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Your blog must be unique and should have good content.Tools for you and them are the things which make your blog to become a successful blog. You must make your blog to have adds which can earn you money and you should know how to get traffic.

The most important thing for your blog is the quality content. This article is not about the blog content but all other good things a blog should have is covered here.This article is for you to create a professional blog and not a bare simple blog.

Terms explained below for people who do not have idea about:—
“Above the Fold” is the content that appears on the screen with out scrolling down.
“Organic Traffic” is what Search Engine traffic is not the traffic you have bought.

Your Contact:

One of the most important things your blog should have is options to contact you directly. A personal chat with someone can make them a reader of your blog for life and make them to recommend your blog to friends. It helps build trust if they know that they can contact you and that you are a real person willing to help them in the on-line world. Plus it’s the great to provide your viewers a way to give feedback. At least one of these should be Above the Fold.
Some recommended ways of contact are…

• E-mail me form – This simple site allows you to create a form people fill out to send you a mail. This allows them to send you a E-mail with out you having to give away your E-mail which is misused by spammers. The form will send an E-mail to any E-mail service you opt for and it will all come from the same address allowing you to set up filters and folders so you never miss any E-mails sent to you. Plus while you are setting up the form you get the control where the person goes after filling out the form, so you can send them back to any part of your blog or another site of your choice.
• Instant Messenger – Putting any of your Instant Messenger’s on your blog so that people can contact you immediately for guidance is another great way to build trust with people and develop long time relationship. I like to put my IM names on the E-mail me form so people can find different ways to contact me.
• Yahoo IM message box – This little box is a great help to your blog. It allows people to chat in a box with you alone, the box will send the message to your YIM. So as long as your on YIM you will get any message they send immediately. Multiple people can use the box at once, and no one else can see what you two are chatting about.
• Shoutmix – Another chat box, but it doesn’t connect with any Instant Messengers. It’s visible on your blog for all to see, anyone can leave a message and everyone can read what’s talked. A great box to have on your blog so people can say hi or leave a quick message or feedback which make things lively.
•  Followers feature for Blogspot users – This is important and a must have in addition to other features for Blogspot blogs. With Blogspot being one of the biggest blogging platforms out there, and it being run by Google almost everyone has a Google account and many of them follow blogs through this feature, so you must give them this option.

Profile or About me page

Absolutely necessary to build trust and credibility with your readers. Make it a full page or just a short note about you. Its better to include some sort of “credentials” proving you know what you are sharing about in your blog. I.E If your blog is about baseball, your Intro might say I was a baseball player for 12 years.
You should also include something about you to give it a more “get to know me” like things, like I collect Rubber stamps.

Categories/Labels/Topics

Not everyone likes to view a blog the same style. Making sure people can navigate anyway they like is important for developing constant readers and for new readers to find what interest them. Some like to view the most recent post by using the archive, while others will start at the start using the same archive. But then others only are interested in one specific category of your blog. So they will use the Categories/Labels/Topic section to find all posts related to what they want to know about. It’s important to keep these two parts of your blog visible at all times, so don’t space them out. Put side by side if you use multiple columns on your blog.

Many on-line users do not like to navigate so they will use the search box. Most blogs have a simple search box plug-in/gadget that you can add easily. If you choose to go with a search box, make sure this is above the fold.

Personally I like to use the “Pax Search Tab” this helpful tab takes just 5minutes to set-up but it’s worth doing it. This tab attaches on the side of your blog (see my blog, right hand side for example) and it will scroll with the page staying in fixed position on the screen. All anyone has to do to use it is click the tab and a small window pops up, giving 2 options. Search the blog, or Search the web with Google, by default the blog is selected. You can customize the colour of the tab and where it’s displayed on the blog. It’s a free service and very use full.

Tweet

There is no doubt Twitter has looted the world and not capitalizing on the fact that it’s the fourteenth most used site on the web is a huge mistake opportunity. So by taking five minutes to set-up a tweet this button for each of blog entry’s is well rewarded. It’s a one time use of code on your blogs template that  puts a gadget on each one of your blog entry’s that quickly and easily allows anybody reading your blog entry to send out a tweet about it to all their followers.

Social Bookmarking has become a common way for users to say “I like this article or blog entry”. Outside of tweeter this is the most common way for many to share and find relevant articles. Just like the tweet this button, the “add this” button is a simple use of code into your template that puts a button on each of your blog entry’s allowing users to share your blog entry.

Subscribe options

Many users choose to subscribe to blogs via RSS and Atom feed’s. Most templates now automatically have one of these gadgets built in. But if your site does not support, make sure to add it above the fold. Some also choose to subscribe by E-mail so giving them the feature is nice as well. But it’s not as needed in the early stages of your blog. So after your blog has been up for six months and you are considering taking your blogging more seriously to do some work on “auto responders”

Connect to relevant blogs/sites

There are “A-list” bloggers out there for pretty much every category. Find them and link with them. Doing this does many things. It will help your readers know you are reading and learning from the A-list bloggers, you know that your blog offers something special then those blogs, and perhaps most importantly it provides great information to search engines like Google that you are a good blog and worth having in their search engine. The better your search engine rank is the more Organic Traffic you will get. You should link to five-twenty blogs/sites that are in your nich. Having a “Blogroll” feature in your sidebar is the easiest way to do this as all you will have to do is provide the site link and the gadget will then display the blog/site name and the most recent entry of theirs.

A great place to find  A-List bloggers is IM report card, this Paid to Review site has around hundred of the top bloggers and names on-line that have been reviewed by the site itself and the viewers of the site. Along with providing access to the person’s blog. This site will pay you fifty cents per review you give on the site, so once you know some things about a blogger go back, write a review and earn some money while getting this free information.

Google Analytics

This free service by Google is for very help full. It will give you important information, like no of viewers to your blog, where they came from on the Internet (search engine or link from what site), where they are placed in the world and how much time did they spend on the site and what they clicked on your site. This feature takes about ten minutes to set-up and another twenty four hours before it start’s working. Then just spare 10-20 minutes a week analysing the data.

Traffic for free.

Getting traffic to one’s blog is naturally one of the difficult things. Getting Organic traffic is about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This is a difficult thing to learn and even more difficult to master. Read this for a few basic SEO tips to start with.

Other than Organic Traffic there is self promoting traffic, traffic exchanges and residual traffic.
The best one is residual traffic, where you put your blog link on a site and it gives you a steady flow of visitors with out having to do anything more. A great place for this is Link Referral, You submit your blog link in the relevant category and people can view your blog to help them get visits to their ones through the site. You can also log in every day and visit other blogs to help improve your blogs ranking on the site, you don’t have to, but it is recommend to get extra traffic. Takes maybe ten-twenty minutes

Image via Wikipedia

a day and will bring in a great amount of traffic each month for you.

Self promoting traffic, is where you promote your blog on places like forums and social networks. Just use your signature to promote your blog or post in groups on social networks where appropriate and you will usually get some views from each post you make in the short term and the occasional visit down the road. Too much self promotion becomes spam and will generate very little traffic if considered as spam.

Traffic Exchanges, is where you visit other’s site in exchange for someone visiting your blog is usually not a good traffic, they just want to get traffic for their site just like you do. But what this can bring is the occasional constant reader. Your blog is sure to come across the screen of someone who is interested in what your blog is about and they will begin to follow your blog, if you gave them the option to follow it.