Some successful bloggers earn hundreds of dollars per month from AdSense, thousands of people read their blogs, and every entry generates dozens of comments. Most bloggers however, will never achieve this, in fact most blogs are never read by more than a few people.

Your blog could become a success but there are a few things you need to do. You do want to own a successful blog right?

Pre-Requisites for a Successful Blog

Why do most ordinary blogs stay ordinary? Because they are ordinary, they’re just another blog filled with the author’s personal activities, bandwagon ‘check this out’ entries, ’sorry I’ve been busy’ entries to explain why they haven’t written anything for weeks, etc. They lack any clear focus and consistency. Successful blogs by comparison are focused, they have a reason for being, and they’re updated regularly.

A focused blog concentrates on a few related keywords, a niche, and ALL entries are written around those keywords. Our ordinary blog needs to do the same. Picking the keywords for your blog isn’t difficult, you already know what subject you’ll be covering. Google your main keywords with a tilde (~) before or after the keyword, for example ~music, to see which terms Google associates with them, they’ll be bolded just like your main keyword. Voila!, a ready made keyword list to include in your entries.

Writing regular focused entries is key to building a successful blog, your readers are interested in the topic and will go elsewhere if they don’t get their ‘regular fix‘. Most successful bloggers write every day. Extremely popular niches might warrant several entries per day, less popular might get away with weekly updates. You choose, however a good rule of thumb is if your content is newsy, then more frequent updates will be required.

Make sure the blog management system you use creates feeds automatically and make sure your feed is promoted on every page.

Using services such as Feedburner to host your feed are great for ordinary blogs and successful blogs alike, they allow the blog owner to track the number of subscribers and reduce bandwidth from your site, but remember that readers who don’t visit your site aren’t being exposed to your other content such as static pages or advertising.

Writing Style and Blog Presentation

Almost all successful blogs are written well and supported with a great template to showcase the author’s entries. By contrast, a lot of ordinary blogs are haphazard, the writing style varies from entry to entry, templates are often a personal favorite of the author, or worse, poorly modified by the author.

Good writing style encompasses a variety of styles, however all have something in common. Consistency of spelling, grammar, sentence structure etc. Well written entries read well, the logic flows from point to point, and they don’t tax the brain of the reader too much. Simple tips for writing good entries include, write out your main points first, then add the detail. Write a great introduction paragraph that is quotable, and includes the goal of your article. Make sure your title is descriptive. If it’s about optimizing pages for the Google spider, then make sure these words are included in your title.

Comments to your entries are the life blood of a successful blog, without which a community won’t develop, and consequently associated backlinks. Wherever possible, write your entries with an edge of controversy, have an opinion, encourage your readers to start discussions within your comments. Successfully blogging often creates a community who disagree with you, these people will drive more traffic and create more backlinks than those who agree with you, but there is a fine line to be tread. Don’t antagonize them to the extent that you lose them.

Successful bloggers almost always use a template that makes it easy for readers to find the entry, the site navigation, and other relevant blocks on page. Often the graphics on page are quite minimal, contributing to fast load time and a cleaner, whiter design with dark grey text that is optimized for the human eye. Don’t hide your links, make them stand out using bold text or a different color, let your reader see that you’re aren’t afraid to credit another writer, this adds weighting to your entries.

Promoting the Successful Blog

Truly successful blogs are promoted by their owners, failure to follow this step may allow another blogger to usurp your rightful place in the search engine ranking wars. Effectively promoting your site will improve your sites page rank, increase traffic, and minimize the effects of competition within your keyword niche.

Promoting the successful bog begins with pinging the major blog search engines every time a new entry is published. If your blog system doesn’t include a pinging module, bookmark a service such as iPings.

You know your niche well, you probably know all the experts in your niche, most of whom will have a blog or be active members of discussion forums. Use these to promote your own blog. Commenting in other bloggers entries and forum threads, especially those that rank well for keyword phrases, are a good way of driving traffic to your site. Reciprocate by linking to their blog entries or forum threads when this will improve the flow of your entries.

Actively seek out authority pages on sites such as About.com, wikipedia, and other high ranking sites to submit/request a link to your entries. They’ll only be interested in good quality entries that add to the discussion so pick your content carefully. Chances are you’ll only get one shot at impressing them.

Monetizing the Successful Blog

Most professional internet marketers and bloggers agree that a successful blog is quite capable of providing a full time income from advertising and promoting products. Google AdSense is an excellent program to implement that requires virtually no input from the blogger. Many of the most successful blogs however are monetized using other advertising programs which often generate greater income and therefore profit.

Most higher paying programs will not accept low traffic blogs into their programs, so starting with Google AdSense is the preferred strategy for developing blogs. The aim of the blogger would be to increase traffic to several hundred unique visitors per day as a minimum.

Following the tips presented here are guaranteed to start the process of converting an ordinary blog into a successful blog with its own large community and monetization prospects. Don’t be ordinary anymore, get working!