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Your choice of blog host or whether you self-publish is personal and you can turn your blog into a successful one whichever platform you choose, so I won't explore that topic here.

Pre-flight check:

Before you get any hits at all, you need to get your blog to a high standard, otherwise none of your visitors will come back and you'll need repeat visits, not only to maintain your hit-rate, but to spread the word and get you new hits too.

Style, darling!

It has to look good, but online, think Armani rather than Versace. A sleek, attractive, minimal style is easy on the eye and allows your content and images to stand out. Clashing colors, scrolling text and animated gifs all belong on nineties Geocities homepages, not on the top blogs of today. Do not attempt that kind of retro unless you have seriously good style. Start off with a simple template depending on where and how you blog, you can customize features of it to reflect your own style and give the blog an occasional facelift to keep people interested.

What are you saying?

Niche blogs work well. If there's consistency in your subject matter and/or how you express and present it, you will become a bit of a cult within your field (if you're doing it well). Use your spellcheck and make sure your apostrophes are in the right places readers get militant about apostrophes.

All linked up and everywhere to go:

List your blog in every directory and aggregator you can find and look for directories and subdirectories with categories that relate to you. This is an essential part of making your blog easy to find. Register it with Technorati before you do anything.

Add your blog link to all of your personal stuff too use it as an email signature, put it on your social networking profiles and so on.

Offer reciprocal linking on your blog i.e. get people to add your link to their site by doing the same yourself.

Be a complete comment whore. The more you comment on other blogs leaving a handy link to your own blog, naturally the more visits and comments you'll get on your blog. Visit celebrity blogs and comment you'll get plenty of visits that way too.

Burn the feed:

Use somewhere like feedburner.com to burn your feed and make sure that your RSS feed is highly visible, as well as the option for readers to subscribe to the feed via email. Make it easy for people to become regulars.

Get interactive:

Questions and surveys and interviews and polls are a great way to get people to interact on your blog. Interaction means people spend more time

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