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Blogging can be a very marketable and very profitable tool if used correctly. Profiting from blogs is a matter of grabbing the attention of an audience and not doing any actual selling. In the next three articles you will learn 13 essential steps to successful blogging.

1. Where to start?
You should begin your blog with a free blog hosting service. Starting with a free blog hosting service allows you to begin blogging instantly without having any knowledge of scripts, blog hosting or programming. It allows you to build an audience for your blog and allows you to focus on the content, not the maintenance, of the blog. The advantage of starting with a free blog host is that, if your blog doesn't become successful, you don’t lose any money. Blogs are organized in chronological order; your latest entry is displayed first. So when your blog traffic has grown and you are ready to upgrade to a paid blog hosting domain then you can announce your ‘move’ in the last entry and provide the new blog URL.

2. Niche

A niche is a targeted product, service, or topic. You should decide on a niche that interests you. Choose an area which you can enthusiastically write about on a daily basis. You can use keyword research services like Google Zeitgeist or Yahoo! Buzz Index to find popular searched topics. It doesn’t matter if your topic is popular as long as there is an audience for your topic. Anything can be considered a niche as long as it has a target audience. A blog about your cat can be a niche or a blog about the species of the cat family can be a larger niche market as long as there are people who are interested in hearing about it.

3. Update Daily (nothing less)
This step is a must and not a suggestion. Updating your blog daily keeps your blog more interesting to readers and gives your blog fresh content, making it more appealing to search engines. Not updating your blog on an occasional holiday or one day here and there is understandable, but missing days at a time or weeks is unacceptable and will most likely result in your blog being unsuccessful. To keep your blog traffic and retain your visitors’ interest you must update your blog daily. There is a growing trend of successful blogs that are not being updated daily, but they are still updated weekly with multiple entries. Until you have a steady audience you should try to update your blog at least once per day.

4. Traffic

It's no secret. You must have traffic to profit from blogs. There are numerous ways to build traffic: paid and free advertising, viral marketing, search engine marketing, RSS/XML feeds and word-of-mouth. You should always use your blog URL address in the signature of your email, forum discussions, message boards or any other communication media. You should submit your blog URL address to search engines and blog directories. You should submit your RSS/XML URL feed to blog ping services like Technorati, Ping-O-Matic, and Blogdigger. Share your blog with family, friends, co-workers, associates and related business professionals.

 

Blogging successfully takes effort. The next article looks at how to track your visitors and some ways to make your blog more user-friendly.

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