Photo by place-light.

(A bit out of practice, but stick with me.)

If you’re like me, you’ve probably read the equivalent of a few books worth of material on how to run a successful blog. You’ve read about getting more traffic, getting more subscribers, getting more links, more comments, social media votes and so on. If triggered, you can probably remember (broadly at least) most of what you’ve read. But it’s easy to forget the steps involved, particularly when we consume so much new information every day.

The purpose of this post is to lay out the key principles of successful blogging in one place. The details of each point aren’t here — that’s where your own knowledge comes in — but I think it should be helpful in terms of reminding us about the skills and habits that are most important to what we do.

I could have added a dozen more sub-headings, but I wanted to take some of my own advice and simplify down to the eight areas that I believe are most important.

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Photo by Iydurg.

It’s easy to get caught up discussing high-level Digg strategies and complicated metaphors, but it’s important not to lose sight of the things that make the advanced stuff worthwhile.

Without the ability to gather links, subscribers and comments, your blog can’t grow. These three basic things are the lifeblood of your blog. It’s essential to be reminded (every once and a while) of how you can keep that lifeblood flowing.

Let’s get back to basics!

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Photo by Thiru Murugan.

On the 12th of March I proposed that one way to create a remarkable blog post is to write like you’re never going to be able to write again, and, in doing so, produce a trump card post. After reading the post, ten Skelliewag readers decided to give it a go. The results were quite spectacular, and covered a broad range of niches, from personal finance, to self-improvement, divination, online writing, work and the PC hardware industry!

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Photo by millicent_bystander

Repeated and huge torrents of social media traffic over many months.

That’s it.

Think about the blogs you’ve observed grow from zero to many thousands of subscribers in a relatively short period of time.

Zen Habits has been on the front page of Digg 82 times.

Freelance Switch, 18 times.

Copyblogger, 22 times (but is now on the auto-bury list).

Dosh Dosh has never made the front page of Digg, but it eats StumbleUpon alive every day.

Here’s the truth about how they did it.

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Photo by Indy Charlie

While I’ve already discussed the benefits of trying to grow a blog in a competitive, crowded niche, I want to devote some attention to how you can best grow a blog in an empty or under-served niche.

The best aspects of this method are an undivided market. If you’re the first quality blog on a topic a lot of people have been searching for, you’ll generally become the biggest blog in that niche because you were the first — as long as you stay consistent. ProBlogger.net, arguably the first blog about blogging, is still the biggest. Freelance Switch, arguably the first blog dedicated to freelancers only, continues to remain the biggest in its niche.

Unless you’re focusing on ultra-obscure topics I think it would be difficult to be the first blog in any niche, but if a niche is under-served (there aren’t enough blogs to meet demand), it’s easier to be the best. Tapping into an under-served niche is what many bloggers dream about when brainstorming blog topics.

While the potential gains are great (quality blogs in under-served niches tend to grow rapidly), surviving in an under-served niche can present a host of difficulties.

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