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Blogs can be thought about from different perspectives. While the history of blogs reveal that they are meant to be online journals where people vent their daily frustrations and feelings, today's blogs are becoming the mainstream media for the most updated news for any topic in the world.

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.

Kian Ann is a professional blogger and blog marketing trainer based in Singapore, passionate about using blogs as a key start to Internet entrepreneurship, and helping businesses get maximum presence by getting started in corporate blogging. For more blog marketing tips and to get your free blog marketing e-course, check out his blog at http://www.blogopreneur.com

Though my own experience in blogging and talking to people, I realized that there are too many people out there that say they want to get started with a blog... but they never get down to doing it!

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!

Tan Kian Ann is an advocate and mentor for creating sustainable home based eMarketing businesses. To claim your free eCourse worth $147 on how to get create a sustainable eMarketing business, and live the "money rolling in while you sleep" lifestyle, check out Kian Ann's eMarketing Lifestyle project.

I have been a little distracted the last couple of days. I will get my blog post done and do some commenting and forum participation, but not as much as I would like. You see one of my passions is songwriting, I love it, and I find that when I jump on my keyboard or pick up my guitar, I get lost for hours trying to write fresh new songs. It is a great escape and probably one of my favourite thing to do.

The songs I write are Christian songs for my church and youth group. I am always hoping to have them played on a Sunday or Friday night when we have meetings, but most of all I would love to see them recorded. You see our church created its first CD/DVD this January, and are looking to launch a new album each year. The songs are quality songs.

The song book has been created and we already have churches from The United States and other countries interested in playing our songs in their churches. My goals is to have at least one of my songs make it on the next album.

Why am I telling you this?

Because I believe that creating a blog that is famous is a lot like writing a hit song, and I would like to take some of my experiences in both song writing and blogging to highlight a few key points that I think will really help you with your blogging.

1. The Effort You Put In Will Affect Your Result
Everyone says this, but barely anyone ever does it. If you are serious about something you will put the required effort in to get the desired result. I have tried writing songs with a couple of my friends and it is interesting to see the results that we get based on the attitude and effort that they apply.

2. Love What You Are Doing
I love song writing! I get lost for hours on end just mucking around on my guitar, or going downstairs to our piano and just fiddling with new chords and progressions, finding interesting melodies and seeing how a song can unfold from nothing.

People can tell when you love what you do, because it comes out in your work. You can tell when songs are written from the heart or just created to be another hit. It is the same with blogging. People can tell when you are just churching out posts to get more traffic and new subscribers, but I challenge want to challenge you. Do you love what you are doing? Because if it is not - why not find something that you love, and put your effort into that?

3. Get Input From A Few People You Look Up To
So many times I will get stuck part way through a song and I will have no clue where to go from there. That is why I often take my songs to friends who are also musicians and singers that are highly talented, and ask for their input. Sometimes it just takes the smallest suggest to set off a whole new chain of thoughts that will help me finish a song off.

In regard to blogging, this is your circle of influence. In may be a blogging forum or just bloggers that you network with, that you can ask questions and brainstorm with. BlogPremiere forum is great for this!

4. Don't Get Offended When People Don't Like It
I had to learn this one early with my songs. I would write a song that I thought was amazing only to have to shut down by friends and leaders. It took me a fair while to work out that they were not doing it to pull me down but to encourage me to keep pushing to write better, and I used to get really offended by their lack of interest. Now however I see it as a positive. Because they do not tell me to give up - which means they believe I can do much better.

We need to be able to learn how to handle constructive criticism.

5. Learn From Your Mistakes
As soon as I learnt the the lat point, on not getting offended when people told me my song wasn't good enough, I started to take on board what they had to say. And you know what? My songs started to improve, and I think the same will happen with your blogging when you are able to learn from the things that you may not be doing well at the moment.

Just like I am starting to see success with this blog, I am also seeing some success with my song writing. A song that I wrote with 2 of my friends is now one of our most popular songs at Youth, and 3 of my songs are getting played in kids church. I believe that if you follow these 5 easy steps you will have a famous blog in no time!

To find more creative articles about blogging visit: http://www.standoutblogger.com