At the time I was also maintaining a website advertising my website-building services and occasionally made the sporadic update on this and that, so I thought, “Why not? I’ll add my random thoughts to the front page.” Long story short, after coding some pages in PHP and setting up a MySQL database backend, my makeshift blog was ready for debut at ScottRobertsWeb.com.

From the offset I wanted the blog’s focus to be evenly split into three categories. The first would be technology, which would encompass everything from programming tips to interesting happenings in the world of computing. The second category would feature my indelible love for hot sauces and spicy food. The remaining 33 percent covered all other general topics, whether they are crazy photos, funny videos, politics or what exactly was inside of electric stuffed animals. It was beautiful – I had relatively unlimited freedom to blog about whatever I desired, just as long as it fit into one of the three buckets and there were an equal number of blog articles from the other two categories to balance everything out.

But, over time, the blog has evolved to cover spicy foods as the chief focus, though I do attempt to fill out the other two from time to time.

Creating Your Own Blog and Determining a Subject Matter

Enough about me. You may have a desire to start up your own blog or site, but don’t know the first clue of what it’s going to be about. Perhaps you’ve tossed around a couple of ideas but are unsure if any of them are winning themes that people will want to read about. Well, here are a few tips that may aid you in your decision.

- Go with what you know. Go with your passions, go with your expertise, go with your unique experiences. Believe it or not, you are an expert at something. We all are. It doesn’t matter what it is, but you’ve spent your life doing something that is useful or will be interesting to somebody. Everyone’s got a story.

- Go with something you can update frequently. I’ve seen a lot of blogs that were crammed with great content at the beginning, but peter out very quickly. Why? The author simply ran out of good subject matter. He or she was able to whip up intriguing, engrossing posts for the first few weeks or months but they weren’t able to sustain their run with fresh, new content. Whatever you decide to make your blog’s theme, make sure you can keeping it alive with ongoing updates.

- Before you type a single character of your first blog post, write down several potential topic titles. Do they seem to write themselves? Are all of the thoughts, ideas and paragraphs freely flowing and just begging to be typed out and placed into your blog software? And what’s more, do these initial topics spawn other thoughts of stories and article ideas? If so, you might have something solid you can sink your teeth into for many months to come.

And be aware – if you want to dive into topical or controversial topics, you better do your research first. Make sure you know your stuff and why you believe it, so have all your bases covered. If you’re thinking of entering the world of politics on your blog, be prepared to take your hits with critics’ slings and arrows. If you’re not thick-skinned, then perhaps you should stay with less contentious subjects.

- Go with something that YOU would like to read about. What would stimulate your interest? Have you thought, “If only someone wrote about such-and-such, now THAT would be a killer website.” Take it upon yourself to write about those topics!

Have you scoured the web and seen a void that needs filling, topic-wise? This could be your opportunity to rush in and gain a readership that’s dying for information about a particular subject.

Develop the skill of noticing the little things and recognizing the offbeat. Every guy and his dog can write about the mundanities of life, but if you can provide a fresh perspective and a one-of-a-kind spin that no one else can provide, you might be able to produce a winner.

There’s nothing wrong with having multiple topics and focuses on your blog, but be clean and consistent. Refer back to what I mentioned earlier about my blog. While it’s okay to sometimes go on random flights of fancy with your writing, a “throw stuff at the wall and hope it sticks” approach isn’t always best. Attempt to categorize topics and keep things neat and organized so that your readers don’t have to cut through what they consider to be weeds to get to the freshly-cut grass.

In all of this, remember that your blog has to come from you. You are the most important ingredient, and you are the key to making each post enjoyable to read. You don’t have to be a great writer, but just have the ability to effectively convey your thoughts and let your own personality shine through.

Don’t post regularly. If you don’t habitually write blog articles (daily, weekly, or have specific, recurring days), this will effectively keep people away from your site in droves as there will be no real reason to come back. Awesome! Besides, you posted a few times back in April of 2008 and once last February, so that should be good enough, right?

Constantly apologize for not posting regularly. Who cares if this is as annoying as a fork scraping across a chalkboard? Keep screaming you’re sorry and that will make up for the good content your site lacks.

Don’t have your blog be focused on one general topic. Have your blog be about both nothing and anything, such as random thoughts, poetry, and why ticks love to infest your best pair of work shoes.

Don’t know why you are blogging. Simply create a blog because everyone else says it’s cool. And if you’ve just started a blog for your place of business, it doesn’t matter if you have  good content or a well thought-out, coherent plan. Just blurt out whatever comes to mind.

Constantly copy other peoples’ blog posts and articles. Just take verbatim what other folks write, and offer no original thoughts or perspectives of your own. Never offer anything valuable or unique.

Don’t use proper spelling, grammar and punctuation. Feel free to blog posts like you’re a 12-year-old who’s text messaging. Showing regard to good diction, well-formed sentence structure and easy-to-read paragraphs went the way of 8-track tapes.

Don’t have comments enabled. Why on earth would you ever want to reach out to an audience and let them strike up a two-way dialog? That might force you to spend more than three minutes a week on your blog.

Require someone to register for an account to post a comment. I know that most of the blog software out there has anti-spam filters and captchas that will catch most of the rift-raft. People enjoy jumping through hoops and filling out forms and love the fact that there’s YET ANOTHER username and password to keep track of, right?

Don’t have items easy to find and well laid-out on your website. This would make it too easy to find an RSS feed, an “About Us” or “About Me” page, post archives, and so on. Instead, force site visitors to spend several minutes on your site (you know, because you’re so great that they should naturally want to waste ridiculous amounts of time on your site). Have an ugly, gaudy, and extremely disorganized website.  This gets them every time.

Don’t write for the web. Use gigantic blocks of long-winded text with few or no breaks. Why should your blog be easy to read?

Use misleading and undescriptive blog post titles. You should fool, baffle, and ultimately turn away any readers that may be straggling around.

Don’t develop your own voice. Be cold, impartial, and overly-analytical. Don’t put your own unique spin on something.

Attempt your best to be “spammy”. Do your best to sound like an ad, using lots of marketese, and have virtually nothing honest, trustworthy or real to say. While you’re at it, employ as many font styles, font sizes and colors as you can in your blog posts, as well as underlining several lines of text despite them not being hyperlinks.

Cover your blog with ads. Clean is out. Make your site look like the Vegas strip or downtown Branson at night. If your 60-year-old boss at your place of employment likes flashing and shiny objects scattered across his monitor, that should be a justifiable reason to cram your blog with as many ads as you humanly can.

Be a loose cannon and don’t watch what you’re typing. Never do research and never think of any kind of repercussions your posts might have in the future. Having class, restraint, and highly calculated ideas is overrated.

Member of several social media and network sites? Terrific! Do nothing but spam your blog post links on them. Never become personally involved in social communities and participate in them unless you can get something out of it.

Never spend time on other blogs, to borrow ideas, topics, tools, and tricks which you can use. Be stagnant, unimaginative, and uninteresting.

If you follow these simple, yet concise, tips, you will establish yourself as a blogger NOT worth following.  Because, really, what’s the point in maintaining a fresh, engaging blog that encourages others?

Oh, one more thing – be ready to use sarcasm at any moment when you blog.  Make sure you sufficiently confuse your readers as to whether or not you are serious.  Your followers will love this…

Free Flow

Often writers become overly concerned with the minutiae that they get hung up on and make their productivity come to a grinding halt. You may frequently get the urge to back up and edit what you have already written. You may worry yourself, “how am I going to phrase this?” or “should I say point A or point B next?” or “what is the best way to express my feelings on this?” Break out of this self-inflicted rut and simply start typing away.

You can accomplish this by what some call “free writing”. To do this, you set aside a pre-determined amount of time (5 minutes, 15 minutes, or 30 minutes), start writing and “never look back”. Write whatever ideas pop into your brain. Don’t worry about minute details, don’t worry about spelling and grammatical errors, and don’t worry that what you’re writing may not flow together smoothly – it probably won’t. The key is to get your thoughts on your computer as quickly as possible. Just keep typing and plugging away at it until the time is up. You can always edit and spell check later, and change words around, add adjectives, or delete entire chunks of writing.

What does the other side say about it?

If applicable, read an article or blog post from an opposing point of view, and then type out some counter arguments and statements as you read their article over.

Jot it down and reuse later

Here’s a great tip that may not help you now but can do wonders for you later: write or type out little snippets of thought. Just document whatever comes in your head, in the middle of the day or night, even as you are performing other tasks, and even if it has absolutely nothing to do with what you’re currently writing about in your current blog posting. It may be clever, coherent ideas or pure gibberish. It could be single sentences or short paragraphs. At a later date, you can come back to these, possibly combine two or more together, or expand upon a short paragraph and make it a full-blown blog post. The point is to have a well of ideas and words to dip into whenever your mind becomes “dry”.

Create an unpublished blog post or simply create a text document on your computer and add these snippets of thought, and use them when you need a topic or thoughts on a particular subject. You might be able to simply “plug them in” to an article on which you may be working, or create a brand-new article from scratch.

Outline your thoughts

Before really digging into your article and filling out the fine details, make an outline of what you want to say. Come up with the important points, or an intro, a problem, and a resolution, and then once you have those add the less significant points and details.

Take a break!

Do something totally unrelated to writing or blogging. Get away from the computer. Exercise, stretch, or get some fresh air and go for a walk.

Turn off the noise

A distracted mind can often be less productive. As you sit at your computer, turn off all instant messaging programs, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, internet browsers, e-mail clients, and anything else that may distract you or tempt you check in on every five minutes. Turn the ringer off on your cell or landline phone. Trust me, you won’t be missing much, and the world won’t miss you. You’ll be able to better focus on the task at hand.

Have only a text editor or word processing program open, and when you’re finished with your work, copy and paste your blog post into your web browser to publish.

Change your setting

Try changing your physical location. Move to another room. Try writing from the library, coffee shop, or even the inside of your car. Stuck at a desktop computer? Make yourself “feel” you’re sitting elsewhere by modifying the room’s lighting and putting on some oddball music on your stereo.

Make a clean break

Take a bath or shower and put on some clean clothes. Sometimes having a (literally) fresh break can do wonders for your creativity.

Change your time

If you regularly blog in the evenings, try doing it in the morning or vice-versa. Your mind may be too used to routines that a time-of-day jolt may do wonders for your creativity.

Go for the bizarre

Still stuck? Stop what you’re doing for 60 seconds and do something off-the-wall. Do as many push-ups in a row as you can. Make funny faces in the mirror. Grab all the food cans from your pantry or cupboard and see how high you can stack them on your kitchen floor. Smack yourself.  Build the ultimate paper airplane and see how far you can throw it.

Done? Then immediately jump back on your computer and start plugging away again.

I’ve given you several ideas below to help you get started.

Search Engine Optimization

Whether you’re trying to capture hits for one of the latest hot topics on the web or just trying to get a few people hitting some of your archived posts, you need the search engines such as Google to be able to scan your pages, index them, and rank them highly for keyword searches.

1. Get SEO plug-ins. There are many available for WordPress, including the All in One SEO Pack.
2. Write good, keyword-rich titles for your articles. A clever or funny one may catch peoples’ eyes, but make sure it’s packed with good, pertinent terms based on the post’s subject matter.
3. Use Article title as the URL, not month/date, etc. Instead of having your blog’s links be something along the lines of http://www.yourdomain.com/2009/03/02/blog-traffic.html or http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=1473, make it look like http://www.yourdomain.com/ways-to-increase-your-blog-traffic.html. This can be accomplished in your blog’s admin (you may need one of the aforementioned plugins).
4. Have article headers – such as <H1>, <H2>, <H3> tags – that are keyword-rich
5. Use <strong> instead of <b> tags, especially for important words and keyword phrases
6. Use plenty of keyword phrases and variations on your articles. If your article is about running shoes, use loads of variations on that term and brands associated with that: tennis shoes, cross trainers, cross training, athletic shoes, sneakers, Nike, Adidas, New Balance, Reebok, etc… (Just a warning – your writing style should seem natural to a typical human reader, who is quick to spot if the article sounds like it’s from a marketing brochure or so crammed with keywords it looks like spam. So use caution and use a balanced approach or else you’ll irritate those ever-so-important human readers.)
7.  Have a good, easy-to-follow site structure. Your categories and sections should be well organized and have a good, clean, uncluttered design. Make things as easy as possible for others to use your website. Use good navigation, keep good archives, keep things free, have a nice site search.
8. Frequently link back to and refer to older articles you’ve written – these “deep links” will ensure that not only will Google and their ilk be able to easily reach archived pages, but human visitors will, too.
9. 9. Use a robots.txt file and have good sitemaps.

 Get Links to Your Site Everywhere

 If you want to get some serious increases in the number of readers, you’ve got to post your website address in as many places as possible.

1. Find other sites that are similar to yours in subject matter and offer link exchanges with them.
2. Set up an “e-mail to a friend” link, and encourage others to share the love.
3. Find plenty of similar sites, blogs, and forums to yours, and post frequently there with your blog URL. DON’T spam their comments with your name and URL; you should always have something meaningful to say that will legitimately add to the conversation.
4. Submit your blog to DMOZ, which is a human-edited directory of links.
5. Offer to guest-post on a blog that’s in a similar niche as yours.
6. Answer questions in Yahoo! Answers and Google Groups. Give relevant, pertinent info, and if you’re able to throw a URL to a blog posting that is related to the question, that even better.
7. Post your URLs of your latest blog posts to social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. and post these updates often.
8. Sign up for accounts on social network sites such as Technorati, Digg, etc. and get your blog listed on them. This includes your blog’s RSS feed. If you don’t know what the URL to your RSS feed is, learn it.
9. ANY site giving you the capability to post a URL of your website, you should: profile pages for various online accounts, social networking sites, forums, and so on. If it’s scanable or readable by humans or search engine spiders, get that link up there.
10. Write a great article and submit it to free article sites like EZineArticles, iSnare, and GoArticles. People are always looking for fresh content, so why not provide it for them (along with that all-important link back to your site)?
11. Update your site on pingomatic.com every time you crate a new post entry.
12. If you find them (or if they find you), have your blog listed on a blog carnival.

 Content, Content, Content!

This is the most important tip of all: write fantastically engaging content.

1. Don’t worry if your content seems too vague, niche, narrow, or specific a topic. The more specialized the better. You’ll have less competition on the web for that subject matter. If you write a detailed article about a particular niche, you might be considered to be one of the main sources of info on the web.
2. Update your blog frequently. Post on a frequent, regular basis. Have set schedule of posting. If possible, write an extra blog article or two so that if something happens in your day-to-day routine that prevents you from posting, you’ll have a backlog of fresh content on hand to give to your loyal readers.
3. Get readers involved. Ask questions. Don’t be afraid to tackle controversial topics, just as long as your arguments are thought-out and written well. Site visitors are more likely to be regular readers if they feel they are part of the “community”.
4. Write a piece about current events. Did something happen in the “national discussion” that’s near and dear to your heart? Why not blog about it, especially if you have are able to present it with a unique angle? I’m not suggesting that you pen something about every news headline or celebrity scandal, but if you can put an interesting spin on a hot topic then Google, Yahoo, and the rest could rank you high in their search results, giving you a small flood of new readers.

If you follow this simple, yet comprehensive, list of suggestions, you will find yourself on the fast track to successful SEO optimization.

Written by: Scott Roberts