When you look around at a lot of blogs, one of the things that strikes you (if you can bear to look for long) is that they are very boring.

So what do you do? You click back, or you click away, and you instantly forget where you just were and what you just saw. Boring, boring, boring… 

So how do you get your reader’s attention and keep them on your blog?

1. Say something different, or, if you can’t do that, say something from a different angle. Suppose that you just went to the store and bought a pack of frozen fish. Now, you could report this in all its tedious detail because that’s what you just did, but the chances are that fifty thousand other people did exactly the same thing today - so what? How about ‘one fish’s journey from ocean to ice-box’ or ‘how an unknown fisherman caught my supper’? OK, I know it sounds a bit cheesy, but you get the idea.
2. Ask you reader a question. So, they’ve read all about the storm at sea and the fish market and the teenager at the grocery checkout, but don’t leave it at that. Ask them a question about their similar experiences or opinions and invite them to post a comment. People like to be engaged in a dialogue. They actually might have something very interesting to say. And when people have commented on a blog, the chances are that they’ll come back to see their offering on display.  You just got them hooked!

So, what do you do to get your blog noticed? Feel free to leave me your comments!

Blogging is simple but it isn’t easy. If you learn a few winning habits it becomes a breeze. So, here are the seven habits of highly effective bloggers:

1. Have something to say
The best blogs are those where the blogger has something attention-grabbing to say, whether it be about potty training a puppy, supporting a baseball team or electing a president. Say it with vim, say it with sentiment and above all say something different.

Make it a habit always to put a novel angle on a topic and you’ll attract readers like flies to a dung heap.

2. Project your personality
It’s about you, stupid. Have an attractive, enticing ‘About’ page.

If you’re going to have a photo of yourself don’t just use a mugshot: you’ll look much more intriguing if it’s a picture of you actually doing something. What you want people to do is talk not just about your blog, but about you.

Get into the habit of being a character.

3. Post regularly
The most booming bloggers have sticky blogs. That means you want regular readers who come back because they need your content. And so you must continually gratify this craving with a constant stream of dazzling content.

One easy trick is to find a big theme that you can break down into a succession of posts. Post as ‘Part 1′, ‘Part 2′ etc (for example ‘20 Tips On Training Your Puppy’). Make the sequence addictive: hold back just enough information to have them howling for more.

If you can get this right, you’ll become their habit.

4. Engage with your readers
Blog with a smile on your face but aspire to be an authority. What you want your readers, and other bloggers, to do is to like you, trust you and give you their esteem.

And don’t be afraid to be contentious: being opinionated will stir up their responses and get them to comment.

Comment generously on other blogs. Give and leave trackbacks. Bond with your blogging community. The idea is to get them hooked. Which is where you want to be.

Be in the habit of being addictive.

5. Optimize with titles, keywords, categories
Every post title should start with the words of explicitly what your post is about. The title of your blog post is what your human readers, and the search engine spiders, see first. ‘My Puppy Peed On The Carpet’ rather than ‘Oh No Not Again’.

Scatter relevant keywords all through your post. Use tags, categories and slugs to explicitly spell out what your post is about.

Optimization doesn’t seem very sexy but it’s a great habit to get into.

6. Harness the power of RSS
Many bloggers are neurotic about design of their blogs and pay little attention to their words. This is a mistake. RSS will syndicate your content around the globe in seconds but what gets displayed in the feed? Words, words, words - not pictures. Words speak louder than pictures.

Be smart with syndication: practice the habit of loving RSS.

7. Keep on blogging
Winning bloggers find their voice and this voice matches their character. When you are comfortable in the skin of your personality it’s not too difficult to find something new to say. So keep on blogging. The most effective, original, expansive bloggers are the most gripping bloggers. Blog every day, or at least three times a week.

Get into the habit of fluency and both you and your blog will thrive.

WordPress is, basically, a very basic blogging system.

To create a successful blog there is no need to get complicated. Some of the most powerful and popular WordPress blogs have very few bells and whistles. These simple, basic blogs have maybe four or five static pages which provide the background to what the blog is all about, and maybe why the blogger blogs. Then they have the posts which broadcast to the world what the blogger has to say. The blogger posts regularly, has built up a loyal and expanding readership who provide an interesting stream of comments, and that’s about that. There will be few (or no) extras or ads or distracting links away from the blog.

But what if you do want to have a more complicated blog? What if you want to take advantage of all the add-ons and graphics and interactive goo-gaws that characterize the phenomenon loosely known as Web 2.0?

Well, this is basic Wordpress’s strength. If you want, you can have a very robust, basic blog but you can bolt on a huge array of add-ons known as themes, widgets and plugins which slot into the WordPress engine to provide a very powerful and distinctive web presence. Each blogger can choose their particular combination of add-ons to make their blog unique.

With WordPress you can be as simple or as sophisticated as you want!

Wikipedia describes Wordpress.com as:

‘WordPress.com is a WordPress-powered weblog hosting provider which opened to beta testers on August 8, 2005 and opened to the public on November 21, 2005. It runs WordPress MU, a version of the original software that allows people to create and manage their own weblogs without requiring the time, money and technical knowledge involved in setting up WordPress on an ordinary hosting account. It is financially supported via the use of Google Adsense banners and paid upgrades.

The site was initially launched as an invitation-only service, although at one stage, accounts were also available to users of the Flock web browser^[1]. However, accounts can now be registered by anyone, and there are over 2,491,431 individual blogs with the service^[2]. Registration is not required to read or comment on weblogs hosted on the site, except if the blog owner wanted to do so; but registration is required to own or post in a weblog. All the basic and original features (current as of May 2006) of the site are free-to-use, and will remain so in future. However, some features (such as a CSS editor, domain mapping, and storage upgrades) are available only to users who pay for them^[3]‘

If you were coming to blogging fresh and inexperienced this definition would be as clear as mud. And this is the problem: Wordpress blogging is so immersed in incomprehensible jargon that a newbie balks at the first hurdle.

So let’s do what the marketers tell us to do: point out the benefits, NOT the features.

What are the benefits? It’s quite simple.

• Wordpress lets you create a free, robust, flexible web presence without the need to know any webpage coding language.
• Wordpress is a WYSIWYG blogging system that lets you create web pages quickly, easily and as often as you like
• Wordpress is respected as the premier blogging platform on the Internet.

That’s it. That’s what Wordpress is.

Look, these days you don’t have to be a self-obsessed, egocentric loner to want to start a blog. Far from it.

In fact, anyone who wants a web presence needs a blog. Why?

Well, a well-designed blog is very often a better way of reaching your desired audience than a conventional website. A static website that looks very much the same from week to week does not encourage surfers to stick around or bookmark you for a return visit. It just sits there, metaphorically speaking, gathering dust.

Blogs, by contrast, are dynamic, interactive and alive. And the beauty of a blog is that, once it is set up, you can update it every day (or even several times a day) and you don’t need to be a techie to add more pages. You don’t have to wait (or pay) for a webmaster to upload stuff for you: if you can use a word processor you can maintain a blog. You just sit down, log into your blog’s admin area, type out your blog post and with one click it’s up there, live on the Internet!

Blogs can be used by individuals, businesses (big and small), voluntary groups, churches, families, clubs and societies, political parties, hobbyists, eBay sellers, schools, colleges, gamers, travelers, musicians, photographers, cooks, retirees, etc, etc - you name it.

Let me show you how you can build your own, good-looking blog, all by yourself, even if you are a complete newbie!