If you are just starting out in the blogosphere, you will no doubt be excited by its possibilities and potential. It is your brainchild and you developed it. It is really something to be proud of and one that, if not neglected, will bear fruit and you will grow to love it.

The subject could be about anything you are interested in, whether focused on one particular area of your interests, spread out across all your interests or it could just be about you as a person and what happens on a day-to-day running commentary of your life. I believe that in the latter area, it has more or less taken over the process of writing your thoughts down in a diary or journal – something that has been practised for centuries.

So, where do you start and what do you need to do in order to develop your blog? If it is for your own personal enjoyment, it is quite simple and something that you can’t really get wrong. Your blog could be designed any old how and still be perfectly good. As long as you are happy with what you have done that is the point of the exercise.

If it is for your business, you need to have a way of catching everyone’s contact details so that there is a chance of getting their custom and the more names and email contacts you have, the more successful you will become. It is like the "numbers game" of sales. The more email you send out the more chance of a sale.

You can get material for the blog from Article Biz, other article submission directories or from your own knowledge and experience. If you develop writers block then Article Biz is a good place to get articles for your blog. The whole point of Article Biz is as a place where you can get free articles as long as you include all the links at the end of the article. You just need to copy and paste the entire article into your own blog – simple as that...and that’s why article marketing is such a good way of getting traffic – more on that in another of my articles which will be written soon.

A good question to ask yourself is: How often am I going to contribute to my blog? It all depends on whether you want to increase the traffic to your blog. People who want to have a large readership will contribute to their blogs several times each day, but if you want to only impress yourself with what you can do, then it really is up to you. Many people will only update their blogs once each week.

You also need to use widgets that are available with your blog. The main two blog providers (Wordpress and Blogger) have many different widgets available that will enable you to write an effective blog that the entire internet community can visit, read and subscribe to your RSS (a facility which alerts you when a new post is created and keeps a copy on your pc for you). Another good place for widgets is widgetbox.com. A Pro membership is very cheap and you can pick up some awesome widgets.

You should stop off at YouTube when you are writing your posts. Everyone loves a video and it is a really effective way of attracting more traffic. It will keep your visitors returning to your blog in the future. If it suits you and your visitors, you should consider putting a video on your blog whenever you write a post.

If you would like to see an example of a blog, you can see mine at the address below. You can also look through blog directories like technorati.com.