by Gordon Hamilton

Created on: February 25, 2009

There can never be a hard and fast set of rules for creating a popular and successful blog as the creation of such depends on too many variables outwith our control, not the least of which are human opinion and taste and search engine ranking formulae. The best we can do is follow an established series of tried and tested practises to ensure our blog is in the best position possible to attain such status and hope that those external factors do work in our favour.

The first step is to devise an extremely focused and dedicated subject upon which we are going to create our blog. It is not sufficient to create a blog on a wide ranging, general topic such as cooking, as the competition we will have is too vast for us to have any realistic chance of significant success. We should therefore look at very definite sub-topics or categories within this domain upon which to create our blog. Examples of very focused blogs in the cooking genre would be such as, "How to cook beef in a healthy fashion," or, "The best cakes we can make with marzipan." You will see that both such titles are much more focused and are therefore likely to encounter but a tiny fraction of the competition that an unspecified cooking blog would.

When we have determined the subject matter of our blog, we must decide upon a URL and title for it. It is likely that we will determine only part of the URL of our blog as the hosting platform will determine the remainder of it but we must make this as short, sweet and informative as possible. "Healthybeefcooking," or, "Marzipancakes," would be two good suggestions for the examples quoted above. We should also make the title of the blog as close to this part of the URL as possible but also very eye-catching. We wish to have a title which will stand out from the page on any listing, for example, returned by a search engine.

When we get to the stage of creating the blog, we need to choose a template which seems to fit with the topic of our blog. Try to visualise your blog and choose from the available templates one which you think will suit your subject matter. We should also be choosing a blogging platform which will allow us to include Google AdSense within our blog that we may have the chance to generate pay per click revenue from same.

There are a great many blog hosting platforms which allow us to include a blog introduction, just below the title and quite distinct from our regular postings. We must ensure that this introduction is relatively short but extremely

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