Before you commit to blogging, you’ll want to know some of the primary factors that lead to the death of so many blogs before they’ve ever had a chance to get off the ground. Keep in mind that blogs take time to grow. Many blogs don’t see marked success until they’re at least six months to a year old, if not more.

Habits to Commit To

1. Update Regularly – If I’ve seen it once, I’ve seen it a thousand times – Someone takes the time to set up a blog, gets excited, posts 500 posts in the first few days or weeks. Then the number of posts begin to decline until the blog goes weeks at a time without updates. Nothing will ensure failure like not updating. If you are going to blog, you need to outline a posting frequency and stick to it. Even if this means you commit to posting once per week – be consistent. Not updating is not fair to your readers and it will kill your blog.
2. Don’t Rush Your Posts – There will be days that you just don’t feel like posting or you have a day that’s packed full of tasks that threaten any amount of time you may have set aside for posting. You rush to gather a hot topic that’s being discussed around the blogosphere, throw a post together and click publish. In the process of rushing, you neglected to proofread. When you rush, you’re almost always guaranteed mistakes. Take your time, proofread, double check your work and then publish. Remember you have an audience who will recognize the errors and the sloppy posting done in haste. If you happen to see a mistake after you’ve published, correct it promptly.
3. Always Reply to Comments – Your blog will is nothing without your readers and those who leave comments – take the time to acknowledge them.
4. Blog for Fun and Readers, Not Money – I believe wholeheartedly in blogging for pleasure and readers – not for money. Sure the money is great, but if your blog is built on a tinge of greed you’ll likely end up a very disappointed writer with a blog. It’s been said by many professional bloggers that you should blog as something you would do even if you didn’t make money at it – because many don’t earn for a long time. The largest majority of blogs make less than $100 per month – so you better write about something enjoyable!
5. Humanize Yourself – Whether you develop an alias character or you blog under your own name – readers want to know you and they want to know about you. As your readers get to know you, they will trust you, your opinion and your point of view – so give them what they want.
6. Write For People, Not From a List of Keywords – There was a time when I genuinely believed it was best to print out the most popular key phrases surrounding my topic – to create content based on keywords, key phrases, keyword density and making sure my content was search engine friendly. Then I realized that was Hogwash! Everyone seems to want to grasp the ultimate Google Page Rank, but readers want genuine content that’s uniquely you, not something that makes little to no sense.

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My Comment Commitment: If you leave an approved comment on any of my posts, I will visit your blog and “share it” in some way whether on StumbleUpon, Twitter or Facebook depending on if I can find a nice fit.

Originally posted 2009-07-31 12:00:00.

Reader: Can you give me a list of directories to submit my blog to?

Gayla: I’ve never used blog directories and some of my blogs have gotten fairly high on the search engines without them. I have focused on using the proper keywords and did just fine.

Reader: Is there any place I can go to learn more about how to use keywords?

Gayla: What I do for keywords is:

Watch Technorati to see what people are searching.

I use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find variations of keywords and phrases.

Example: Say you’re wanting to use the keyword HOLIDAY — the Adwords keyword tool will tell you all the variations of the word holiday in how it was searched recently. I personally try to utilize as many keyword combos as I can with searches of 1,000 or greater. You’d be surprised at just how many visitors you can pull in that way.

Go to the Google Blog Search and see what other blogs similar to yours may be writing about, how they are tagging etc.

Yahoo Buzz is another great place to watch to see what the movers and shakers in the search world are. Try to incorporate as many of those top search terms into your blog posts as you can and tag them as the keywords that are being searched.

Another tip I’ve found to help is by bolding out the keywords within your post. You don’t have to do this on every single occasion, but it does help to do it once in a while. In as much as your eyes will pause on the bolded words, so will search engines.

That’s not saying I’m totally against blog directories — it’s just that I’ve never found the need to spend my time submitting to them.

If someone has an opinion that supports directories, I’d love to hear it.

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My Comment Commitment: If you leave an approved comment on any of my posts, I will visit your blog and “share it” in some way whether on StumbleUpon, Twitter or Facebook depending on if I can find a nice fit.

While having my morning coffee and browsing through some of my favorite message boards, I stumbled on a tip that just blew me away.

Rather then getting frustrated with all the comment spam you receive, let’s think about how we can use it to our benefit.

Yes, there really is a way!

Obviously those spammers are finding their way to you somehow and more then likely it’s got to do with a search of some sort.

What about the comments they are attempting to leave behind?

Ever consider looking at the keywords they’re trying to drop in your comments and compiling your own list to work from when composting your content?

Of course you’ll probably have to remove prefixes that pharmaceutical or porn related to get to the better keywords, but it might just be worth it.

It certainly makes it a lot easier deleting that spam when I stop to think of them working for me for a change.

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My Comment Commitment: If you leave an approved comment on any of my posts, I will visit your blog and “share it” in some way whether on StumbleUpon, Twitter or Facebook depending on if I can find a nice fit.