I can't remember when I first heard about blogging, or what prompted me to try it....I suspect it was hearing about blogging effectiveness on attracting search engines to your website.

Now our blog at http://www.wealthstrategysecrets.com/ has a five out of ten Google pagerank, has 727 posts, 207 comments and 32 trackbacks.

I wasn't clever enough to figure out how to install a blog on our domain name, so I went with Typepad's middle package, as it had the trackback & ping feature I had read about and I've been very happy with it to date. Lots of lovely features and widgets and ever so easy to use. You can earn money from your blog by placing commission generating ads on it, seeding it with Google Adsense, and even eBay affiliate links.

However, if I was starting again, I would pay someone to set me up a Wordpress.net blog on my domain (actually, I am doing that right now and moving my blog over) as it helps with the SEO on your domain apparently.

The other cool thing about blogs is that you can use Feedburner to track your stats, create a cool little revolving box for your email signature that shows folks the last few posts, and Feedburner gives you an RSS feed that you can use with your Google Adsense account so when people see the text only version of your feed, ads that you make commission from are being shown. The feedflare feature of Feedburner automatically drops Adsense in your most recent post too, something that is a pain to do manually.

Pick a topic you are passionate about, because even then you WILL get writers block occasionally, but you can always pick up articles from sites like EzineArticles and SubmitYourArticle, as long as you credit the author and put a link in to their site.

If you write about your topic, you will naturally be seeding your blog with key words and phrases, but don't forget to set up tags for your posts as well.

As an example of how effective blogging is, one of my friends, Gill Fielding, was on the programme The Secret Millionaire recently. If you did a key word search on Google for her name, her website came out at number 1 on page 1, but EVERY OTHER ENTRY on the first page of Google was our blog. Because we had created companies together, and I had talked about her so naturally over the years, and every new post counts as a seperate page, our blog dominated the search results for her name.

Set your blog up to link to your website, and your website to link back to your blog thus creating a virtuous circle for the Search Engines spiders to crawl through and around.

And above all, don't worry! There is no right or wrong way to blog, it's a tool to enable you to express yourself, and to let the world know you are there.

People like to do business with people they know like and trust, so share your personality, your passions, your unique quirks and don't worry what people will think of you.

Some of the best blogs are the most "out there" ones so have fun!