What are the keys to having a successful blog?

What makes you want to read certain blogs? What are some topics that you think would make a blog successful? How does one get more people to watch their blog?

There are several factors that contribute to a successful blog. First and foremost, you should focus on a particular market or area of interest, e.g., sky diving. Your topics will derive from what you or other sky divers are interested in, e.g., how to sky dive, sky diving equipment, best locations to sky dive, etc. You want to establish the blog as a place to find good content, resources and an interactive community.

Once you setup your blog and post some initial content, you'll need to let sky divers know of your existence. Getting indexed in the major search engines is a start: Google, Yahoo & MSN. You should also read and comment on similar blogs, post in forums where your target readers hang out, and join some online communities. Additionally, submitting your site to blog directories is helpful along with exchanging links with other bloggers.

Overall, you want to create a content-rich site, targeted toward a select group of people. You then get on their radar screen by utilizing some of the traffic sources mentioned above. The most important thing to remember, however, is not to give up when you first start out. Creating a successful blog with a consistent flow of traffic takes time.

I hope this helps.

Some blogs get crawled by Google and come up in searches. A way to optimize your blog is by applying meta tags/keywords. Also stick to a small range of topics. This will allow you to repeat your keywords and focus your traffic and ranking. Those are ways to get more traffic.

Write about interesting things and topics people want to read about, more importantly your target audience. People might put a link on their site that leads to your blog. This could increase traffic and Google page rank. Thus bringing even more traffic.