How to create a successful blog

The platform is an important factor to decide on the look, feel and functionality of a blog. There are various platforms available like Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad etc. I have been concentrating mainly on Blogger and Wordpress.

Which is better Blogger or Wordpress?

It actually depends on your need, If you are looking for an extra professional blog with not much flashy content, I think Wordpress will be the one for you. Whereas Blogger is a much more flashy and in my experience it is little more userfriendly platform.

Hosting in seperate domain

By default when you register a blog with say neowebarts you will be assigned a blog address as http://neowebarts.blogspot.com or http://neowebarts.wordpress.com. There is nothing wrong with this address except for that unnecessary blogspot extension which comes with our name.

Another major thing is that the ranking will be a less compared to other sites when it comes to listing in search engines. So its better that you spend some money to get a domain tailored to your content. So if your ranking is more, more traffic, more revenue!

Find a suitable theme

There are a lot of free themes for Blogger as well as wordpress. So you can select one according to the content. Also if you are planning for adsense or any kind of advertising, implementing a 2 or 3 column theme will be more successful. A few editing on the theme will enable us to place ads in positions normally not possible. For example You can place an ad between 2 blog post. This can considerably increase you conversion rates. So select a theme and place ads on suitable positions. (Positioning ads are a very important thing).

Add Feed Subscription

Feeds are very important to a blog. Feeds are used to send notifications to subscribers when new posts are posted. If he finds a new post interesting he might come back to your sute to check it out. So you can bring back your existing readers.

www.feedburner.com is the unmatched leader in delivering feeds.

Add Social Bookmarking Links

These are also a very important factor in bringing visitors to site. The important bookmarking sites are Digg It , Delicious, Technorati etc. There are millions of users in these sites looking for good sites. So adding your site to these services will surely bring in traffic to your site.

Add to Blog & Search Directories - Adding to blog directories also brings in traffic to your site. Main blog directories to look for is Topblogsites, Bloggernity, Blog Catalog etc.

Add to search engines - Add your site to major search engines like Yahoo, Google, MSN, Ask, Altavista. All these provides free listing and it the lucky thing is searchbots love blogs. So you should be quite confident that your blog will be listed soon.

Keep a SiteMeter - A sitemeter allows you to track your visitor and get indepth information on your visitors. This is very helpful and you can track your daily visits , the countries from which your visits came, whoever referred you etc. So it will be very useful to evaluate your existing referral sites and work more on it if necessary. You can get a good sitemeter here www.sitemeter.com.

The content of course - There is nothing as much important as your content. Only if you have original and useful content people will visit your blog. So it is very important and do make sure that there are no errors on your posts.

Invite Authors - Invite others to share views on your blog. As the quality of your content increases everything increases, including revenue. So try getting in good authors and thus good content. You can encourage others to join you by implementing revenue sharing in your site.(As done in hubs)

All these should help you design a successful blog.

Hi guys, this is my first hub. I have been in the blogging arena for quite some time now. I would like to share the knowledge I have on blogs. I have authored over 50+ blogs which is running well in the internet space. I hope it was of some use to you.