It is time to share with you my readers my take on what is needed to be a successful blogger. Today I begin a series where I will discuss the secrets of successful blogging. I will share with you everything I know!

To be a successful blogger you must first have a blog. A blog is quite simply a regularly updated website. Try and avoid feeling that your blog MUST be updated every day- otherwise you may feel that writing one is too much of a committment or you may (like most bloggers!) find yourself becomming obsessed from time to time. A blog can take over your life- don't allow it to do so!

A blog is essentially something fun who's most important reader is YOU yourself. Don't ever forget, you are not being paid for your blog (and are highly unlikely to make a profit on it any time soon!). The most important decision you have to make before you begin your blog is will you be an anomynous blogger known only by a "nickname", will you be a blogger with a nickname who also makes your name public (eg the Jollyblogger by David Wayne) or will you be known by your own name like I am. Placing your own name on a blog reminds you that your blog can be read by anyone who knows you. Using a nickname only may not protect you from being found out especially if you start blogging things you shouldnt! Everything you ever write online could be read by your boss at work, your wife or your best friend. I have little sympathy for the majority of the few bloggers who have been fired because of their blogs. Criticism of the company you work for online is all very well, but why should they carry on employing you when you are undermining them? Similarly blogging about friends and family can go very wrong. If you think before you hit send "Would I be happy to see this written in a major newspaper with my name attached to it?" then you will not fall into the kind of trouble with a capital T it is possible to get into.

So, you want a blog. How are you going to go about this? There is much mistique about this, and a certain amount of snobbery from some established bloggers. In my own humble opinion you can do a lot worse than visiting good old blogger.com and begining a blog with them. It will take you minutes, and the basic free blog that you can set up will be enough to keep you going with one of their standard templates. Blogger really is simple enough for anyone to use who can use a word processor or write an email- it takes the technobable out of blogging. A blogger blog can also grow with you and there are a number of technical tweaks that you can implement when you get more confident. I will explain some of the more important ones as we go through this, but if you can't wait and want to start implementing some of the things I do here on my blog, you are most welcome to delve around in my template file and copy as much as you want.

When you are setting up your blogger blog, ensure that you make the following settings- they will all maximise your chances of being read.

-Set up a Blogger profile with keywords that may send people your way.
-Under Basics ensure that "add your blog to our listings" is set to yes
-Under publishing ensure that "notify weblogs.com" is set to yes
-Under Archiving ensure that individual post pages is set to yes- this maximises your chance of hits from search engines such as google
-Under site feed ensure that your site feed is on, place a link to the address of your site feed on your homepage. Many people read blogs through their RSS feed rather than visiting the page. If you are not implementing a site feed you are probably at least halving your potential readership.

It is important if you want readers of your blog to submit it to the search engines. You may only need to submit to google as other engines tend to find sites which have been submitted there- you can submit elsewhere as well, but ensure that you have submitted to google. The good news is that google loves blogs, so you should find that your blog is indexed by them fairly quickly.

Every time you post on your blog, you should also use pingomatic to tell the blog search engines that you have updated. This is helpful which ever blogging platform you are using, and will ensure that your blog is updated and fresh in a range of important sources across the internet.