A good blog, however, requires good consistent traffic. One key feature of blogs is the ability for readers to leave comments, and the great thing about the commenting feature is that bloggers can choose to allow anonymous comments, which is unlike forums, where user usually have to create an account in the forums in order to post.

So how then, do you get people to come back again and again, and leave comments? The answer lies in two keys – the first is “Writing on Controversial Topics”, and the other is “Responding to comments”

Writing on Controversial Topics

People feel an urge to voice opinions when they find an idea worthwhile commenting on, and when there can be different viewpoints to a certain topic. So, if you want them to comment, leave some room for chatting!

As an example, you could pose an introduction to both viewpoints, and then end of with a simple question – “What do you think?”

Responding to Comments

It is important to realize that in many successful blogs, readers comments will eventually form part of the blog contents. To be able to get people to actively contribute value to your blog is a very powerful way to build a value added site!

However, your readers’ contribution is only the first level. In order to bring the quality of your blog to the higher level, you need be able to hold a conversation under every post – that is exceptional!

To achieve this, there must be a few things that you must be do.

The first is of course, to recognize that you must respond to your comments. Your response to your blog comments acknowledges the reader and their contribution, motivating them to drop in time and again, to leave more comments.

The second, is to build in functionality in your blog to allow your users to subscribe to comments. This can be done using the comments RSS features, or using a comments subscription service.

Thirdly, there must be a good commenting policy on your blog. To promote conversation, it is recommended that do not require explicit moderation of every comment! If you are concerned about comments spam, install a spam filter.

Lastly, you, the blog author, need to be informed of comments on your blog. Most blogging platforms allow email notification when there are new comments on your blog – and bloggers can maximize the use of this in conjunction with a frequent email checking practice to get almost immediate notification of comments on your blog.

Having really tried and fiddled around with WordPress system, I must say that WordPress is indeed a very powerful system to put your blog on. Unfortunately however, the system does take time to get used to.

WordPress comes in two versions. The first one is provided by WordPress.com, which is the hosted version. The second version provided by WordPress.org, and usually in order to use this version of WordPress, you will need to have your own domain name, and web hosting space.

Blogging at WordPress.com

Using the version provided by WordPress.com, you will be given a subdomain URL, like http://blogopreneur.wordpress.com. While this still sounds nice, it is definitely more professional and stylish to tell people that your blog is at “blogopreneur dot com” rather than “blogopreneur dot wordpress dot com”. WordPress.com does, however, provide domain mapping services, meaning you can go and grab a domain and the redirect it to the WordPress blog. This comes with a fee, of USD$10.

The default and free configuration of the blog at WordPress.com comes with 50 megabytes of space, and allows you to select a template from the list provided. For some templates, you can further customize them using your own header images and colors. However, in order for you to take control over the CSS that goes behind the blog, of get more webspace, you will need to pay a fee.

Blogging using WordPress.org

The version of WordPress provided at WordPress.org is the more powerful version, and is the platform used by many A-List bloggers in the blogosphere today.

To set up this version of WordPress, you will need to download the system from WordPress.org, extract the file contents, upload, and install it on your own domain and hosting. For total Internet starters, this process may prove to be quite a roadblock, but as you get used to using FTP and using your hosting administration panel, setting up a WordPress.org blog is a five minute job.

As mentioned, this version of WordPress is extremely powerful.

Firstly it allows you to have full control over your templates – from the CSS to the individual pages that make up your blog. You can even have a different page look and feel for each category you use!

Secondly, it allows you add on functionality to the system by using WordPress plugins! With a simple search on Google for “WordPress Plugins”, you will realize that there are millions of plugins available for free for you to use. Plugins are extremely powerful – allowing you to add functionality to your blog like social bookmarking icons, subscription to your blog comments, and specifying a different front page for the blog.

With 70 million blogs as reported by the Technorati state of the blogosphere report in April 2007, every Internet entrepreneur must learn how to blog, and if you want to blog, you simply have to use a powerful blogging system with unlimited functionality – WordPress!

Today I share with you the first 7 steps to take, to get started blogging!

1. Pick a topic

Remember that in order to have a successful blog, you need to have a good readership. People like to read blogs that are focused, on one single topic. Pick a topic you are interested to share with people about. Is it tennis or golf or hockey, or computer tips, or creativity or stress management? Decide on one. Just one.

2. Get started with Blogger

The next step is to quickly get started with the blog already! Getting started with the blog is the simplest step! Just head on to Blogger.com, and follow the steps. You can get started in less than 10 minutes! Do your best to pick a URL that is consistent with your blog topic. For example, if you are talking about stress management, you might want to try http://stress-management.blogspot.com, or something similar.

3. Start your first few posts

Start writing a post a day, don’t worry about marketing your blog yet. Really, explore different writing styles, try writing at different times of the day. Make sure your blog is at least a week old with at least 5 – 10 posts before you start to decide to market your blog. Many blogs don’t even get past this stage.

4. Market your blog

When you have more or less got comfortable with writing on your blog, then its time to market your blog. This way, when the visitors come, at least they have a short archive to read rather than one pathetic post! You can market your blog in different ways, and the best way I’ve found is to go around finding blogs in the same topic and start posting your valuable comments on their posts! Strive to add value, don’t spam.

5. Keep updating

Keep updating your blog on a regular basis, respond to comments. As you start to write, you will start to write better, and slowly you will start to create a writing personality. At the same time, keep up with the marketing, keep surfing around for blogs and commenting. Also observe how people craft their posts, and do your best to write better posts that would entice comments. Soon, you will find reader coming back everyday for updates!

Here are three points you will want to implement on your WordPress blog, to get it better optimized for search engines.

1. Change your permalink structure

The WordPress default installation has a permalink URL that goes something like http://www.myblog.com/?p=123. While Google does let pagerank flow into single parameter URLs like this, a more optimized permalink URL would go by the structure of http://www.myblog.com/category-name/post-name/

The reason for this is because if you are writing for SEO, you would most probably have keywords in your post title, and WordPress uses the post title to generate the post slug. Using this permalink format would result in the permalink URL with keywords embedded within.

2. Customize the page title to change for each post

The default WordPress title format for individual post puts emphasis on the blog name, putting the blog name before the post title. However, from an SEO perspective, it would be wise to have a different title for each page (post) in the website, therefore, tweak your single.php file, and make sure you change your title for the page to be something that emphasizes the post title first, before displaying the blog title. The blog title is already used for the home page!

3. Get more inbound links by commenting on other blogs

One of the best ways to automatically get an inbound link to your blog is to go ahead, search technorati for blogs that are relevant to you, and then start posting valuable comments on these blogs. In fact, this does not only help you get an inbound link, potentially raising your page rank, but if your comment is valuable, readers of the other blog would also want to drop by your blog as they read the comment.

4. Modify your template to ensure proper use of header tags

Unfortunately, but true, most templates featured on the web are built only with aesthetic appeal in mind. Designers who work out the templates use CSS classes to tweak the look and feel of the site. However, what search engines see eventually is the underlying HTML. Make use of the header tags H1 to H6 to properly emphasize and show the hierarchy of information in the site.