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1. Find Your Niche – Ask yourself. What do you really want to blog about? What are your interests? Then research on them to determine whether or not it stands a good chance of being successful.

2. Setting Goals & Planning
Why do you want to blog? What are your goals? Are you blogging because you want to earn profit from it? Don’t allow yourself to just go with the flow. With goals you will have something to work towards, something lying up ahead in the future to aim at.

3. Buy Domain and Hosting – If you really want to be considered as a serious blogger then you need to buy your own Domain Name and hosting. This will give you enough freedom to expand and modify your site later on.

4. Make your Layout Design Stand-out - If you have the resources to purchase your own Theme or Layout then consider it as a valuable investment. However, there are thousand of Free Templates you can use and modify to suit your needs. Just make sure you keep it simple and professional.

5. Content is King – Focus on your content first. Make sure your topics are useful, interesting and even entertaining. Your content is the main attraction of your site.

6. Reach out and Interact to your Readers – Think of your articles as conversation. You engage your readers to comment and send in their feedback.

7. Promote your Blog – It is essential to promote your blog. You can start at emailing your friends about it. Submitting to Blog Directories and so on and social networking sites.

8. Make your Blog Search Engine Friendly – This is important because you want your blog to be indexed to Search Engines easily. So never forget to modify your permalinks.

9. Add Useful Plugins to your Blog – Plugins help make your blogging life easier. I highly recommend, akismet, contact form with spam protection, all-in-one seo pack, commentluv and many others.

10. Tools for your Blog – There are lots of tools you can find that add functionality to your site, such as, entrecard.. feedburner.. twitter.

11. Post Regularly – This will get spiders much more interested at indexing your site and improving your serps. Not only that, it also keeps people coming back to your site and see what’s new.

12. Monetize Effectively – If part of your goals is to earn money for your site then its never too early to monetize. Common ways of doing this will be adding ppc ads, banner advertising, private ad sales and doing sponsorship posts.

13. Injecting Personality to your Blog – Try to find your own voice in the blogosphere. Create and stick to your own writing style to avoid being distant to your audience.

14. Proofread your Post – Before hitting the publish button make sure you have checked your article from spelling mistakes and grammar errors. This usually turns-off a reader.

15. Learn Basic HTML and SEO – It never really hurts to learn. Just try knowing the basics of html so you can easily tweak your lay-out here and there. Also, learn simple SEO techniques that can give your site a bit of an advantage than others.

16. Do not leave your “About Me” Page Empty – Usually the “About Me” section is taken for granted even if this is obviously necessary in a blog. Usually, the main reason is that, we kind of run out of words sharing something about ourselves. However, you must know that your readers woud want to know things about you and your blog.

17. Stay Informed – It is important to stay updated of current trends and developments in the world wide web. Simply subscribe to web portals who are offering this information first-hand.

18. Track your Stats – Check Awstats in your cpanel or sign-up and install Google Analytics. You need to keep track of your site’s growth so you will know if you are headed to the right direction. This will also help you determine the areas you need to improve on.

19. Be Patient with your Blog – Again, success isn’t achieved overnight. Give your blog a time to grow. As long as your numbers are increasing then that is a sign of a healthy blog. Do not expect your earnings, traffic and rss subscribers to zoom up right away. It all boils down to the time and effort you pour in to your blog. Be patient.

20. Submit to Important Web Directories – I am talking about Dmoz, Yahoo, and Google. Make sure you submit your site following strictly their guidelines. (It also takes time to be accepted and added).

21. Research and Do your Homework – Find really interesting or controversial topics that your readers can appreciate. Gather ideas that would improve your blogging by selecting and improving on your topic choices.

22. Showcase your Most Popular Posts/Articles – This is simply showing your best foot forward and is in fact the best way you can invite New Visitors landing to your site to subscribe. Show off why your blog rocks..

23. Network with Other Bloggers – Try to network with Blogs in your Niche. This is the best way to gain relationship with your fellow bloggers. Established blogs in the same niche as yours have exactly the type of readers you need. Therefore, they will likely follow you as well because the content you offer is relevant to their interest.

24. Link Love – Link generously.This is another way to best develop relationships with your fellow bloggers.

25. Scratch Each others Back – When you promote their blogs, most likely they will do the same thing. You gain backlink and even friendship!!

Read: Compilation of the Best Blogging Tips Part 2

My themes do not work for versions lower than Wordpress 2.5 that is the reason why I get a lot of emails each day asking me why the theme isn’t working for them. I am surprised to know that a lot of you are quite afraid to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress. Maybe because you feel like you are not savvy enough to do this.. or are afraid of messing your blog?

Although manually upgrading your blog by following this step-by-step instruction from the wordpress codex site is easy to follow.. I would highly suggest using plugins to do the work for you.

First, make sure that you back-up your database. I personally use the WordPress DBManager plugin from Lester Chan. This plugin allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

Next, download and activate the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin by Keith Dsouza. Then that’s it.. upgrading to WordPress is that easy indeed!

By the way, the forum I have installed on this site is quite boring..so I think I’m going for bbPress to handle support questions. Sometimes it’s really tiring to answer the same questions over and over again. Do you guys have any suggestions in handling Support Questions?