However, no matter how interesting your content is, if there is nobody to read it you can’t generate profit from it. Traffic is the lifeblood of your blog. In order to attract people, you must offer valuable information. Simple enough.

However, to get traffic onto your site, you have to think backwards. Where do people look when they need information? Yes, they search using popular search engines like www.google.com, www.yahoo.com and www.msn.com. So, to get these people on your blog, your blog needs to rank high on the search result pages of these search engines. When people search for information through the search engines and see your site among the top results, they will more likely click through to your blog!

The art of getting your blog or website into high rankings on search result pages is called search engine optimization. It can be a very difficult and complex subject to master, but we won’t let that stop us from learning simple yet effective techniques to conquer the search results for certain keywords. More complex techniques are usually needed to fight for very competitive and general keywords such as “fat loss”, but I’ll teach you how to overcome that later.

For now, let’s determine the keywords that you want to optimize your site for. Let’s say, for example, that you blog about tech gadgets. You’ll want to check in Google to see how competetive your keyword is. At the time of this writing, there are 53,400,000 search results. Think you can beat 53,400,000 sites on your first attempt? I don’t think so.

Now, let’s try to narrow down our scope. Let’s look for “technological gadgets” instead. At the time of this writing, Google lists 730,000 results. That’s more manageable, but you’d still like to search for more focused keywords. However, let’s optimize your blog for “technological gadgets” just for the sake of learning.

First, you have to pay attention to the title of your blog. Since you’re optimizing for technological gadgets, you need to have that exact phrase in your blog title. For example, a line like “Your Best Technological Gadgets Blog!” would work great. You can change the title of your blog in the Blogger control panel or the WordPress blog when you’re creating it. If you’re proficient with HTML, you can even do that on other blog engines like Moveable Type. Bottom line? Learn a little HTML!

Other than that, your page heading should also contain the term you’re optimizing for. The page heading is the bit of text in your code that is enclosed within the <h1> and </h1> tags. This is important as it tells the search engines what your page is about (in this case, “technological gadgets”). Since we’re posting a blog, the <h1> </h1> tags are usually the post titles, so remember to include the term there whenever relevant.

One last tip… you should also sprinkle the words “technological gadgets” in your posts whenever possible. The frequent occurrence of that phrase in your blog will tip off the search engines that your blog is really relevant to that topic.

This final tip is the most important of all. Always keep in mind that you’re writing for real life people who read your blog to obtain information, so it is very important that you not spam your blog with keywords! In fact, if you do that, the search engines will end up thinking you’re spamming and they will drop your ranking down into oblivion. So keep in mind… write for humans, not search engines!

We have discussed how to write effectively, so now we are going to discuss what topice we are going to write on. The very first option that I think a blogger should write on is a topic that he or she is interested in and passionate about. You’ve chosen to use blogging in your business because you want to escape a mundane job – forcing yourself to write about something that you’re not interested in would be as torturous as as your mundane job!

Another reason to write about something you’re passionate about is because your feelings and emotion shows through your writings! If you feel indifferent to a certain subject but still write about it, your readers will notice it. Remember the advice about writing with a personality? If you force yourself to write, your personality will not show through in your writing.

Once you have chosen your main theme, start posting to your blog about it and make it a habit to post at least once every day, even if it’s only a comment on the newspaper article you read today. Think of yourself as a gigantic train. It takes a lot of effort to get you moving. You will go slowly at first, but once you get up to speed, it will take a lot of effort to stop you!

Even if you know your topic very well, your brain is bound to get exhausted over time. Here are some methods to brainstorm for content for your blog.

1) The very best way to brainstorm is to see what other bloggers have to say about what is happening in your field of discussion. And the very best way to find related blogs is to use http://blogsearch.google.com/ or www.technorati.com. With a little research you may be able to find other decent search tools. From other blogs, you can gather more knowledge on your subject and you can also comment on what others have to say on your own blog!
2) Once you’ve established contacts with other bloggers in your field, you’ll have an almost unexhaustible ongoing “conversation”, so you won’t need to spend as much time searching for content to write about. However, if you’re still stuck, search for news articles related to your niche in the local newspaper or online through sites like http://news.google.com and http://news.yahoo.com.
3) You can also have conversations with people with the same interests as you in the your particular niches, so you will eventually build up a collection of questions and answers and interesting discussions to write about in your blog. To do this, join forums related to your niche, but don’t join every forum there is out there. Stick with one or two with the largest number of members or the one which is most focused on your niche. This will also come in handy later in gaining traffic and generating profits.

Remember to keep up your momentum of posting at least once per day so that the major search engines will know that your blog has fresh content everyday. This will attract the search engines spiders to your page on a more frequent basis, hence gaining you more traffic.

For now, don’t worry about search engines and generating traffic, because we’re going to talk about that in more detail later. For now, remember to keep a consistent effort everyday and build up momentum like that of a locomotive!

However, the difference between a profitable blog and a non-profitable blog is the way in which the blog is written. For example… would you prefer to read your university professor’s lecture notes or the latest novel by your favorite author?

You may prefer the novel because it appeals more to your interest, or because it is not as mind-numbing as the lecture notes by your professor. However, the most important point is people like to read “light” material most of the time. When people log on to your blog, they are not only looking for information – they are also looking for information they can obtain easily, and better still in a relaxed manner.

So, to attract more visitors as well as to keep your current visitors coming back for more, it is very important to add a human touch to your blog posts. This can be done by simply imagining you’re talking about a certain topic with a friend. An extra bonus for your readers would be a great sense of humor, so add funny comments in your articles where appropriate.

Another important key point is to avoid writing as if you’re preparing a speech. Instead, you should write as if you’re having a conversation to a single person because this will make your visitor think of you more as a personal friend.

Besides that, it is also very useful to express your own personality through your words. Human beings are very curious creatures, so naturally your visitors would want to know as much about you as the information you’re offering them.

Communicating your distinctive personality in your blog can make a world’s difference in differentiating your blog from all the other blogs out there. This is a lot like creating your own brand name, where people immediately remember your blog’s name, just like how people immediately think of McDonald’s for fastfood or Nike for sportswear.

So, the lesson for today is to simply write as an equal friend to your visitors, write to them as if you’re talking to a single person and establish your own personality on your blog.

Blogs are easy to set up and maintain, and blogging can be a lucrative source of profit.You get paid while you write on subjects that interest you. You can write whenever you want and wherever you are. The flexibility of blogging makes it easy for you to just kick back, relax and go on a vacation whenever you feel like it.

In this article, we will look into the profitability of a blog and set up a blog of our own at no cost! Interested? Read on!

First, you need to obtain a blog. There are several options – you can host a blog on your own domain or get a free blog. For starters, let’s talk about the free blogs. You can obtain a free blog at www.blogger.com or the newer (and better!) www.wordpress.com. If you are a techie, you must have heard of WordPress, a free blog engine that is robust and infinitely expandable.

You might think that, since Blogger.com is owned by Google, that Blogger blogs would be ranked higher by Google. However, WordPress is better in the sense that it has more advanced features such as Trackbacks and Categories. You can also manage your sidebar links more efficiently (more about this later).

Get a free blog at either Blogger.com (http://www.blogger.com/signup.g) or WordPress (http://wordpress.com/signup/). Then, familiarize yourself by posting your first post on your blog and tinkering around with the options and templates.

Here are a few common “blog-related” words to help you out:

1)      Permalink – Permalink stands for permanent link, which is a URL (uniform resource locator) that leads to an individual post that you make in your blog.

2)     Trackback – When you post about someone else’s blog post elsewhere, your post will show up in their “trackback” section. This feature, however, is not available with a Blogger.com account.

3)     Pinging – Blogging seems to be paired with pinging almost every time either one is mentioned nowadays. Pinging is actually the action where a certain aggregator is notified whenever your blog is updated, so that the aggregator may show the newest post of your blog on their website. This is a useful way to gaining traffic, which we shall discuss later.

For now, I shall leave you testing out your new blog and the features that come included with it. In the next articles, we shall discuss the many ways we can gain profit from a blog, as well as tips on how to write posts that keep visitors glued and keep coming back for more!