Starting out a blog can be as easy as 1+1 or as hard as a calculus problem, it depends on your purpose.

Making a blog to express your feelings can be an easy job. But making a blog to share knowledge, gain popularity or even gain money is a hard one. I’ve been blogging for 2 years now, but I’ve been into the hard side for 5 months and I can attest that it is really hard. Doing it over and over again makes it easier and easier each time.

Here are a few tips to live on to start out successful blog easier:

1. Know Your Blog’s Purpose. If you are serious on blogging, you should never miss this step. Your blog’s purpose will drive your blog to success. Remember that it is always better to blog on things you know well. But that does not mean limiting yourself on the spectrum, you can always explore. If you are into blogging just for fun, you may skip this and later, you will realize your blog’s purpose.
2. Find a Good Name. Your blog’s name should be catchy. A catchy name will attract more visitors. Avoid using titles such as “Welcome to my Online World”, “My Blog” and the likes. Also, avoid using template titles such as “Beautiful Disaster”, “Mandigo” or “Hemingway”. You will just end up having a hard time climbing the Google search results.
3. Get a Good Host. There are free blog hosts in the internet such as Blogger and Wordpress. The downside of these free hosts is the lack of customization especially in Wordpress. Another disadvantage of using free blog hosts are the .blogspot.com or .wordpress.com suffix. If you think you are ready to go hardcore, you may decide to host your own blog but it costs some amount.I’m currently hosting at my own plan in Dreamhost. A personalized [dot]com, 200GB of webspace and 4.00TB of bandwidth will just cost you $22.40 for your first year ($97.00 off of the original $119.40) if you use the coupon code: conradmiguel or use this link on signing up.
4. Use the power of link exchange. For really starters, this will be helpful. Contact different bloggers and ask them for a link trade. Blogs of similar topic are the best place to have a link.
5. Join blog communities. Join blog communities such as MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog. A sample of a MyBlogLog widget is on my sidebar. MyBlogLog widgets logs every registered MyBlogLog user visiting a blog. Your avatar will appear on the widget of the blog you are visiting. This gives you publicity, and if you are fortunate enough it will give you traffic.
6. Put a Top Commentator plugin. A sample of this plugin will be on my sidebar. With this plugin, more users will be interested to comment on your blog as their name will appear if they are among the top 10 commentators. You gain comments plus they gain exposure. What a nice mutual relationship!
7. Harness the power of RSS. The use of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds are now starting to earn popularity. When a visitor subscribes to an RSS feed, he receives the content of your blog without actually visiting your blog. You may also choose to give only the excerpt of your posts so that they will have to visit your blog to view the full post.
8. Comment on other blogs. Commenting on other blogs, especially those blogs with Top Commentator plugins, will bring traffic to your blog. Just don’t comment spammy messages. Say something, not just “Nice article. I like it!” or the likes.

That’s all for now, I may have missed some points, you can add them by commenting. ;D