There are hundreds of different formulas or paths to achieve a successful blog, but most pathways will have some basic concepts that will always remain the same. I am so sure you must have read most of it on many blogs (the most often repeated one – Original and well written content) , which is quite a necessary factor , but not the only factor. To keep it easy I have broken it down to three simple steps. This post is made for basically word press based blogs but can be applied to other websites as well.

Get Traffic and make your blog Popular

In my 10+ years of blogging, I have realised that these three factors that make up the basic recipe of any successful blog is just 3 factors as given below

• Content ( Regularly Posted Content)
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• Design (Look and structure of the blog)

Good Content is necessary mainly to build up a regular audience that comes back to your blog repeatedly and also get your posts linked, leading to AUTO SEO for your blog. An yeah don’t forget that Google also likes good content except once in a while when their evil pandas and penguins do stuff that they are not supposed to do. People also bookmark good content which make them comeback at some part of time to your blog.
SEO is needed like every good product that needs advertising to get it noticed. Unless you seo optimize you blog, it’s unlikely that you will be found on the vast internet where millions of blogs are vying every day for every person’s attention. This is made easy by word press SEO plugins that make the job easy for you.
Design is a concept that pretty much needs no explanation. If you seen any makeover show on TV , you can get what I am trying to say , you make something look good ( like a blog – not a ugly chick) and people will come back and it will also register on their mind. Design includes the colours of your blog, structure of your blog and also the overall look of your blog. If you notice most successful blogs have a light colour (or white colour) theme.
So now that you got a good idea of why these 3 steps need to be implemented on your blog or website, I will show you how to do it the easy way and the hard way.

Content

Content can be the hardest part of these three steps to get your blog popular, just because it’s the most time consuming of these 3 steps. To make this part easier its always recommended to have a blog topic or niche that you are passionate about and like to write about. I Have never SEO researched my topics to post before blogging and I still get decent traffic for my niche, because the content is good. Get windows live writer for blogging and save content that interests you in your niche on windows live writer and finish and post it when you get time. One way to keep the regular flow of your blog posts going is to at least write four articles for your blog and keep ready to post ( which takes care of at least 4 posts for a month) and then in between when you get time and find articles that interest you and you want to blog about just add them as bonus posts to your blog in-between your this 4 posts. YOU can vary these numbers of posts to suit yourself depending how frequently you want to update your blog. This was the hard way, some easy but not as effective Ways are given below for the people who are always short on time or are just part time bloggers like me.
The easy way to get content for your blog
Get content for you blog from other people, this can be done in two ways PAID and Free
FREE content – The easy Way to get free content is to get people to do guest posts for your blog on you blog niche topic (to keep it relevant). This becomes easier the when your blog has got a higher Google rank as people will want to feed of your high Google ranking.
Nowadays you will also get many paid offers from SEO companies ( with provided content and link ) to post on your blog for a fee, which is happening even more after the GOOGLE PANDA & PENGUIN update. These sort of offers are good because they content provided is free and you get paid as well.
Hard way and Paid way to get content for your blog
PAID for CONTENT, for blog – This method involves a bit of work, mainly trial and error until you get the right person, with the use of content writing services that can be offered for a fee to you on freelance sites. You can get an article written for as low as $5 an article, but also finding a person who can write it for $5 without grammatical errors and good content is a bit of a hit and miss until you find that correct person. I Myself do article writing , so I know the time it can take to write a well written article , so if someone can do that for $5 and come up with good well written content then it’s cheap.
Some of the websites where you can source article writers for blogs are
Freelancer.com
Odesk.com
Fiverr.com
There are plenty more websites (vworker.com , guru.com, elance.com) which provide these services but I myself have not done any business with these sites so far .People can charge you from $1 an article to $25 an article on these websites, but you can get either well written article or a bad grammar article for somewhere between $2 to $10 an article. If your blog is making a decent amount of income this strategy is well worth considering to free up your time to focus on SEO and other aspects of the blog that needs some tweaking and attention.
When you compare all the three aspects mentioned, I believe content is one of the most important aspects of a blog, because good well written content will make people come back to your blog and also is the reason for you getting more natural links to your blog and therefore getting more traffic. Beginner Bloggers often overlook the importance of this factor and later on there is a lot of reverse work to be done to fix this.

SEO

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. When a website or blog is search engine optimized it is using tools and methods to rank higher within search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. The easy way to get SEO for your blog is to get a theme which is seo enabled or then has a specific SEO function added in. SEO in a theme will only help you a little bit now days, as the definition of SEO today is rapidly changing, no thanks to Google’s regular updates on SEO. The other factor that is increasingly being taken in as measure of your seo value is you popularity on new popular social websites like Facebook, twitter and Goggle+.
One good strategy for improving you SEO and Traffic rapidly is to focus your energies on one thing – get links from authority sites. A website that is highly ranked in search engines results in more traffic to your website
A good way to be up-to-date with SEO for your blog is to read what’s going on in the SEO area, by reading reputed SEO blogs like SEOMOZ.com/blog, SEOJOURNAL, DAILYBLOG TIPS and also Google and BING webmaster tools blogs. If you got a Google account, a Google webmaster tools account or a Bing Webmaster tools account will also help keep you in good stead and help you keep a watch on your site to check if everything is proper and functioning as it should.

Design

Design is not only a feel good, look good factor but also helps bring in more people back to your blog, even more if the content is good as well. Who doesn’t like to be associated with a good looking person?, the same goes for a blog to a small extent. When a website looks professional and neat more clients and Viewers will be attracted to it. SEO needs a nice looking website design in order for them to both work more effectively. If a website does not appear clean and friendly customers and clients will be put off by it
One of the other important factors for good design that is often overlooked is easy navigation and structure. Your blog visitors should not get frustrated trying to find things on your blogs. A well laid out top navigation bar with appropriate sub- links under appropriate headings, a search button for your blog and Social buttons placed in optimised positions will improve the likeability of your blog as well, due to a better user experience.
Contrary to some beliefs, your blogs design could actually be responsible for your lack of traffic. Design for a blog is getting cheaper by the day thanks to heaps of new freelance sites as mentioned above. Due to these cheaper prices, Websites that provide themes have also started reducing their prices to make it more affordable an affordable word press theme.
Good design isn’t only about the aesthetics of the blog. It also affects how your website looks on all the different web browsers that people use to browse websites. The only safe way to make sure your website does well in all browsers is making your site compatible with all of them. Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera – your website should be tested against each of them or at least at a minimum the most popular of browsers and how they look and render on them.
“No matter how great your blog looks, if it’s hard for your viewer to navigate your blog and find what they want, you’ve defeated your own purpose. Great design is a good marriage of form and function and usability.”
To conclude I can say there is no magic fix that your blog will become popular overnight, there are a just a few things you should get educated or get some focus on for a successful blog “I suggest learning about blogging, especially content marketing, then perhaps social media, how search engines work, and copywriting, for starters.
This is a guest post by Jeff J. You can read more from him at SheldonShing.com.