One of the elements that I like to talk about in blog consulting is something I call Blog T.L.C. Most people think of TLC as tender, loving, care which is certainly applicable to a successful blog. I use the T.L.C. for time, links, and content. For blogs to be successful they must be a mixture of all three.

Time - There is no getting around the fact that your blog will garner more traffic after it has been around for awhile. The first year of most blog sites is usually quite slow. It takes time to get your site to begin to show up on search engines. You can get traffic with other methods, but in almost all cases, most of your traffic will eventually come from search engines. Time will also keep you out of the Google sandbox. While Google generally denies the existence of the sandbox, it happens way to often to be a fluke. For example, I stated a site recently called Hurricane Tracking Sites (www.hurricanetrackingsites.com). The site made a big entrance showing up in position 5 on page 1 for it’s title and in the first three days had over 400 page views. (That is very unusual!) It stayed on page 1 for five weeks and then, gone. It is nowhere to be found on the search engines. I concede that it shouldn’t have been on page 1 already, but it shouldn’t have gone out of the top 1000. That is the sandbox effect. Your site might have some initial success and then, sandbox. It usually only lasts for a few months and then the site will come back to page 4 or 5 so that you can continue to work on it to get it back to page 1.

Links - Links are the oil in the search engine results. The more links you have the better your site will do. The links need to have authority to make a significant difference. By that, I mean that the best way to get more traffic is to have sites that are authorities on your keyword topic link to you. This is where the Golden Rule principles are so important. You want to link to sites that are similar to yours so that will link to your. What is good for your site is good for theirs and vice-versa.

Content - If you don’t have good content on your site it will eventually lose its way. You may have some initial success but it won’t last. In almost every keyword category I have pursued that had a lot of sites with garbage content existing only as a place to put Adsense, my sites with good content will eventually surpass them.

When you remember the T.L.C. of blogs you can stay focused on what is important. Watch out for short cuts. Many of them might have a quick response but they don’t last. In future articles we will discuss some of the most practical ways to work out Blog T.L.C.