First of all, you have to have a blog in order to make money from a blog. There are a number of sites out there that will set you up with a blog for either a fee or a portion of your advertising proceeds. If you are truly serious about making blogging your career, then you need to consider not using these services. If you are going to try to make money in blogging, then it would make sense to share the money with as few people or services as possible. Instead, start your own website and keep the money. You will pay a monthly hosting fee, but if you are serious about blogging you know that this money will be considered a business expense as if you were to rent a storefront for a clothing store or something similar. So your first step in turning blogging into a successful career must include starting a blog and doing so on your own website.

Secondly, you have to figure out how you are going to derive revenue from your blog. There are a number of ways to do just that. The easiest and perhaps most popular way is to use some sort of advertising. Many of the search engines and other services on the web will place ads on your blog site and then pay you for every time someone clicks on one of the ads. Another way to do it is to sell something from your site and use the blog to bring in customers. Or, in a similar strategy, advertise someone else???s product on your site and then get some sort of commission from that person. No matter which strategy you use, or even if it is another strategy you come up with on your own, you need to find a source of revenue if you are going to make blogging into a successful career.

Third, once you have a way to make money off the blog, you need to get people to the blog. The key to most anything that happens on the internet is to drive traffic to your site. No matter what, whether you are using an ad service or selling a product, internet money is a game of percentages. You want to draw as many people as possible to your website. The larger the overall number of hits your site gets is the lower percentage of those clicks that have to be profitable you need. So how do you draw traffic? They key is, to turn a phrase, keywords. You need content on your site that is going to bring traffic from search engines to you as much as possible. There are a number of ways to do this: through software programs designed to find the best keywords, websites that perform a similar service, or just coming up with them on your own and crossing your fingers. No matter how you choose to do it, though, just bare in mind that you cannot turn blogging into a successful career without getting people to your website.

Blogging can certainly be fun, but what if you want to turn that fun into a profit? There are hundreds of people out there who have turned blogging into a successful career. It is a great way to make money from home doing what you want, when you want. However, there are some things you need to consider before diving into a blogging career. First of all, you have to get yourself a blog, obviously. Next, decide how you are going to generate revenue from that blog. Then, finally, work hard to drive traffic to your website. Remember, the internet is a game of numbers and percentages so promote and update your blog as often as possible.

There are two basic types of bloggers, the casual blogger and the serious blogger.

The casual blogger may have a basically well balanced life and a blog that is primarily a hobby. The casual blogger will start writing a post, work at it for awhile and then stop to get some other things done until he or she feels like writing again. If a finished post doesn’t get many comments, that’s OK; the post expressed just what the casual blogger wanted to say and its out there if anyone is interested.

The serious blogger’s situation is quite different from the casual blogger’s. The serious blogger has a blog that he or she considers to be a job — a job that may be competing with other important elements of life such as a primary job, a family, a social life and adequate rest. The serious blogger is committed (almost to the point of an obsession) to maintaining his or her blog and feels it is an essential element of daily life. The serious blogger feels dejected if any post sits on the blog for twenty-four hours or so without generating a comment or if the blog’s ???hit counter??? does not register a certain number of visitors every day. That kind of commitment to blogging may take a big hunk of time out of the day and can easily create some serious conflicts between blogging and the rest of life — to avoid this, the serious blogger needs to be organized and efficient.

Time management for the serious blogger! Anyone who feels that the day is too short needs to understand and implement the basic principle of time management: setting priorities. Some things are obviously more important than other things but some important things may be left undone unless you are controlling your schedule and not having random events control you. You need to set priorities and live by them.

Make a priority list! To begin setting priorities, make a list of everything you need to get done — everything including things you’ve committed to doing, things you want to do, things you know you should do and things that you really don’t want to do but are on your mind. Be honest and put everything on the list — take a couple hours or more to put it together if you need that much time, it will be time well spent because you are about to get organized.

Important: You will be using and modifying this list every day so create the list using some program that will allow you to move list items around, add items, remove items and save the list. Just notepad or your word processing program will do nicely but there are other more specialized programs available — they may even be free, check out: Tucows at http://www.tucows.com/.

Categorize! Now carefully consider each item on the list and put each one into one of the following five categories.

Must get it done today

Must get it done this week

Nice to do and might be beneficial

Nice to do but not really necessary

Unnecessary

Now you have a decent priority list. Start every day with this list and every time you become aware of a new task add it in a proper place to the proper category. As the ???must do??? items are accomplished and moved off the list, some of the nice-to-do items may be moved up, but only if their priorities can honestly be changed.

Too many must-do things! If the list of items in the two ???Must get it done . . . ??? categories is overwhelming, reconsider each item’s importance and re-prioritize if you can, if not select the items that you really don’t have to do yourself, things like fix-it projects, business phone calls, business letters, editing and proofreading jobs, etc. — some of these things may be able to be done just as well by someone else. Find a friend, family member, co-worker or a freelancer to do it for you.

Start with the news! Open up your favorite news page or open a newspaper and see what catches your attention. What are the politicians up to today? Any pending legislation that worries you or flat out scares you? Or perhaps someone is running for office or proposing a law that you may want to publicly support. Some celebrity is sure to be in trouble again; have anything to say about that? Maybe you have an idea about who should be dating or marrying who. Who died? A nice memorial post for a nice person may be in order. What happened ???On This Date??? in past years? Some past events are worth researching and writing about. Are you into sports? Many bloggers or blog readers are sports fans and they might be interested in your take on the playoffs or the players. Don’t forget to check the editorial page and the letters to the editor — do you agree with the opinions? Tell the world why or why not.

Read some blogs! Start surfing your favorite blogs. What are they talking about? You might have a different perspective on the latest hot topic that might just be interesting to your fellow bloggers or a perspective that might make them mad (BTW, never worry about making bloggers mad — most of them love having something to gripe about). If you can’t find anything that inspires you in your favorite blog, surf through some of those blogs that always make you mad; the ones that seem to promote everything that goes against your lifestyle. Anger is always a good blog motivator but don’t get so angry you get irrational. Comment on some blog posts and then expand your comments into a post on your blog. Also try logging onto Blog Explosion, Blog Clicker or one of the many other blog traffic generator programs — there are lots of ideas out there that are worth writing about from either a pro or con perspective.

What have you been watching or reading? Have you read any good (or bad) books lately? Write about your latest read — recommend it, blast it or even write an abstract for your blog (but don’t give away ending). How about movies, the great ones or the pitiful losers might be worth some good or bad words — you could make movie or book reviews regular features of your blog. The same goes for television shows. Start a series that follows your favorite TV show, there might be quite a few fans of the same show that will be interested in your take and appreciate your summary of episodes they missed. If there is a book, movie or TV show that you thought was great there is sure to be a reviewer who panned it. Find the bad review and write a post countering the reviewer’s opinions.

What have you been doing? Your work place, your co-workers, you bosses, your home and your family members are all fair game for your blog — keep it short and amusing and you’ll have a great post. Once you introduce a particularly interesting person to your readers you may want to do some sequels. When was your last travel vacation — write a travelog about where you’ve been or do some research on some places you’d love to go to and write about them.

Do you have a special skill? If you can make something that is unique or something that is common but made special because of what you know, there may be people interested in knowing how to do it. Give away tips on cooking, sewing, cleaning, fix-it projects, pet care, child care, beauty secrets, personal care or organizing tips. Make it a regular feature on you blog. If you have a digital camera find an interesting subject, take some pictures and then write something based on the subject. If you found it interesting or comical or sad its likely to interest someone else.

1. Interact with your readers – When readers leave comments on your posts, make sure you reply back and ask questions to continue a discussion that your readers started.
2. Ask questions at the end of your posts - This will enable your readers to start a discussion that could end up involving many other readers.
3. Make it easy for readers to comment - Do make sure that your comments section is set up such that readers don’t have to go through a long process to register. This sometimes deters readers from commenting.
4. Notify commenters of new comments: A Subscribe to Comments plugin enables commenters on your blog posts to check a box before commenting and get an e-mail notification of further comments related to that particular post. This will encourage readers to come back and take part in the conversation.
5. Reward your commenters – You can encourage commenters to increase comments on your blog by rewarding them. You can do this by using the Show Top Commentators WordPress Plugin.
6. Use plugins that attract more comments – There are a couple of other plugins in addition to the Show Top Commentators WordPress and Subscribe to Comments that you can make use of to attract more comments from your readers. These are Comment Relish and Brian’s Threaded Comments. The Comment Relish plugin sends a thank-you email to your blog’s first time commentators. This will surely encourage them to come back again and comment regularly. Brian’s Threaded plugin adds a ‘Reply to this comment’ link to every comment which means, your comment is placed directly under the comment you replied to. This plugin make comments easier to follow and also prevents readers from scrolling down to look for answers to their questions.

These 6 tips will surely help you get your readers to add more comments to your blog posts and at the same time provide you with more unique content which in turn will keep the search engines spidering your blogs more often.

Use a Casual Tone

The most interesting blogs are not written using formal grammar rules.  Frankly, the formal tone can be a little boring and web surfers don’t want to read through a bunch of “hoity-toity” text.  If you want your blog to be popular and a success overall, consider writing in a more casual tone.  Think of the writing as being a conversation you are having with a friend.  Write exactly the way you would talk, not the way you are supposed to talk.  Using slang and other words that may not be considered “proper” is a great way for your blog to reach a wide variety of viewers.  Using humor and other personality characteristics in your writing will make people want to keep coming back to read your newest entries.

Don’t Overdo It

Keeping your blog short will help you retain any interested viewers.  People don’t want to spend massive amounts of time reading text on the web.  If they wanted to read a novel, they would do just that.  Try to stick to your point and keep it nice and short.  A blog that is more than 500 or 700 words is just too much.  If you need to carry on with the topic, consider creating another post that finishes your point.  Although this is basically creating one long blog, the break in the text will be welcoming and readers will be less likely to get bored.

Never Advertise Improperly

Too often people use blogs as a space to advertise their services or their products.  This can be a cheap way to get your work out there.  It is noted however that blog readers can get annoyed quickly at advertisements on blogs.  If you must advertise on your blog, consider doing so in a more subtle manner.  Write a short post about your product and put a link to your website.  Don’t take up your entire blog space with the advertisement.  Although it may seem like a great idea, you will essentially be scaring people away from your blog altogether.

Check Your Spelling

Although the tone of your blog should be kept casual, you should still edit your work. There is a way to be casual, without being sloppy.  You should always check your spelling before you submit your post.  If your posts are sloppy and full of misspelled words, people will think that you are not educated and probably won’t take anything you say seriously.  Some blogging software comes will a spell check features, while some doesn’t.  If your blogging software does not come with any spell check feature, simply create your post in a word processing software and use the spell check there.  Then cut and paste your edited work into the blogging software text area.  This will allow you to post without spelling errors, which is highly recommended.

Be Versatile

If you want to reach the largest amount of people, you do not need to advertise endlessly.  You simply must be versatile with your post topics.  Those blogs that cover only one type of thing may be popular with one specific targeted group of people.  That is fine, if it is what you want.  If you want to reach everyone however, you need to post on everything.  Consider posting on current affairs, music, books, and other hot issues.  This will draw people in.  When you post about popular things in the news, it will draw people to your site when they do a search on the web.

Post Often

People who become fans of your blog will likely be looking for a new post every few days.  Some will only look once a week.  If you want to keep your blog fresh and interesting, you should post often.  Posting often is something that takes very little time, because your entries should stay short and sweet.  It is a way however to keep things new and exciting for your biggest fans.  They will be waiting for your new posts and will continue logging on as long as you provide them with new information.

Studies show that readers are often much more interested in blogs that offer pictures.  Blogs that use pictures are shown to be accessed more often than plain text blogs.  If you are looking for an interesting way to boost traffic to your site, you might want to think about including pictures.

Adding pictures to your blog is typically not a hard task.  Most blogging programs will have areas in which you can quickly and easily add pictures.  Keep in mind that if you are involved in a program such as Google Adsense, pictures won’t always correspond as well for your ads as text will however.  Overall pictures provide readers with a better understanding of what you are trying to convey over your blog.  If you are wondering why pictures boost traffic, consider these explanations.

Scanability

One surefire way to boost traffic on your blog is to create a blog with a high level of scanability.  When your blog can be easily scanned for content, viewers are more likely to want to visit your blog again.  Experts say that it takes almost 25% more energy for the eyes and brain to read words on a computer in contrast with reading them on paper.  Therefore, although readers may not know it, they are likely to read much less on their computer screen.  This is because it takes longer to read the words and uses up more energy.

Sixty percent of the people who read your blog will not read it word for word.  They will simply scan through it looking for your main points.  They almost always read the headlines and also look at the pictures. Pictures always help make your blog more easily scanned because they offer a break for the eyes and the brain.  The eyes and brain will look at the picture in a different manner than they look at words on a blog.  Offering the eyes and brain a “break” will allow your blog to be scanned easily.  In turn, when it can be scanned easily, the readers will keep coming!

Keeping the Interest

One thing that bloggers tend to do is go on and on about one thing endlessly.  It is important to limit each post to a small amount of words because if you don’t, your reader will get bored.  To avoid losing a reader’s interest you can shorten posts and bring your main point to the forefront.  You can also add pictures to your blog.  Adding pictures is the perfect way to keep the interest of your readers.  If you are talking about a lovely plant you have grown in your yard or an unusual looking dog you just adopted, consider adding a picture of it to your blog.

You would be surprised at how much more traffic you can bring to your site.  People will be able to connect more with you about the subject you are posting about.  They will be able to laugh with you at pictures you find funny and admire those that you treasure.  You will be maintaining a “friendship” through your pictures with your readers.

If you want to add pictures to your blog, you might want to consider investing in a digital camera, if you don’t already have one.  This will make putting the pictures onto your computer a much easier task to begin with.  After you master this task, read the “help” information on your blogging software to understand how you need to add the pictures to your blog.  Pay special attention to any size requirements or suggestions.  Some blogs will only allow a specific amount of space for graphics, so you will need to be aware of that amount.

Adding pictures to your blog is a great way to allow your blog to be easily scanned and to keep the interest of your readers.  When you do use pictures you will see your improvements easily.  Your readers will return to see what you have to say and new visitors will be interested and entertained.  By connecting with those who read your blog via pictures, you will be building lasting relationships with your readers.  Just be careful about what types of pictures you add.  You should not post someone on your blog without their permission so if you are posting a photo of someone you know, be sure to ask them first.

While blogs and website are intended to be different, there are a couple of similarities in blogs and sites. Mainly, they are both found on the Internet using a URL or a web address. Both also must have some sort of host to keep the information online. Another similarity of the two is that they both can be maintained by virtually anyone from individuals to companies. Both Weblog and websites can also contain information, pictures, link and keywords, as well. These two types of sites will target readers.

With a blog, information that is entered on the site is generally updated very frequently depending on the writer. Sometimes blog writers even update several times a day. Usually with a website, information is not updated regularly. Websites generally contain information about something that does not change often. When a website is updated, usually the entire page is altered. With a blog, just one entry at a time is updated. After a website has been changed, that information is gone and cannot be seen again by the reader. On a blog, new entries are added, but the old ones are not deleted from the site. Instead, they are stamped with the date and time that they were created, given a title and indexed on that blog page. It makes it easy for a blog reader to go to a certain blog page and read past entries without having to search.

Another main difference between and blog and a website is that a website is generally a little harder to maintain and oftentimes requires a solid understanding of the way the Internet works. With a blog, almost anyone can easily and quickly update a blog. It does not require any special working knowledge of the Internet. In addition, there are many sites that offer blog features and most of the time these can be used for free.

Blogs also encourage people to communicate with each other much more so than with a website. A websites primary function is to provide some sort of information to a reader. While there may be a place to leave a comment or an email address for writing that is not why that site was created. Blogs are used for communication. Writers may choose to make their site private, but most choose to publish their blogs making them public to any one who wishes to read. Most blog hosting sites offer options to add to the site so readers and the writer can leave comments to each other on the site. In addition, there are entire web communities built just for blogs. Blogs encourage those who have similar thoughts, interests or even businesses to share their blog site so readers can find them easily. Blogs offer guest tracking, keyword tracking, hit counters, comment areas, and even tag boards for both the reader and the writer to use.

Blogging is extremely popular right now. As more people begin sharing their thoughts with others, there are more blogs created each day. Blogging gives writers, journalists, professionals, moms, dads and even teenagers an instant way to publish their thoughts on a regular basis. For those who enjoy writing, blogs give a unique opportunity to practice writing skills and experiment with what others want to read. Businesses use blogs to show off their expertise and knowledge in their fields, whereas websites do not always get this type of message out to the readers.

Blogging and websites do have some similarities. They are both found on the Internet and contain information. However, blogs give a writer the unique opportunity to communicate with their reader and update their entries on a frequent basis. Anyone who tries blogging will love the instant gratification of getting their opinions and thoughts out on the Internet right away and getting instant feedback from readers that visit their site.