There are a lot of reasons to blog, including voicing your opinions, doing a public service, and more. A more “insidious” motivation to start a blog is to make an impression on Google, providing updated content to your site continuously (not to say there is anything wrong with romancing Google!) This is because Google does not look favorably upon static websites and gives higher ranks to those which are updated more actively.

Where your blog can be posted/published: If you don’t already have your own web site, many blogging services are available online. Blogger and Wordpress are two of the most used applications. Yahoo.com has also started getting some of the action in blogging. You can insert a blog on your pre-existing website, which is a fairly common practice.

Blog Software: Try Wordpress for blogging if you already have your website hosted. In addition, you can compose blog articles on Blogger and then post them up on a site that you own, via FTP.

Content: An effective blog must include content that is informative, of high quality, original (no copy and pasting of other people’s work except for short excerpts that are properly attributed) and should be dynamic (regularly updated).

Interaction with readers: Reader feedback can be allowed on your blog. This gives you the power to moderate your blog and comments. The “moderator” facility is necessary, since it’s difficult to fight off spammers. Also, individuals who disagree with you may leave rude comments.

Ensure you have visibility for your blog:

1) Make sure that the blog content is original and fresh

2) have links from other sites,

a.) Find and join webrings

b.) Use social networking (Myspace, Twitter, Facebook, etc.)

c.) Look for forums that have similar interests as you do. It is possible to find forum communities at places like Yahoo, Yuku and Aimoo, among others.

3) Make a submission of your URL to the search engines Google and Yahoo. There is an XML Sitemap generator plug-in available for free if you use Wordpress. It’s a free program, but donations are welcome.

4) Use HTML “tags” in your articles. Place keywords in the tags (Title tags, H1 and H2 tags, etc.) so that your blog articles will be placed in the correct categories by web crawlers (spiders).