by Lou Belcher

Created on: April 17, 2009   Last Updated: April 30, 2009

A successful blog can bring attention to your website, increase your sales, and/or help you to build your business or organization. Here are ways to go about writing a successful and popular blog:

1. Choose a broad version of your topic. Name your blog after your business or after the topic of your business or organization.

2. Devise a list of sub-topics. These will be the topics of your blog articles. Make as long a list as possible. You'll be more apt to keep up with writing articles to post on your blog if you have a long list of topics ahead of you. Keep the list handy. Every time you think of another topic, add it to the list, so that you'll have an endless list of topics.

3. Write 400- to 600-word articles about each topic. Do research if necessary and make a short outline of the points you want to cover in the blog article. Choose key words to use in each article. Keywords are the words that customers will use in a search on the Internet. They are the words that will lead traffic to your blog. Keywords should be repeated several times at the beginning of the article, again in the middle, and at the end.

4. Begin posting the articles. It's probably best to post them every other day and to post shorter comment-type blogs in between.

5. When you post the blog articles, send out a notice to your mailing list that a new blog is up. It is a good idea to put a join button on your blog, so that you can add visitors to your distribution list.

6. Social media sites are good to help increase traffic to your blog. Sites, such as Twitter.com and Facebook.com, can help to bring attention to what you have to offer. When you post a blog, notify those who follow you on the social media site that a new blog is up. Not only will your followers take a look, but they might notify their followers. This is the way a following grows.

7. In order to keep a following, you must post useful information that is interesting to your following. Also, you can make your blog more interesting by encouraging participation by seeking comments from those who visit.

8. Contests and surveys also increase participation and interest from readers.

A successful and popular blog requires constant work. Keep blogging and keep encouraging interaction with your readers and you'll find that you have a great response to your blog. If you are not a writer, there are writers out there who will be glad to write and post blog entries for you. It's important to have good writing on your blog so the visitors to your blog are not distracted from your message by poor writing.

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