The response from friends is good. And if I recall correctly, link blogs are the genesis of blogging. I’ve also got deeper “[subject] Week” style things planned.

I want to get linked and read, but I also don’t want to tie myself down to one or two subjects. Most of it ends up being science and technology, but I’m expecting there will be more variety.

Would this produce too broad a set of subjects?

Thanks,
Martin

Don’t try to impress people that know more about the subject you are writing about. Instead write for people who know less about it. There are (probably) much more people that can learn from what you have to say, so you will have a bigger audience. And this way you can avoid looking ridiculous.

SEO is hugely important, and so is ease of navigation, and so few new bloggers these days think that they need to actually work to get noticed. That’s why you see so many blogs on Blogger with a couple of posts and then nothing else.

Now I’m spending a ridiculous amount of time going through your blog’s archive.

On the plus side, I figured most of the other stuff out on my own, so the blogs I’ve tried still get some traffic, despite not being updated in ages.

Sadly, I have that problem as well and my main problem is lack of blogging ideas. But I’ve been moving around from blog to blog to learn on how I can improve this.

I also learned the importance of #6 the hard way. In my early days of blogging, I would begin to lose motivation and my post frequency would decrease until I wasn’t posting anything at all. Mainly my loss of motivation was the result of me not promoting myself, reaching out to other bloggers and getting involved in the blog community. As a result, I lost focus on why I was even blogging in the first place.

Over time, I began to acquire that focus once more. I’m now very pleased to where I am in my blogging career. My blog is heading its way on up and readers are contributing a lot more to comments. I also find that I’m much more motivated to write now that I feel like I’m part of the community and have been reading other blogs in the same niche.

While most points are dead on, I’ll have to disagree with #7 when you state “The real answer, however, is ‘Because I am lazy.’ Don’t be lazy and learn what you must if you want to make your blog popular.”

First of all, I love SEO. I optimize all my sites for search engines. However, I’ve talked to many people who don’t bother with SEO at all, and it’s not because they’re just “lazy.” Many people just don’t believe in SEO.

Take Leo Babauta of Zen Habits for example. He has a very successful blog with an ongoing readership. He hates SEO and believes that content should be focused directly on the readers and not search engines. He has managed to grow his blog admiringly without optimizing it for search engines. Even though he hasn’t optimized his blog, his posts end up getting picked up anyway. He mainly got most of his traffic through guest posting and interacting with other blogs. Search engine traffic is a minor portion of his overall traffic compared to the traffic he gets from referral websites.

While I don’t agree with Leo on some of the things he says, it makes sense why he doesn’t use SEO. He’s not “lazy.” Look at Zen Habits and you can automatically see that. He just doesn’t believe in SEO.

You need to identify your hurdles to overcome this issue. Most common problems blogger don’t update on regular basis are: Don’t have enough time, lack of blogging ideas, disappointed with their ROI.
What’s yours?

while I agree with number 10, I have seen some people have really successful blogs by bashing people. In fact, some people do that for a living. I certainly don’t like it, but in some cases it does unfortunately work.

Cheers!

Mike

Putting all these together really tells a blogger that he is doing a business and not a job

Some people blog because they think it is an easy way to make money. It isn’t. It’s hard. You made some good points.

Good list, thanks.

If you’re not enjoying the journey to get there, then you’re doing it wrong.

In my opinion, all of the tips are very good and a lot of bloggers are doing those mistakes.

To be honest, I was guilty of a few before. Lol.

Very, very useful points.
Thanks a lot for sharing!

Thanks.

This is perfect. I couldn’t agree more with every point you make, especially #1, #2, #7 and #8.

Thanks for this great post.

Michael

Good post.