options:

1. Text Link Ads Blog Juice Calculator. Text Link Ads put in a lot of work to come up with their custom Blog Juice Calculator. This resource considers the values of Alexa Rank, Technorati Authority, Bloglines RSS subscriptions, and the number of registered backlinks. You could use the Blog Juice Calculator to rank a large set of blogs within a niche, then produce a shortlist of the most “authoritative”.
2. Popurls. Popurls is a brilliant way of easily monitoring the conversation in the blogosphere. The problem is that it’s not focused on any given niche. And it can’t be customized. Not surprisingly, there are many niche-focused clones. Someone even came up with a WordPress theme that clones Popurls, and which can be customized. I’ve produced several clones (e.g., Bootstrapper.biz) with this theme. They’re publicly accessible but were customized for my own use so that I can monitor several niches one at a time. Of course, I have to figure out what “top blogs” to add first, and modifying later is a pain. Also, they are not robust and will occasionally show error messages. I’m working on a more robust WordPress-based setup, which will be released to the public (if it ever gets done).
3. Techmeme/ Megite. Techmeme and Megite are two very similar web applications which show a clustered river of news in the tech niche. While both look very similar, Megite appears to be a bit more advanced. Regardless, the best I can figure is that both use “clustering” algorithms based on a set of keywords, applied to a growing set of URLs. However, the primary sites are “authority” blogs and news sites. Unfortunately, no one has come up with a clone of these – that I’m aware of – and I haven’t been able to reverse engineer the clustering algorithms beyond the theoretical.
4. Social media sites. The simplest way to track a niche is to go to your favorite social media/ social voting site, choose the niche you’re interested in, and monitor the content submitted there daily. The problem with this is that there’s a lot of “noise”, and good new blogs are not always well-represented.
5. Custom solutions. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, you may have to build a custom solution. People who know me know that I’m a huge fan of the visual plug and play interface of Yahoo Pipes. Building a  Pipe, in my opinion, is so much easier than writing code from scratch – even for me, an experienced programmer. I’ve previously buil two Pipes that utilize the Technorati API to monitor the top blogs in a given niche. It’s one of the simplest ways to build a custom solution. I just sort blogs in a specific niche by Technorati’s “authority”, after searching for either keywords or tags. And they worked. For a while. Unfortunately, Technorati started changing their API, and Yahoo Pipes is still in beta (afaik), so Pipes modules are often being deprecated, thereby wasting my development time. Once Yahoo Pipes leaves beta, I’ll redo my pipes, then clone them – one per niche.

In a future post, I’ll provide a tutorial that covers the Technorati API, followed by another with a sample Yahoo Pipes integration.

Three months ago, Freelance Writing Jobs moved from its rented space at Writers Row to its own brand new domain. The immediate results weren’t pretty.

• My Page Rank tanked from 5 to 0.
• My traffic dropped by half.
• My revenue showed a substantial decline.
• FWJ dropped in search engine rankings.

I did expect some negative effects in the very beginning, but nothing like this. October and November were bad months for me. Though things slowed down for the holidays, December showed a steady rise.

Three Months Later

Three months later and I’m back on track. Revenue is getting back to where it was in the beginning. Freelance Writing Jobs is back at the top of the search engines and my traffic is flowing nicely, thank you very much. Though it probably means nothing at this point, what confuses me is that I never got my page rank back. FWJ is still showing a page rank of 0.

Do I regret the move? Absolutely not! Even though it took a few months for my numbers to get back up, it’s nice not to have to share a domain with others. Now I know where all my traffic is coming from, I’m my own site administrator, and I have a lot more freedom.

Start from Scratch

The important thing was to work hard to build my blog up to where it used to be. Fortunately I was able to do so with some very shameless self promotion (sorry guys), a few well stumbled posts (thanks!) and lots of help from the good people here (I’m grateful).

Traffic isn’t only back to normal, it’s surpassing what it was before the domain change. Revenue isn’t quite up to what it used to be but it’s showing promise, and I’m receiving individual requests for advertising.

My biggest challenge is getting those who linked to me to adjust their links, but I’m working on it. In the mean time, it’s been fun watching the numbers rise. I know some blogspot and wordpress.com bloggers who are afraid to move to their own domains. Indeed it took me two and a half years to make my move. I’m here to tell you it was one of the best things I could do for my blogs and I have no regret.

As for that non existent page rank…does anyone really care about page rank anymore anyway?

How to start a new blog?
How to develop a successful roll out concept?

Some blogs get the attention from the start because they have a great format

The standard way of starting a blog is finding a niche and then starting to produce articles. Before doing that most bloggers fiddle around with the design for months.

Bad. Acceptance. Is. The. Consequence!

I have found two blogs with the same blog format which satisfy immediately because of the simple but great blog format.

Let me show you why…

Blog format

In the article Create a structure for your blog posts I spoke about developing a content structure for single articles.

Develop your own design rules for different article types. Reviews, personal notes, link lists and articles in general will all need their own set of rules. The rules should be in form of a ordered checklist. The checklist will make sure that you do some quality control before publishing.

But the same is true when developing a new blog. Before you start a blog you should definitely as much constrict the format as possible. Doing so will create readers trust and your blog will have a high brand recognition.

I am talking about a predefined content architecture and not design.

Two astonishing clones

Please take the following blog format as an example. I have chosen the used blog format because it is so simple to understand on a 1st glance.

• journalismenterprise.com
• newmusicideas.com

The 2nd was 1st but I discovered it because Paul Bradshaw, who maintains Journalism Enterprise.com, mentioned the original on his about page.

If you scan the articles you will discover that both websites have three things in common with journalismenterprise.com being a very smart successor (only regarding the blog format):

1. The astonishing simple article structure concept which is the main success factor of the specific blog format.
2. Multiple authors are involved from the very 1st beginning.
3. The strong focus on their specific niche.

The article structure

Both websites use a very simple writing template for their content which are reviews. Writing is done to a review template – a simple six-question format:

1. What do they say it is?
2. What do I say it is?
3. What’s great about it?
4. What could be better?
5. How is it going to make money?
6. Should I pay it any attention?

By using this review template it looks like guest authors are magically driven towards writing reviews because of the constriction and not because of their freedom to create articles like they want to. Astonishing isn’t it?

Guest authors

And then we have the social factor. Both websites allow and invite people to become part of the editor team.

Journalism Enterprise.com is a community blog – written and maintained by volunteer contributors. Anyone can join, and how much you contribute is up to you – from helping improve reviews to suggesting leads, through to writing yourself.

The very clear Join In page explains exactly how to become a contributer and what are the rules to follow.

Niche focus

Instead of publishing general ‘review output’ each site concentrates on a very narrow niche.

Journalism Enterprise is definitely a know-how driven site because to write “reviews (about) websites that are attempting to make money from journalism in the new media age” needs outstanding specialists.

The predecessor newmusicideas.com says that they will “evaluate and unpick new and interesting websites from around the internet that may be of use to independent musicians and the music business” which is a little less narrow niche but still needs good business know-how.

Both sites just meant as examples. What great blog formats do you know?

Promoting the blog (format)

After realizing the blog format and writing some initial reviews Paul Bradshaw used Facebook to send announcements and invitations to his contacts. This way I learned on January 14th about his new project. Look at the site and tell me if it looks like a new project? In fact the 1st article is dated November 21st, 2007.

Before I already was a big fan of his other site, the onlinejournalismblog. As he stays in his journalism niche but only developed a different blog format I am sure that he also had loads of other contacts than Facebook to use for the blog promotion already. Very smart is the idea to combine the new blog announcement on his blog with the force of a blog carnival on Carnival of Journalism in January. That’s what I call timing!

Because of the strong blog format the appearance is mature from the very 1st day! This way blog promotion is a breeze.

The importance of your own blog format

As you can see this article is not so much stuffed with lists of concrete ‘how to do items’ but with a great example of a successful blog format and how to do a powerful roll out. Let me try to list some rules which I find very important when developing a blog format:

• The most important thing about developing a rigid strategic blog format is to do it much in advance. Don’t rush!
• Make sure that your blog format is a strategic declaration which survives design changes and allows to add multiple article structures.
• Define milestones for the roll out. Blog promotion is crucial for a new blog! But don’t overdo it if you are still in the alpha or beta phase. Be patient for some months to let the blog mature!
• Choosing a nice template is important but playing around with the design is not! Instead develop the article structure and publish real articles to get feedback from ‘beta’ readers.

Did you develop such a blog format in advance?
How is your experience with such work in advance?

Keyword research is very important in the SEO game. Two of the most important search ranking factors are title tags and anchor text. However, these factors are useless unless you have relevant keywords. Relevant keywords should be in your title tags and anchor text so that you can rank highly and get more search traffic.

One benefit that I’ve noticed recently about keyword research is how it can make your blog more comprehensive. Oftentimes I find bloggers including myself getting into rut with about blog topics. We write about the same stuff without delving into other areas in our niche.

If I don’t do market research (which is what keyword research is), I find myself writing about what I like instead of what my market is searching for. It’s okay to write about our favorite topics. However, we should balance our blogs by also writing about the things our niche audience is thinking about. By doing this, we become a valuable resource and our monetization opportunities increase.

The key to good marketing is giving your audience what they want. Through keyword research, we can find out topics of interest within our niche that we’ve neglected.

Quick Example

Let’s look an example of this phenomenon. Let’s pretend I’ve started an SEO firm.

I’ve set up my website. I believe blogging is a great way to converse with my target audience, so I blog. I’ve written blog posts about keyword research, link building, and social media because in my mind, those are currently the most important aspects of SEO. Also, I like writing about those topics. However, if that’s all I blogged about, I would be missing out on profits and traffic.

So, I did some keyword research using Google’s Keyword Tool.

I typed in seo, made sure the “Use synonyms” box was checked, and then clicked “Get Keyword Ideas”.

The keyword tool spit out a bunch of keywords. I clicked “Avg Search Volume” to organize the keywords by search volume.

After glancing at the top keywords, I quickly came up with new SEO topics.

One of the keywords was search engine marketing. This phrase isn’t used as much as search engine optimization in the SEO blogosphere. However, the keyword tool said both keywords got the same amount of search volume. Therefore, I’ll write a couple blog posts about how SEO can get a valuable tactic in any business’ marketing plan. Also, I’ll talk about the relationship between marketing and SEO.

Here are two other keywords that I would not have thought about unless I did keyword research: search engine placement and search engine positioning. You don’t hear search marketers use the words placement or positioning. I’ll start using those two words in my blog posts. Also, I write articles based on those keywords. For example, I’ll write an article about reasons why the top SEO firms don’t guarantee search engine placements.

Surprisingly, search engine submission was a highly searched term. Search experts agree that search engine submissions are not needed anymore. I need to write posts about this subject to educate my audience.

As you can see, based on my keyword research, I’ve learned more about my target audience. I can speak at their level better because I know what they are searching for. My SEO blog will be more comprehensive because instead of just writing posts about topics I like, I’ll also be posting about what my audience is interested in.

Your Turn

Try out my exercise. Go to Google’s Keyword Tool. Type in a broad keyword that relates with your niche and see if you can find topics that you have neglected. Realize that people are actually searching for these keywords. By writing posts about them, you’ll be filling a need in your niche.

If you do this exercise, I’d like to hear your comments on how it worked out for you.

What are you known for? What do you want to be known for?

It’s an important question. Especially if you want to be interviewed.

Consider the bloggers you follow. Can you name things they are known for? I can think of a few, who am I talking about here?:

• Ideavirus
• Six Figure Blogging
• Copywriting
• Tech startup news

I am sure you can think of better examples than my quick brainstorm. How can you be like the people who come to mind? How can you be known for something good and beneficial?

Today I posted at Blog Herald how there are two Chris Garrett’s known in blogging, both living in the UK, both with our own slice of one niche.

You can hear the “other” Chris Garrett’s opinion in this Xfep podcast. Just for equal time you had better listen to me also, just to prove we are two different people!

The thing is we get on quite happily because Chris Garrett and I are known for different things. He is a great designer, and I have carved out a little niche in blogging all my own.

When I launched my own professional blog in February, I wanted to show that I wasn’t just “Chris from Performancing” so I did a few things deliberately and differently. The first big part of the strategy was to release a free blogging ebook called How to Write Killer Flagship Content. Another was to define a blogging concept I named Authority Blogging. What do people ask me about when I am interviewed? You guessed it.

In the last few weeks I have been thinking how I can make my brand clearer, as I write for all sorts of blogs from a company that develops PDF to Excel converter software to a blog about freelancing, and of course here, but having thought long and hard I think that adds to my brand; I am that freelance blogging guy among other things, or I might get there eventually.

Getting known is hard work, getting known for something positive is even harder. Before others will know you for anything, you have to consciously decide to be known for something. Better decide now, before someone else decides for you.

Back at the end of Oct 2007, I admitted my long-term efforts to reach $100/mth in AdSense revenue on all of my blogs collectively. Embarrassing but true. Since then, I reached about $160 in Nov and just over $200 in Dec. However, January isn’t shaping up too well, and I’m not surprised – especially after Xmas. (Note: this doesn’t include revenue from other ad sources. My total take is still only about $475/mth, minus my partners’ shares.)

I’ll still be past $150/mth (AdSense) in January, I think, but not all of these earnings belong to me, since I’m partnered on some of the sites. So AdSense still hasn’t worked for me. However, now that I have a bit more time to devote to sites that I own/ co-own, I do see that a scientific approach works for certain niches. Here’s what I’ve learned since cracking $100/mth in AdSense (including emphasizing what I’d learned in October):

1. Traffic. It takes a great deal of traffic to earn a living with just AdSense. And then some. And traffic is seasonal, as well as affected by holidays. Even important TV or sporting events will affect traffic.
2. Low CTR. Many popular niches have very low ad CTR (ClickThrough Rates). I long ago gave up regularly updating any of my “how to blog” blogs. Instead, I casually add new content when I have it, and might occasionally get a dollar here and there. But my focus is down to about four niches instead of the dozen-plus that divided my efforts and earned me nothing.
3. Diversify topics. If you are banking on just AdSense, consider diversifying with a few sites covering topics you’re interested in. But honestly, don’t fool yourself into believing you can maintain more than two active blogs on your own, especially if you are covering non-overlapping topics. I’ve given up that effort, but I do add new content once in a while to my mostly dormant older sites. The difference now is that I do it when I feel like it, not because I have to. And the net result is better quality articles.
4. Supplement ads. Depending on your niche, throw in some CPM (Cost per Mille) ads to capitalize on traffic. Not all niches have suitable ad networks, but if you luck out, it can make the difference between giving up and sticking it out a bit longer. CPM ads are really useful if you plan to write and promote “resource bait”, which might bring surges of traffic that earns you at least $3-5 per thousand (per Mille) pageviews.
5. Paid reviews. Personally, I don’t like doing these. They sometimes appear on my sites, but I often get a friend to do the review and pay them the full amount. But if you have a suitable niche and don’t mind, these can earn you some extra income. The problem for me is that they take extra writing time on top of what you already write.
6. Diversify income sources. I still don’t believe MOST bloggers will earn a living with just AdSense. I’ve previously discussed many ways for alternate income (such as freelancing), and for using blogging as a means to promote your other income sources. This includes promoting your services and products. (For example, I hope to use blogging to promote my movies, once I finish film school. In the meantime, I’ll keep building my personal brand, as well as start promoting my future film studio name. I no longer plan to make a living from just blogging. It’s not satisfying enough for me.)
7. Take a scientific approach. In the right niche, you can often count on a consistent average daily CTR for ads. Say it’s 2%. Work backwards. The daily CPC (Cost per Click) will fluctuate, and is affected by seasonal changes, but make a rough, conservative guess.

   Maybe you want to earn $1000/mth. And maybe you’re averaging $0.20 per click. That requires 5,000 clicks per month, or an average of 167 clicks per day. (Just consider that weekends are usually slower for most niches – something I’ve tested in about 15-20 niches.)

   If you’re averaging 2% CTR, then you need about 8,350 PV (pageviews) per day. If you are using social media sites and can figure out how to get at least 100 PV for each post you promote, then you’d need 83 posts/ day. Not a winning approach. This is where you need to put the most effort: efficient ways to promote your posts, even after the search engines finally index your new site. This is why you need to make lots of “social” friends.

   On the other hand, if you can pull 500 PV per post by using five or six social media sites, then you only have to do 15 posts/day. Not long ones, but you’ll still want to write at least 100 words/post, to escape “thin content” search engine penalties. Put some effort into maximizing  the effect of your blog posts.

Obviously, this 15 posts/day approach is not suitable for all niches. In some niches, readers simply won’t appreciate it. But the general principles I’ve mentioned still apply. Your niche might just have a rough scientific formula, though 3-5 quality posts per day might be all you need – especially if it has a high ad CTR, or at least provided you make the effort to promote on social media sites.

And when the search engines finally kick in and send traffic in the many thousands of pageviews per day, that’s when the revenue COULD go exponential. Provided you’ve done everything else right, and added a reasonable mix of CPC (e.g., AdSense) and CPM or CPA ads.

Building a successful blog is like playing a game of golf: there are dozens of factors you have to apply in sync. Here are a few:

1. Adding timely content of at least 100+ words, if your site is newsy.
2. Adding quality content that satisfies your readers and induces them to help you promote.
3. Promoting your own content or hiring someone to do it for you.
4. Having the most optimal layout of content, navigation, and advertising.
5. Being consistent.

There are other factors, but these are the ones that come foremost to mind. You just have to find the rhythm that’s right for you and your topic.