If you want a blog that will be popular and have loyal followers you need to keep in mind the following things.

1.) What type of hosting service should you use - I am not talking about specific hosting services I am referring to whether you should be using a free service like WordPress.com or whether you should purchase your own domain name and hosting.

If you are blogging for profit you should be on your own site with your own domain name. Yes, it is possible to make money with the free blogging services but you will either have to be lucky or work much harder.

If you are running your blog as a business having your own domain name and site will make your blog appear much more professional. Plus it is much easier to optimize your site for the search engines and drive traffic to your site.

2,) What blogging software should you use - you have the choice of lots of software but I recommend you stay with WordPress because it has the most support, the most plugins and the most themes and almost all of them are free and easy to use.

3.) Stay in your niche - when you create a blog you should know what niche you are going to be working in. Make sure you stay in this niche. If you stray too far you will loose readers because no one wants to go to a blog about fitness and read about the new triple chocolate supreme delight being offered around the corner.

Staying on topic for your specific niche will make you the obvious expert and will help on conversions whether you are selling your own product or are referring your readers to affiliate products. You will become known for your niche.

Your niche should be something that you have an interest in. Even if you aren't the expert you should still be able to tell if a post is good or if it sucks and only put good ones on.

4.) Do some keyword research - Keywords are the heart and soul of your blog. If you are relying on the search engines to get traffic to your site you need make sure you are using keywords that are being searched and are targeted to your niche.

There are a lot of free keyword research tools out there but Google's Adword Keyword tool is by far the best free tool you can use to do some quick research of your keywords and it will suggest keywords that you might not of thought of.

5.) You should be the star of your blog - let the readers know who you are, put your picture on the blog and a short biography. This will help the reader relate to you and will end up getting you more loyal reader then trying to be an anonymous expert.

These steps will get you started with blogging, review them before you start your blog or if you already have a blog going see if they apply to your blog. They are the backbone of almost all successful blogs.

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