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Thirteen ways to blogging success
In no particular order…

1. Find a Niche. Pick a subject (or a couple of subjects) and blog about those specifically. Don’t jump from Britney, to Politics, to Software reviews to auto racing on the same blog. Your posts would be everywhere and no one would be able to follow. If you want to blog about a variety of subjects, create multiple blogs (they can all be subdomains!). Look at the big guys, they all have a fairly narrow subject and they stick with it.
2. Blog regularly. Regular blogging helps keep you on your toes. It provides more content for your visitors and it gives them a reason to keep coming back. Not to mention, but it looks really bad when there is a month span between posts. Almost like you don’t care to blog.
3. Write about what you know. I’m a dad, a history major, a backpacker and an IT guy. It would be insane for me to blog about cars or soccer or even milking cows when I know very little about those things. However, I can blog about family experiences, computer related topics and even history and politics to some extent with a little credibility. It helps to sound like you know what you’re talking about. You wouldn’t go to the Doctor for a physical if his doctorate was in poetry would you?
4. Communicate with your readers. This is one thing that a lot of bloggers fail to do. Yea, you’ve written the post. Maybe your job is “done” but it shouldn’t stop there. If susie leaves a comment on your post follow up. Either a reply in the comments or an email to susie thanking her for her comment and commenting on it goes a long way to gaining a new reader. Besides, your readers are more likely to check back if they know you’re going to reply.
5. Don’t do it for the money. Yea, money is nice and its always good to be able to pay the bills so the lights stay on, but if you’re blogging strictly for money, your posts will show it and you’ll get tired of blogging. Not to mention, your readers will get tired of reading the CRAP you put out.
6. Relate to your readers. I know it sounds silly, but the better you relate to your readers, the more readers you’ll have. Instead of spouting off statistics, numbers and links, try and tell your story (think of each post as a story) on a personal level. If you add a bit of personality to your writing your readers will be more likely to relate to the post and find that nugget of wisdom in it you want them to have.
7. Post things you like. If you like something, chances are your readers will too. If you’re disgusted by something, again, chances are your readers will be too. One of the best things you can do is post about things you like (it goes back to posting about what you know).
8. Keep a journal. Call it what you will, but journaling on paper was the precursor to blogging as it is today and it still has a valuable place in every day life. Unless you’re a hermit living in your mother’s basement (sorry Gruntled) you’re not going to live connected to your computer/blog 24/7. Keeping a small notepad on you will help you remember what you wanted to blog about the next time you log on line (like that outfit the really fat guy was wearing at the mall today, or something your professor said in class about making sausage). Its easy to come up with ideas to blog about, its harder to remember them.
9. Write as though you’re having a conversation with a friend. This is a tricky one that could get a lot of bloggers in trouble and it shows in the blogs that use broken English as their main language. The trick is to write so not to seem stuckup and snooty. If you write as you talk (make sure grammar and spelling are correct) your readers will have a much easier time reading and will be more likely to come back.
10. Do not use a FREE blogging site like wordpress.com, blogger, livejournal or myspace. If you really want success as a blogger, pony up the $10 a year for a domain name and find some inexpensive hosting. Know though, that as with most things, the cheaper the hosting the cheaper the service. If you go for a cheap hosting plan, don’t be upset when you experience outages, downtime and poor customer service. The cheaper hosts aren’t concerned about quality so much as quantity.
11. Have fun. I mentioned post things you like above, but you also need to have fun. Successful blogging is a job (whether or not you see it that way) and as with most jobs, the more you enjoy it or have fun doing it, the more likely you are to continue doing it. Imagine that instead of blogging we’re talking about making widgets. You spend every day punching a time clock and standing on a manufacturing line making these widgets. Every widget is the same as the last. For the sake of arguement, lets say, they’re money making widgets. Each one is the same color. The same size and shape. After a while, the newness of the “job” wears off and you hit the snooze button in the morning because you really don’t want to make widgets again. Blogging is a lot like that. If you don’t enjoy blogging (I mean really enjoy blogging) it becomes a chore and one thats easier to give up than most. Don’t constantly blog about the fact that you aren’t making any money. Instead, blog about things like what you did with the little amount you have made. Blog about your children, pets (well, dogs really) or your favorite pair of shoes. Blog about things that are fun to blog about.
12. Comment on other blogs. Establish a network of blogs you visit daily. It doesn’t take long to pop in to five or ten blogs and leave a comment. Even if its just a “hey, this was a good post” comment. Almost every blog around will at least let you drop a link to your blog back in. Some of the cooler ones let you drop a couple. And every link counts.
13. Make social networking your friend. I don’t mean myspace. There are plenty of other SN sites out there. FaceBook (there is a really cool WordPress plugin for facebook), entrecard, digg, thoof, bloggingzoom, sphinn. These should all be your friends and you should be visiting them daily. One of the best ways to gain readers is to figure out what the hot button topics are and post about them. I don’t mean the “John chow said” type posts, but blog about the hot stuff in your own voice. Yea, hot button topics are good, but the same old crap isn’t. Bring a new and different (conflicting?) view to the scene and more people will visit and comment.

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Thirteen Facts about NEW YEARS!
In no particular order…

1. The celebration of the new year is the oldest of all holidays. It was first observed in ancient Babylon about 4000 years ago. In the years around 2000 BC, the Babylonian New Year began with the first New Moon (actually the first visible cresent) after the Vernal Equinox (first day of spring).
2. During the Middle Ages, the Church remained opposed to celebrating New Years. January 1 has been celebrated as a holiday by Western nations for only about the past 400 years.
3. The Babylonian new year celebration lasted for eleven days. Each day had its own particular mode of celebration, but it is safe to say that modern New Year’s Eve festivities pale in comparison.
4. The Romans continued to observe the new year in late March, but their calendar was continually tampered with by various emperors so that the calendar soon became out of synchronization with the sun.
5. In order to set the calendar right, the Roman senate, in 153 BC, declared January 1 to be the beginning of the new year. But tampering continued until Julius Caesar, in 46 BC, established what has come to be known as the Julian Calendar. It again established January 1 as the new year. But in order to synchronize the calendar with the sun, Caesar had to let the previous year drag on for 445 days..
6. The Tournament of Roses Parade dates back to 1886. In that year, members of the Valley Hunt Club decorated their carriages with flowers. It celebrated the ripening of the orange crop in California.
7. Although the Rose Bowl football game was first played as a part of the Tournament of Roses in 1902, it was replaced by Roman chariot races the following year. In 1916, the football game returned as the sports centerpiece of the festival. (Personally, I’d like to go back to the chariot races!)
8. Many parts of the U.S. celebrate the new year by consuming black-eyed peas. These legumes are typically accompanied by either hog jowls or ham. Black-eyed peas and other legumes have been considered good luck in many cultures. The hog, and thus its meat, is considered lucky because it symbolizes prosperity. Cabbage is another “good luck” vegetable that is consumed on New Year’s Day by many. Cabbage leaves are also considered a sign of prosperity, being representative of paper currency. In some regions, rice is a lucky food that is eaten on New Year’s Day.
9. An artificial spider and web are often included in the decorations on Ukrainian Christmas trees. A spider web found on Christmas morning is believed to bring good luck.
10. The use of an image of a baby with a New Years banner as a symbolic representation of the new year was brought to early America by the Germans. They had used the effigy since the fourteenth century.
11. It was once believed that the first visitor on New Year’s Day would bring either good luck or bad luck the rest of the year. It was particularly lucky if that visitor happened to be a tall dark-haired man.
12. Many cultures believe that anything in the shape of a ring is good luck, because it symbolizes “coming full circle,” completing a year’s cycle. For that reason, the Dutch believe that eating donuts on New Year’s Day will bring good fortune.
13. Other traditions of the season include the making of New Year’s resolutions. That tradition also dates back to the early Babylonians. Popular modern resolutions might include the promise to lose weight or quit smoking. The early Babylonian’s most popular resolution was to return borrowed farm equipment.

Thirteen Wordpress Plugins worth Using
In no particular order…

1. Akismet - Akismet comes default with wordpress installs these days. Its one of two plugins that do. Akismet is perhaps the single best tool against fighting blogspam that we have available today. Why my install of akismet has already blocked over 6,000 spam posts and blocks at least 100 a day. If you’re not using it, you really, really should be.
2. Commentluv 0.993 - CommentLuv is perhaps one of the coolest plugins I’ve installed to date. What it does is scrape the url you submit when you make a comment and it gleans the last post from your feed and adds it to your comment as a “Last post from” type addition. So you get some really good back links over time if you keep commenting on my site. I’ve received a lot of positive feedback over this one…
3. Comment Timeout 2.0.1 - This is another great comment plugin, this one though helps with spam like Akismet. Comment Timeout does what it says. You can set an amount of time (I think I have mine set to 30 or 60 days) that comments are open on a post before they are closed. Certain triggers like a large number of comments will cause the comments to be kept open on a single post, but for the most part this helps prevent spammers from going through your old posts and adding comments. Its helped cut down on the spam a lot as well.
4. Douche Bag - I haven’t used this one a lot but its fun to have. The guys at YoungGoGetter came up with a way to label comments you don’t like.. You simply add a tag to the comment and the image of your choice is shown (currently its a brown bag with the word douche on it).
5. WeatherIcon - This one isn’t so much a do something plugin, but I’ve had it on my blog for virtually ever. Its nice to know the weather here in teh ATL and I can, all I have to do is hit my blog. Besides, its pretty cool. Isn’t it??
6. WP-Polls A good way to encourage participation on your blog is to give people something to participate in. From time to time, I like to run a little poll to see what the general masses are thinking (I am in no way associated with any official polling company). Thats where this gem from Lester Chan comes in to play. You can specify the items in the poll and display them in a sidebar or a post. Its pretty nifty.
7. WP Grins - Clickable emoticons for comments. What more could you ask for??
8. WPG2 - I use gallery (menalto) for my image management and I needed a good way to integrate it in to the wordpress site. The team working on WPG2 has done an amazing job at making things work the way they need to. Could ask for a better gallery plugin.
9. wp-recent-links Some people use their wordpress install for little more than listing links every day of places they like and visit. I like to use my blog for blogging, but the wp-recent-links plugin works wonders for when I find that little nugget of gold on the web that I want to share with people I know (I was going to say like… but then I remembered Gruntled. I simply add my link and a description and bam. Its posted for the world to see. Plus there’s a cool link archive page.
10. Show Top Commentators - I’m not sure what a commentator is (I believe its a normal tator…) but I do know I like to show the top commenters on the site and this plugin does that. Its great for keeping track of monthly contests.
11. Wordbook - Recently, I created a facebook account (facebook is so much cooler than myspace) and this plugin allows me to post my blog posts on facebook with out any extra work on my part. Now thats nice.
12. Quoter -Allows commenters to quote other comments (dynamically or server side if they have Javascript disabled) and any other text in a page (Javascript only). Is nice when I want to specify what the heck I’m replying too.
13. In Series - I’ve used this only once since I added it (my posts about Disney) but its nice and for sites that are posting series of how-to’s its a god send. You can specify which posts are in the “series” and it adds a table of contents to the post making it easy for your readers to read all the articles in the series.