Obstacle no. 1 to a successful blog is removed. I’m finally searchable in Google. Great. This blog is basically turning into a diary about setting up a blog. And that’s fine for now.

As I mentioned earlier, this is a learning experience. In a future entry I will sum up all my experiences, hopefully creating a good and descriptive manual for anyone setting up a blog. There are so many aspects to setting up a blog. Here’s some things I’ve picked up:

Content. First and foremost is the content. No content=no traffic. Personally, I have no clear idea as to what the content for this blog may be, I guess it’s a kind of “life blog” or “diary blog” with no specific theme. Thoughts, rants and opinions.

But even so I do want to reach an audience, and a large one at that. And how does one go about to achieve such lofty goals with such scant material? I’m not an authority on any particular field, I’m not a brilliant writer, I’m not even sure I’ve got that many interesting things to say. But when I do have something to say I wanna make sure that I’m being heard.

Headlines. You need to know something about what attracts people to your blog. The title is important, that much I’ve figured. And it must hold some universal relevance, something that people can relate to. My “essential” and “ultimate” entries seem to be the most attractive. On the other hand, the essential entry is about Firefox and the ultimate one about PIMs - so it could be the fact they’re so topical and on-target that makes them more popular than the other entries.

Quality. Even though my resources are limited, I try to write in a manner that doesn’t bore people, and doesn’t make them feel like they’ve wasted their time completely (even though I sometimes write about minor and completely superfluous issues.)

Availability. You need to make your blog as visible as possible. Ping services such as Pingoat and Ping-O-Matic! automatically notifies a whole bunch of services that will subsequently include your blog in their searches. I’ve been trying to use the services of Technorati extensively, so far without any luck. But it seems like a good idea. Tagging, to me, is a great way of organizing information. And of course, getting hits on Google’s web search is without doubt the single most important way of becoming visible.

In addition, I will also give you this advice: It definitely helps your cause to add comments to other people’s blogs, make friends, and get other people to link to you. Networking. Apart from Google, that may be the most effective way of building an audience. On this blog, I will try to build an audience without using this strategy. I’ll let you know how it works out.

Consistence. I should probably add this aspect as well, even though I haven’t taken up on my own advice on this one at all. But it’s probably a good idea - to choose a particular subject and stick with it - so that people know what to expect when they’re visiting your blog. Unfortunately, I can’t promise such consistency on this blog just yet.