During my first few months of blogging one of the most effective methods of promotion was writing guest posts for other blogs. I put a lot of effort into getting exposure and links be writing for a number of different blogs and slowly building my own audience.

While I never had any huge spikes in subscriber growth from writing a guest post, I was able to make a lot of great contacts, build my reputation and get a number of quality links by making the rounds to different blogs.

From my experience I believe that guest posting is one of the best things any new blogger can do. At first, getting visitors to your new blog can be difficult, but if you want to you can go out and proactively get your work in front of targeted readers by writing for other blogs.

Now that my blogs are more established I don’t write guest posts anymore, but that hasn’t changed my opinion of how effective they can be for someone who is looking to get their blog off the ground.

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Because blogs need consistent content in order to achieve success, the challenge of developing ideas into useful and interesting posts is never-ending. This is not a new subject for bloggers and there are plenty of posts already written about overcoming bloggers block and how to identify topics to cover. Rather than repeating these common ideas, I’d like to share with you three specific ways that I use for my own blogging.

I have three different blogs of my own and I also do freelance writing for a few others, so my content development techniques aren’t always the same for each blog. However, these three methods have proven to be useful to me, and I think they can help you as well.

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Building a successful and profitable blog does not happen by accident. In order to achieve a high level of success, a blog needs to have a number of different characteristics. In this post we’ll look at ten things that all blogs must have in order to achieve long-term, sustained success.

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Bloggers and theme designers are always in search of ways to maximize the potential of screen space and improve the effectiveness of the blog as a result. Whether you’re working to improve your sidebar in effort to increase pageviews, adding related links at the end of your posts to build internal links, or improving your blog footer, there is an almost constant effort to get more out of the blog.

One area that is commonly overlooked is the feed. Much like the blog itself, the feed can be enhanced to make a blog more profitable or effective for subscribers. In particular, this post will look at the subject of the feed footer and how it can be used for something beneficial. If you’re like me you may have installed one of a handful of WordPress plugins to work with the feed footer, but neglected to keep this up-to-date and useful for subscribers.

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Many bloggers have dreams of becoming a full-time blogger so they can quit their jobs and work around their own schedule on something that they will will enjoy. Of course, the reality is that only a very small percentage of those who start off with these intentions will ever achieve “pro blogger” status.

In order to make it to the point where you can sustain yourself on just a blogging income, you’ll first have to get started somewhere. Building a successful and profitable blog part-time can be a real challenge, but with a strategic plan and a lot of discipline you can certainly build a blog on a part-time basis that can do very well for you financially.

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ScribeFire Blog Editor

There are a number of offline blog editors that work with the major blogging platforms, but if you’re looking for a blog editor to use from inside Firefox, give ScribeFire a try.

“ScribeFire is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog. You can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, upload images, and post to multiple blogs.”

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A very high percentage of people who start blogs in hopes of making money will wind up being disappointed with their results. While it’s possible to do very well financially with a blog, it’s not the easiest way to make money like a lot of people think it is. Building a successful and profitable blog takes a lot of work, consistency and patience. However, if you’re able to build an established blog it will open up a number of other possibilities besides just selling banner ads.

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One of the primary goals of almost every blogger is to gain subscribers, and as a result to grow the readership of the blog. Building a large following of subscribers can be harder than it may seem at first, and it requires focus and a plan to get there.

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Towards the end of July I launched my third blog, DesignM.ag. My goal with DesignM.ag is to build on the things that I have learned through Vandelay Design and to develop a site that will become an excellent resource for the web design community. I thought it may be helpful for some readers of Traffikd to learn more about the process I took with the launch, and to share some things that worked well and some things that could have been improved. Hopefully this will give you some insight and will be an aid for you in your next blog launch.

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If you’re struggling to build a blog that meets the needs of your visitors or stands out from the other blogs in your niche, you may want to improve your blog in a way that makes it a bit different. In most niches there are tons of blogs that visitors can go to for similar information. If you can make your site more of an all-around resource rather than just a blog you can have an advantage over some of the others.

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