Building a successful blog or web-site requires hard-work and patience . There is a lot of manual boring work is involved in making your blog popular and sometimes it becomes difficult for a single person to handle all the work of generating quality content ,marketing your blog , researching your topic.I am going to mention a few tips and resources which will help you in making your blog a success .Though these are not new and have been said many times I just wanted to say it in my way .That’s all .

• The first and the foremost thing is content . What content you provide is the most important thing in making your blog a success .Whatever you are planning to blog about, research about it ,know it’s market viability , it’s strength to earn you money . Google is one of the best sites where you can start researching about your topic .I have listed some sites in my another post ,useful websitesyou can go through those sites and understand your topic . The information internet is providing is so vast and so haphazard sometimes it becomes difficult for you to find what actually you want ,so if you write about a particular topic and give accurate information regarding a particular topic like ,the best colleges for e-learning ,best free softwares ,and so on ,people will come to your site more often as they can find the necessary things all in one place .
• keep updating your blog frequently , so that visitors want to come back regularly to your website so that they can know more .Always try to target a niche audience as your chances of succeeding in it will be more and search engines can easily list your site .Even google delivers more accurate targeted ads if you are specific in your topic instead of being general .
• submit your site to as many search engines and directories as possible as most of the traffic to your site will come from search engines and directories.I don’t think you have to submit to each and every search engine you come across ,as usually major search engines are the ones which will bring traffic to your site and you can save your time by not going to submit to each and everyone.If you find it boring or time consuming you can go to forums likeforums.digitalpoint.com and ask for services like manual directory submission to social book-marking sites , search engines and directories .These forums are a great place to fine tune your skills and you will get all the latest news in the world of blogging , promotion,advertising etc…you can also ask for almost any kind of help and you can avail many services for your various needs ,in popularising your blog . . For the list of social book-marking sites you can refer to my other post where you can find a list of the various social-bookmarking sites. There are a myriad number of such sites but a few of them ,may be around some 35 to 40 ,allow search engines to index the the pages saved by their users as they make the pages public saved by their users .They even post the recently saved pages from their users on the main page and help in easy indexing by search engines .Other than these the rest are usually personal and your saved pages will not be accessible to the public and search engines can’t crawl into these lists .So submitting your blog posts,articles , web-sites to these personal bookmarking sites won’t help in moving your blog up in the search engine ladder.So be careful in availing services for submission to social bookmarking sites .
• every time you write a blog post use pingomatic to ping blog directories.
• subscribe to your own feeds ,ask your friends family also to subscribe to your site’s feeds
• Be active in forums like digitalpoint,webmasterworld, and ask for reviews of your website . Write new posts ,and provide a link to your site in your signature.
• Use trackback url to link to blogs of your subject , so that you get more exposure
• Other methods like asking for link exchange with other bloggers whose topic is similar to you can also be a good traffic generator ,and getting your site reviewed by some of the experienced bloggers or placing a link on their blog or site can increase the traffic to your site greatly
• If you have a web-site , place a link in your every page to your blog.Write the url of your website on your visiting cards , business cards .Write articles in websites relevant to your topic and leave a link back to your website
• Write comments on other similar blogs like your’s .Contact successful webmasters and try to learn their methods and stratergies .
• If you are promoting something like a laptop , car parts etc it’s not a bad idea to use paid search engine campaigns like google adsense ,YPN and MSN and drive targeted traffic to your site .