There are literally hundreds of blog sites that lay desolate and abandoned like an old frontier town with tumbleweeds blowing through on breeze. Their owners failed to identify a hungry market, they failed to attract visitors or they simply gave up posting fresh new content to their blogs.

Blogs are dynamic web sites, they require time and attention. Search engines love them because they are frequently updated with fresh new content. People love them because they regularly provide new and interesting information. But you have to persist, just like any other business, online or offline, you have to work at building up your content, building up an audience of loyal readers and creating a portfolio of products and services that will appeal to your readers and generate some income.

There are many ways of generating income from your blog. Several people have created successful niche sites that offer product reviews including books, software, videos, DVDs and other popular products. Other bloggers earn their income from sale of advertising space and yet others generate income through pay per click systems such as Google's Adsense programme.

There is now another way of building a profitable blog. A brand new hosted blog service -

Make it quick. More and more people are using high-speed broadband connections but a significant number are still using slower dial-ups to access Internet. Consider this when you design and programme your site; people won't return if they know your pages take several minutes to load.

3. Register your Web site with search engines More than half of site visits are via search engines, so don't underestimate their influence on how many visitors your site will get.

You may find companies that offer to submit your site to hundreds of search engines; there is even software that can do this for you. There are really only four or five major search engines that you need to consider (ask yourself how many search engines you can name and how many you actually use). Many of others are just ways to surreptitiously get your email address, which you can pretty much guarantee will become inundated with spam (unsolicited email).

To increase your chances of a high ranking in search engines, make sure that pages contain plenty of relevant text-based information. Mostly, this is what they store in their indexes and base their results on. For example, if you search on Google for "web design brighton" my site appears on first page. At time of writing, my homepage is number five in results, with my company ranked third highest on list. "Brighton web design" ranks me at number one overall. Not bad for a one-man firm!

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